Playwright - Language Playwriting

Language Playwriting

Recent efforts to break with traditional structure and characterization have met with a measure of success as contemporary playwrights seek new forms and modes of expression. "New Playwriting Strategies: A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting" (Routledge 2001), challenged the orthodoxy that had governed playwriting pedagogy for a century, and is now largely eclipsed. Using the "language playwrights" Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, Suzan-Lori Parks, the author noted that playwrights over the past three decades have placed an increasing emphasis on language as the determinant of character and structure, rather than vice-versa. With the proliferation of original language playwrights now running or teaching in playwriting programs at prestigious universities, such as NYU Tisch, Brooklyn College, California Institute of the Arts, Yale, Brown, etc. there has been a marked increase in experimental playwriting across the mainstream. Playwriting collectives, such as Clubbed Thumb and 13 P, which include mostly women playwrights, are determined to produce their member's work unfettered by the constraints of the development process. Crossover Poetics or the combining of traditional and avant-garde in creating the play is the main subject in the second edition "New Playwriting Strategies: Language and Media in the 21st Century" (Routledge 2012). Playwrights such as Sarah Ruhl provide salient examples of how traditional and cutting-edge dramaturgies can be applied in the same play. Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones, noted in his review of the Broadway musical, "Bloody, Bloody, Andrew Jackson" that the hybrid had become the most viable of the contemporary formats.