Vegetables make love above the tenors.

All told, I haven’t read or seen very many plays. Over the last few months, I’ve started brows­ing shelves marked “Drama,” “The­atre,” and “Play­wrights.” Gen­er­ally, these shelves can be browsed in a minute, and that’s if you’re being thorough–reading each title and tug­ging every spine, one by one. The Santa Bar­bara Cen­tral Library, heavy on melo­drama and moral­ity, left a lot to be desired (not that I could tell you what was miss­ing). Still, no mat­ter how lim­ited the selec­tion, these shelves are unnav­i­ga­ble to me. My nar­row com­pass is use­less out­side the land of High School Musi­cal Theatre.*

This is why I’ve jury rigged a new com­pass to keep me from walk­ing in cir­cles. It has only two car­di­nal points: plays other peo­ple expressly rec­om­mend, and plays by peo­ple I am already famil­iar with. In place of mag­netic pre­ci­sion, my com­pass offers safe bets. More often than not, this means play­wrights who were orig­i­nally, or pri­mar­ily, poets. I keep mean­ing to read Pin­ter and Albee and Labute, but when I see an e.e. cum­mings play, hot damn! How can that not be good?! It’s led me to some inter­est­ing reads, and even more inter­est­ing ques­tions, which keep me brows­ing those shelves.

Nat­u­rally, I’ve spent some time think­ing about what dif­fer­en­ti­ates a play from a poem, and how the medi­ums inter­act. I want to know if there is such a thing as writing-a-play-as-a-poet, and writing-a-poem-as-a-playwright, and whether the writ­ing would be dis­tinct as such. “Poem” and “Play” are con­structs, but they’re ingrained and oper­a­ble; we know which one we’re look­ing at, and I think it’s safe to con­tinue talk­ing about them.

Cer­tain poetic dis­ci­plines are also the build­ing blocks, in my opin­ion, of a strong dra­matic piece. For me, poems require close atten­tion to structure–planned or unplanned, for­mal or informal–and a care­ful reduc­tion of images. A poem places you in an elas­ti­cally bound space, hands you the essen­tial objects, then leaves. Plays do the same, only lit­er­ally. Poets are delib­er­ate with every syl­la­ble, treat­ing lin­guis­tic minu­tiae like volatile genetic mate­r­ial. Sim­i­larly, play­wrights are respon­si­ble for each word, con­sid­er­ing how it reveals or masks a character.

Play­writ­ing, in my very lim­ited expe­ri­ence, is like step­ping inside a poem and mak­ing its inter­nal argu­ment appar­ent. Any implicit ten­sions or ques­tions are ani­mated. The tran­si­tion from poem to play is like tak­ing a puz­zling piece of machin­ery, sep­a­rat­ing all its parts, and lay­ing them out so their rela­tions to one another become obvi­ous, if not explicable.

It’s pretty stu­pid to talk about poems because they are what they are. Lyri­cism, non­sense, play­ful­ness, still­ness, descrip­tion, inti­macy, ambiguity–in a poem, any­thing can be an end. You know how when you read a poem, you kind of hear it in a voice that’s com­ing from the place where your ribs join? Or how this knot­ted aware­ness forms in your stom­ach? I want to know how this can hap­pen in a play with­out sac­ri­fic­ing nar­ra­tive or always suc­cumb­ing to sur­re­al­ism. In other words, I want to write some­thing acces­si­ble, relat­able, easy to fol­low, and con­vinc­ing, yet retain that feel­ing that it’s all being spo­ken by a very beau­ti­ful voice inside you.

Maybe that’s not the point of a play, though. Maybe the point is to make you face up to oth­ers and give equal atten­tion to sev­eral incon­gru­ous voices at once. Can a poem do this? Prob­a­bly. What is a poem again? A play? Fuck, maybe it’s not safe to talk about this, after all. Form is impor­tant and inescapable (it all comes back to archi­tec­ture), but as soon as you inhabit one, it yields itself.

I would be wise to give you an exam­ple before we all evaporate.

<a href=“http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_undermilkwood.html“Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas

This is tech­ni­cally “a play for voices,” and was orig­i­nally per­formed for radio. It was later made into a film fea­tur­ing Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor and Peter O’Toole, which, I must admit, is dif­fi­cult for me to envi­sion. Under Milk Wood is like music. It is writ­ten in the dialect of a small, Welsh, sea-side town–a dialect that was in Thomas’ blood. It’s rhythm is pro­nounced, and Thomas indulges–no, luxuriates–in con­so­nance, allit­er­a­tion and rhyme. I would love to hear it per­formed; even in read­ing the lan­guage is enough to carry the play with­out plot or content:

FIRST VOICE

Veg­eta­bles make love above the tenors.

SECOND VOICE
and dogs bark blue in the face.

FIRST VOICE
Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard belches in a teeny hanky and chases the sun­light with a fly­whisk, but even she can­not drive out the Spring: from one of the finger-bowls, a prim­rose grows.

C’mon, I could lis­ten to lines like that on repeat, no con­text necessary.

Under Milk Wood presents a cycle, open­ing and clos­ing at dawn. The day we observe (hear?) could be any day at all, the lim­ited cast going about their chores and repeat­ing well-worn gos­sip. This gives it a mythic qual­ity; the town may as well be the only exis­tence, and its peo­ple eter­nal. The lan­guage sup­ports this qual­ity, remind­ing us of ora­cle and, well, poetry. Even when you’re not sure what’s hap­pen­ing, you can remain present with each line, and sense the earthy magic of the town and people.

FIRST VOICE (very softly)

Lis­ten. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymn­ing in bon­net and brooch and bom­bazine black, but­ter­fly choker and boot­lace bow, cough­ing like nan­ny­goats, suck­ing mintoes, forty­wink­ing hal­lelu­jah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman’s lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread’s bak­ery fly­ing like black flour. It is to-night in Don­key Street, trot­ting silent, with sea­weed on its hooves, along the cock­led cob­bles, past cur­tained fer­n­pot, text and trin­ket, har­mo­nium, holy dresser, water­colours done by hand, chi­nadog and rosy tin tea­caddy. It is night ned­dy­ing among the snug­geries of babies.

The story is nar­rated by these Voices, but spe­cific char­ac­ters also speak, reliev­ing the heavy flow of third-person descrip­tion. Peo­ple with names like Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard, Gos­samer Beynon, Willy Nilly and Polly Garter often speak in play­ful, rhyming stan­zas. This acts like a cue for the listener–someone is speak­ing now. The pol­ished, plain verse of the char­ac­ters stands in con­trast to the detailed, near-stream-of-consciousness nar­ra­tion. The Voices immerse the lis­tener and build like waves, then break against a per­son. The effect is that these per­sons feel crisp and real.

SECOND VOICE

The lust and lilt and lather and emer­ald breeze and crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its breasts full of river­ing May-milk, means, to that lorldly fish-head nib­bler, noth­ing but another near­ness to the tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who’ll sear and pil­lage down Armaged­don hill to his double-locked rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the bot­tom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love.

POLLY GARTER
And I’ll never have such lov­ing again,

SECOND VOICE
Pretty Polly hums and longs.

POLLY GARTER (sings)
Now when farm­ers boys on the first fair day
Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,
Before the sun sinks I’ll lie there in their arms
For they’re good bad boys from the lonely farms…

Isn’t it beau­ti­ful? You can lis­ten to the full thing here and here.

* If you’re unsure if what you’re look­ing at is a musi­cal, ask your­self, Does the title end in an excla­ma­tion point? If yes, you’ve got a musi­cal on your hands. For­tu­nately, there are many other obvi­ous indi­ca­tors that should tip you off before you even look at a title. Also, nobody reads musicals.