My script analysis approach

Wuff. Tiring week. I'm all "Dear White Progressives"-ed out. Tut-tutting my demographic for meanness all week long has temporarily drained my writing batteries.

Well. That and a day of meetings, teaching, grading, and some emotional labor.

Today I gave one of my favorite script analysis lessons.

Some background info is necessary before I specify. My script analysis approach is based largely on the system I learned as an undergrad. It comes from Richard Hornby's Script into Performance, but I make lots of changes along the way. I'm not sure Hornby (whom I never met) would have approved.

Anyway: Hornby offers, in essence, a set of questions that can be asked of just about any play-script:
What choices does the playwright make in turning a story (all relevant people, places, and events related to a narrative) into a plot (the distilled, truncated, and specially arranged product that is the script itself?

• How does the playwright's sequencing of scenes, events, and moments affect the meaning?
• How and why does tempo vary over the course of the script?
• How and why do tension levels vary over the course of the script?
• What lines, actions, and/or images repeat in the script?
• What takes up a lot of space or weight in the script?
• What role do irony, ambiguity, and complexity play in the script?

After you go through a script (several times), addressing these analytic questions in full, Hornby says, you must synthesize by creating a "unifying principle." I define this latter concept in terms of an active verb phrase that provides an interpretive lens to illuminate how the playwright's choices (the answers to the questions above) work together. It's a phrase that captures what the script does, summarizing the action pattern manifested in the script.

This kind of analysis is mechanical. Whereas a literature class or informal book club might focus on character arcs, social issues, or life lessons the script teaches (what the script is about), this method focuses on action patterns (what the script does). Hamlet is, in terms of themes, about things like indecision, the meaning of loyalty, the duties of an heir, and so forth. But knowing these things doesn't help me as a director to divine why Shakespeare starts the script not with Hamlet himself but with some guards wondering who goes there and getting spooked by a ghost. If I see Hamlet through the lens of a unifying principle such as "to pause before striking," then having that first scene be something of a pause itself before the play "strikes" makes a kind of sense. The macro structure replicates some of the main action patterns throughout the play (where Hamlet pauses before striking).  (Fair warning: that's an off-the-top-of-my-head analysis; I won't defend it as especially strong.)

This kind of analysis is a useful exercise for artists to learn, a discipline that forces producing artists to grapple with the script as it appears to them, bracketing out historical or social-contextual information. That kind of analysis also brackets out the kind of dynamic awareness of a live audience that actors, directors, and designers rely on to make a production work. Before you get to that stage, I teach students, you must first engage the script, collaborate with the playwright whose presence is only apparent in the choices she makes in writing the play. Listening to those choices helps you to make your production move with the grain of the text.

None of that is the favorite part I referred to. It's just background. What's the favorite lesson?

I'll let that wait until tomorrow.

JF