I love this passage on play structure from James Fritz, over at The Bruntwood Prize (which Fritz has been awarded).
“How do you structure a play?
Well, often that depends on what your play is trying to do: where does it want to take its audience? What is its intention? Different modes of performance require different structures and rhythms.
The thing that unites all pieces of theatre, however, is time. There will always be a beginning, and there will always be an end. The structure, whatever shape it takes, is how you dictate what the audience experiences between those two points.
The reason we often go back to traditional storytelling structures is that (when they are done well) there is a built-in progression in the audience’s experience from start to finish. Just as they think they’ve ‘got it’, ‘it’ shifts in some way and becomes something new. I.e:
Act one: ‘Can they find Nemo?’
Act two: ‘Oh no, I don’t think they’ll find Nemo.’
Act three: ‘Hooray! They found Nemo!’
Structuring every type of performance, whether it’s a comedy monologue or an impenetrable post-dramatic text, works in the same way. The audience are living through the moment: it’s up to you to give them an engaging experience to live through.
In part that is about controlling the flow of information – what does the audience know at each point, what do they see, what do they hear. But it’s also about controlling (or at least, aiming for the impossible and attempting to control) the flow of the experience: what is the audience feeling and when. Where is the build in emotion? Where is the text at its most intense, its most tender, its funniest?
This isn’t about constantly throwing new and exciting things at your audience, but about being alive to what they need and when. Try and be alert to where you should scream in their face and where you should sing them a lullaby.
As an example, I’d like you to watch this clip from The Simpsons episode of Cape Feare. (Yes, it’s Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes):
The moment is surreal and repetitive, but still has an incredible structure. A beginning, middle and end that is in complete control of the audience’s experience.
It is, as has often been noted, funny at first (ha!) then boring (yeah, I’ve seen this), then confusing (it’s still going on?) and then hysterically funny again (HAH!). The exact same moment, repeated over and over without being changed, but the rhythm of the repetition holds our hand and pushes our experience as audience members forward until we get where the writer/director wants us to go. It’s the goldilocks theory: it gives us just enough. If it had stopped after three rakes, it would have failed to be funny. If it had gone on to fifty rakes, a hundred rakes, it would have ended up meaning something completely different.
During one of my plays I was struck night after night by the overwhelming sense that, at the same moment every night, the people around me suddenly weren’t engaged. They were watching, but their minds had wandered.
It was a failure of my text – I’d underestimated the audience’s response to the material. I’d hit the same note too many times in a row because I thought that’s what they needed, but through the slowly deflating energy in the room I could almost hear their thoughts: ‘Yeah, we get it. What’s next?’
Audiences are incredibly smart. They understand performance and storytelling instinctively.
It doesn’t matter how ‘traditional’ or ‘experimental’, how ‘naturalistic’ or ‘surreal’ the piece of work is, they can always tell when there isn’t the right number of rakes.”