Friday Tip of the Day:

Please Don’t Call a Doctor

While working as Literary Manager for the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, I read literally thousands of plays. In one of them, the main character endured virtually every curse known to modern man — divorce, betrayal by his friends, bankruptcy, and more. Finally, in the last few pages of the script, just when I thought nothing else could happen to the unlucky fellow, he developed a very sudden case of cirrhosis of the liver. (The only sudden case of cirrhosis on medical record.) Though he had shown no signs of the disease until that moment, he died of it before the final page. It took about three minutes of stage time.

This may be an hilariously extreme example but the point, I hope, is clear: beware of using medical conditions in your play. Even if you are not so unwise as to introduce a fatal case of cirrhosis in the last few minutes of your play, a disease is no substitute for genuine drama.

It doesn’t matter whether the disease is mental or physical, fatal or merely bothersome. Just as a limp or a tic or a stammer does not make a character, neither do illnesses. And they don’t make dramatic situations either. A man dying of heart disease is unfortunate and I feel sorry for him, but it doesn’t make me any more interested in his dramatic journey.

Mental illness seems particularly attractive to many playwrights. What, after all, could be more theatrical than insanity? Theatrical, yes; dramatic, not really. When we watch a genuinely insane person, we are not really watching that person at all. Their words and behavior are not emerging from the person, but from the disease. The real person is hidden under the cloak of the disease, unseen.

Of course, you can make illness work. Plenty of plays have characters with maladies both serious and mild. Whose Life Is It Anyway? is quite successful, I think, for the very reason that the play hardly focuses at all on the medical condition of paralysis. Instead, the play concerns itself mainly with the dramatic action: the character wants the right to end his own life.

You could also argue that a play like Streetcar has a character, Blanche, who is insane. While I’d never make any arguments for Blanche’s rock solid mental state, she is surely in her “right mind” throughout the play, at least up until the last scene. Somewhat deluded, yes, and slightly off her rocker at times. But the behavior we’re seeing is, painfully, the real Blanche. Not until the final moments is she so far gone that madness has overcome her. And even then, her true nature briefly shines through with the famous character-defining line, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

As I mentioned above, there is nothing inherently wrong with a character who has an illness, if that’s an essential part of your plot. I’ve had characters with illnesses in my own plays. But be wary of falling into the trap of believing that their medical condition is what’s interesting about them or the play. Maybe it’s interesting to some people. For years, after all, the networks did make a killing on their “disease of the week” television movies. But who remembers those movies now?