Plays within Plays, Books within Books

“Write about what you know.”  Do playwrights stage plays within plays, and novelists write about the writing life or embed layers of fictional books within books because that’s all we know?   Maybe, but it can also be an extremely useful tool for creating drama (sorry for the pun), and addressing deep themes.  One of the advantages of made-up stories over exposition is that the author can address big questions of relationships, philosophy, history, human nature, spirituality--all the “deep thoughts” that separate us from the beasts-- through characters and a story the reader cares about.  Nobody wants to be clubbed in the head with Enlightenment 101 lessons, but build a theme into the plot, and you’ve got good writing.  Layering fiction or scripts with internal creative works creates infinite opportunities, like the optical illusion of two facing mirrors.  A writer can explore various themes without having to stick to “realism.”

I have to mention Hamlet right up front as the most famous play within a play, at least in English.  Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, commissions a group of players to perform a script of his father’s murder to “out” the murderer, his stepfather.   Was this all Hamlet was about, producing a play?  No, but the play within the play allowed Shakespeare to expose human nature at its foulest. 

In some scripts, the internal play production does occupy center state (can’t help myself!). 1983’s To Be or Not to Be by Mel Brooks takes place in Nazi Poland with actors as Resistance fighters, and somehow, it’s hilarious.  The Last Metro, a François Truffaut classic starring Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve, beautifully realizes the anguish and danger of Nazi occupied Paris through the characters of a stage actress and her Jewish husband.  In the novel Atonement, Ian McEwan manipulates the line between his authorial voice and the voice of his author-heroine, tricking the reader (spoiler alert) with alternatives to the “reality” of his own fictional plot. 

Okay, backgrounding of the already famous of plots within plots over, now to the mechanics of plays within plays.   Up front, decide whether you are going to write the internal play or are you going to use a famous one, say, of Shakespeare.  Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, sure they’ve been spoofed but there’s always a fresh take of Coriolanus waiting to be written, isn’t there?  Comedic possibilities abound when bumbling troupes try to stage elaborate productions.  Modernizations of Shakespeare are especially sought after by school theatre groups. The good news is Shakespeare, dead more than 70 years, is in public domain. 

Or, you can write your own internal drama, giving you freedom to experiment.  Romance or jealousy can bloom between actors, murder and mayhem can ravage a theatre company, the show must go on true grit can triumph over adversity (see above World War II movies).  You don’t even actually have to write the internal play, it can all take place “off-stage” if your main action takes behind the scenes.  Crossing the third wall is a neat trick, too.  Go for it, after all, all the world’s a stage. 

Treanor Baring

pwpoems@aol.com

NLAPW, Inc

Pen Woman Magazine Poetry Editor

Website Editor

Looking Back and Looking Ahead: The Oscars and Job Interviews

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you?" is a question you might be asked at a job interview these days.  Employers, who have plenty to choose from, search out the creative job seekers, and test how they work under unusual situations and under pressure.  Applicants to Twitter's internship program must apply in 13 Twitter messages, each limited to 140 characters (NOT words).  Job applicants to Pinkberry "must brainstorm commercials for its frozen yogurt and then work in teams to devise a marketing plan for a hypothetical product."

Some of the oddball interview questions of 2011 compiled by a website called Glassdoor are:  "Name five uses for a stapler, without the staples."  "How would you get an elephant into a refrigerator?"  "What do you think of garden gnomes?"  "Would Gandhi have made a good software engineer?"  "Does life fascinate you?"  So, there's really no way to adequately prepare for a job interview today.  Get a good night's sleep, and ready for just about anything.                                                                           

The opposite can be said for the Oscar nominations this year that were guided more by a nostalgia for the past as well as self-loathing for an industry that pandered to the teenage crowd by making movies "big on bombast turned to noise,  the special effects to exhaustion, and the plots to unimaginative confusion."  Columnist Neal Gabler asks, "Is the film industry tired of itself and of the movies that have defined it for two decades?"

What does the silence of "The Artist" tell us?  According to Gabler, it is about " innovation and the limitations of innovation."  "Hugo" works its "old-fashioned magic through the simplicity of costumes and sets and stop action rather than through computer-generated images."  Both movies prefer "connections to films that are emotional and spiritual, not just physical."
Even the color palette of  "War Horse" re-creates color of the 1950s movies; its story is more about feelings rather than action.  "Midnight in Paris" stars a "numb Hollywood screenwriter searching for inspiration."  He finds it by escaping back to the past.  The film is "a tribute to art that mattered -- to art that did more than diddle."

Gabler's summary of the movie nominations, which rings true, is that "these movies are less about a lost past than they are about an unsatisfactory present."
Personally, I have not yet seen any of the Oscar-nominated movies.  Perhaps I will get to them eventually, but, when given a choice of a movie or a good book, I usually curl up with a good book.  And I'm surely glad I'm not facing any modern job interviews.  Even without movies and job interviews, I, too, feel like I'm neither in the old days or the modern days, but wobbily trying to balance the past, present, and future.

Suellen Zima
Member of the National League of American Pen Woman