Sarah Ruhl
one hundred essays I don't have time to write*
*Please consider these essays as starting points. Consider them starting points for someone else to finish.
65. On standard dramatic formatting
Why are stage directions generally in parentheses? If you (the playwright, that is) want them treated as parentheticals, put them in parentheses, but if they are as important to you as the dialogue, as they are to me, do not put them in parentheses, and insist on using your own punctuation, as any novelist or poet would.Also, in standard dramatic formatting, in the stage directions, characters’ names are in all caps. Why is this? A cult of personhood? Are readers of plays unable to read a sentence and picture a body and distinguish it from the furniture without it being all in caps? I think the readability of a play is diminished rather than enhanced by standard formatting, which limits the very particular relationship between the author and the reader. Things like Final Draft, or the internalized mental equivalent, insists that plays are boilerplate documents with general templates for formatting, rather than particular literary forms, like poems, in which the punctuation of the author is intentional and perhaps quixotic.
One more thing. I like to write the character’s name again after a stage direction, because the stage directions are like an act of speech, after which the character chooses to speak again. For example:
MATILDE:
This is how I imagine my parents.
Music.
A dashing couple appears.
MATILDE:
They are dancing.
They are not the best dancers in the world.
They laugh until laughing makes them kiss.
They kiss until kissing makes them laugh.
They kiss until kissing makes them laugh.
In standard dramatic formatting, the second heading “MATILDE” would be removed, or else it would read MATILDE (CONT.). But I feel that Matilde is not merely continuing to speak; instead, the visual life of the play is itself an act of speech, almost as though another speaker had spoken. When Matilde speaks again, she is responding to the visual world, not “continuing”. The speaker speaks, something happens, and the speaker speaks again.
Punctuation is philosophy and rhythm in a play. Actors understand this. I think readers do too. And I think many more directors would begin to treat stage directions as visual speech acts if they were not always hiding in those horrid little parentheses.