They Say Write What You Know: How (not) to write a play about a pandemic

This was my first week teaching classes as an adjunct professor in playwriting. One of my students asked a question I’ve heard from a lot of other writers lately.

“Should we write about the moment we’re in?”

It can seem like one of those lose-lose situations when we talk so much about needing to remember history to be living history and cry out that we cannot handle any documentation of it even though most people agree that the moment you’re living through something is exactly when you should be documenting it.

I guess we could all write time capsule plays, seal them in a steel tub, and then bury them for 100 years so that the fish-people of 2121 can one day do nothing but perform plays about binge-watching Devs and learning to salsa while FaceTiming an instructor thousands of miles away.

(Those poor, future humans-with-gills.)

There’s also the obvious problem of not being able to avoid two years of human history that have this big a cloud hanging over them.

If you write a play that takes place in “modern times,” and everybody isn’t walking around wearing a mask, have you then written a play that takes place in an alternate reality?

The temptation to write something that is as seductive as not having to deal with characters who actually have to work for a living. Recently, a film critic complained that she was watching a movie where the protagonist spent a lot of time in their office seemingly doing nothing. I can go into that problem at a later date, but suffice to say, if hundreds of plays can be written about characters who appear to never worry about money or talk about work, then it should be possible to simply edit out a worldwide pandemic so you can have two straight characters arguing about their relationship in a gorgeous apartment you doubt either of them could afford.

But we want to come back better, right?

So maybe skip writing something like that.

Admittedly, I am one of those folks who does not want to read a play where the pandemic is used as a plot device.

I am, actually, very offended by movies like Locked Down, not just because they’re poorly written, but because it seems like the definition of “too soon” to use a crisis that’s taken the lives of scores of people across the globe as a centerpiece of your heist flick. Rarely do I argue that something is in poor taste, but in this case, I’ll make an exception.

That being said, it is difficult to tell writers to set aside something that is currently permeating their lives and write about … something else.

My first bit of advice was to look at that permeation as encouragement.

It really doesn’t matter whether you want to write about the pandemic or not. Whatever you’re writing is going to include the pandemic, because the pandemic is in our pores. It’s in the atmosphere.

If you’re going through a divorce, and you write a play about talking magpies, I guarantee you those talking magpies you’re creating are working out your divorce for you. It’s unavoidable.

That means if you do feel inclined to make something that deals with the COVID era head-on, I would argue that an audience living with something every day does not need it reflected back on themselves six months from now in some 50-seat blackbox. Whatever lessons we need to take from this moment will probably need to come with a good deal of retrospection.

In other words, you shouldn’t be trying to figure out how the fire started while you’re still inside the house.

What I did suggest to my students was that they could break down the themes that exist in their lives now and write about those instead. Things like isolation, disconnect, absence.

They could think about how this past year has further allowed technology to invade our lives. They could examine FOMO culture and what happens when it’s challenged.

They could write about community and what our responsibilities are to our community.

I advised them to go really, really easy on the metaphors, because while we’d all like to believe we’re Arthur Miller writing The Crucible, most of the time we’re some hack writing a one-act about an evil troll king that looks and sounds just like George W.

Careful with your metaphors.

Finally, I reminded my students that audiences watch plays the same way they vote — with an eye on personal interest.

There was a trend in the mid-aughts of every play having that David Hare flair for big, global arguments about 9/11 and the Iraq War and politics and ideas so complex you were handed an essay before the curtain rose so that you could understand just what the hell everybody onstage was screaming about in flawed accents.

I love David Hare and I love big ideas and I love a large worldview, but you can write a play that still showcases universal feelings like anxiety and loneliness and hope. Idea-driven plays are one of the things I think we can leave in the before times, since even Aristotle agreed that plot and character should come first.

I had a hard time — and still do — finding plays that deal with characters who are struggling to pay their student loans. People who are working two jobs, people who are smart and funny and clever even if they’re not formally educated. People who are used to living and working and getting things done even as the world around them falls apart.

One day, 100 years from now, when most of my body is bionic, I hope to see a play that looks as though it has nothing to do with the pandemic until a character walks onstage wearing a mask. During that play, maybe the characters will be dealing with other problems that are pandemic-related like the matriarch of the family being laid off or the son needing to adjust to learning at home after being the star of his school.

Those characters won’t necessarily be saying the word “COVID” all the time, and maybe they won’t even say “pandemic,” but they’ll be reminding me of a time that was, yes, unique, but also, one section of human history that still featured many of the conflicts and drama we’ve seen throughout time.

That’s why successful war movies don’t make war the star of the film.

That’s why effective horror movies are not concerned with the element of fear.

That’s why despite what SJP says, New York City cannot, in fact, be the fourth character on Sex and the City.

Ultimately, it has to be about people and the connective, emotional throughlines that run through us all.

A play about masks isn’t just unnecessary; it’s unoriginal.

Just ask the Greeks.