DGWG Tip: Agility

In Buddhism, technique is the canoe that gets you across the river. Once you've made it to the other side, you don't drag the canoe across land. What was a vehicle in one setting becomes an obstacle in another.

Artists who are insecure feel compelled to protect every technique that has ever worked. And now the gift has become a curse because they're stuck. It helped them once, so it must be an eternal truth. When a colleague says, "We're on the freeway now. You can leave the boat at the shore. It's too heavy,"  ego — that brilliant, paranoid little gremlin — whispers back: " No. Keep dragging. What if we hit another river? Remember how smart you were back there? So they exhaust themselves dragging this vehicle with them. And they get very angry at anyone who tries to point out that they're hauling a canoe down the 405.

Part of agility is looking forward. Where do you want to go? Future tense. Yes, some past experiences are useful. But honest, rigorous assessment has to win out over nostalgia for the glory days. Where do you want to go? Study other people who have gotten there and the vehicles they've used, and be willing to experiment, combining past trailblazers with your own preferences to create your own new style. 

Here's the other side of agility that nobody talks about, because it sounds like a contradiction and contradictions make people uncomfortable: you also have to look back. Not to live there. Not to build a shrine. But because the lineage is the vocabulary. You have to know how other people did it before you, not as a blueprint to follow but as a shared language that lets you skip the part where everyone's describing the same thing from scratch.

In a preproduction meeting, a director described a tracking shot he wanted — following a waiter through a restaurant, continuous, immersive, the whole thing. I said, "The Goodfellas shot." He smiled and said, "Yes. But fifteen seconds." And that was it. We knew the scene. We knew the texture, the rhythm, the feeling we were after. And we both knew he wasn't going to Xerox Scorsese — the reference was just the starting coordinate, not the destination. From there, the scene found its own shape.

That's what lineage does. It's not nostalgia. It's not "we should do it the old way because the old way was better." It's the shorthand that lets two people point at the same invisible thing and then go make something neither of them has seen before. The canoe isn't the goal. But knowing what a canoe is — knowing who built the first one, how it moved, what it couldn't do — that's how you eventually build a boat that moves across land on four wheels, or a boat that flies in the air. Or whatever insane thing comes next.

Then there's fear. Doing something new is genuinely unnerving. You will make mistakes. You might make them in front of your peers, which is significantly worse. This is normal. What's not normal — or at least not useful — is mislabeling that crackling, electric sensation as just fear. That's what ego wants you to think, so you stop exploring. But there's a difference between the fear of the unknown and the butterflies you get when you're falling in love. One is a warning. The other is an invitation.

Follow the butterflies. Where are they taking you? Don't ask. They're butterflies. It's mystical, it's illogical, and when you demand immediate concrete answers, you disperse the very energy that was about to lead somewhere interesting. Art is one of the last remaining things in our culture that involves the genuinely unexplainable. Let it be that.

Fear will try to reinstall itself. Recognize it. Talk through it. Say: yeah, this is terrifying. And I'm going anyway.

Now. The peer group.

There are people who are perpetual kayakers — canoe carriers who will offer detailed instructions on how to build your own vehicle based entirely on their past journey. Rather than learning, they've built a dogma. A monument to the one river they crossed in 2003. When you show them the car you built for the highway, they squint at it and say, "That's a terrible boat." When you try to explain you're not building a boat, they don't hear it. And you know what? Don't argue. Arguing implies you need to justify your car. You don't. Also, they genuinely don't know what a car or plane is. It's not strategic silence. It's just useless.

One-hit wonders deserve their own category. The world is full of people who fondly, obsessively recall their greatest triumph. They've become prisoners of their own scrapbook. I've been in conversations with moderately successful people where the entire discussion gets shut down by a resume recitation. "I was in the best production of Hello, Dolly! in 1987 and everyone agreed it was extraordinary." Okay.

What happens to one-hit wonders? They wake up one day in the Mojave Desert. No friends, no car, bridges burnt behind them. Just a canoe from a decade ago, used to help them cross a river that no longer exists.

A few years ago I was in Milan, and the biggest revelation hit me in a mansion in Lake Como filled with wax and plaster models: Renaissance artists did multiple versions of everything. Of course they did. It makes complete sense. And yet I had somehow believed Michelangelo spent one very intense year creating David and handed it in. No. He sketched it repeatedly. Made wax models. Submerged those models in water and drained it slowly to use as a horizontal grid, then re-sketched the proportions. He was a certified genius, and he was still making corrections. Still revising. Still building practice versions.

I wonder if Michelangelo, three years in, started doubting himself. I wonder if some colleague swung by and said, "You're still on that statue? I've finished five since you mentioned David." Maybe some older sculptor told him to keep going. In Florence, the streets are essentially lined with practice. All of it was practice.

The finished work you're trying to protect? Someone else's practice led to it. The thing you're about to make? It'll probably be someone else's floor. That's not depressing. That's the deal. Make the canoe. Cross the river. Leave the canoe at the shore. And when someone hands you the keys to a car, don't ask if it floats. 

American Theatre Absudia

 Despite the evidence, I'm optimistic about American theatre. I have hope because I have given up looking for clear, normal logic. I am encouraged because there are still smart, hardworking artists out there trying to measure results and fix the system. That said, there isn't a single fix to this wacky system. 

I'm a playwright with an above-average career. I've won awards, gotten some amazing fellowships, had multiple regional productions, gone to The O'Neill and some of the best development places, wrote a musical that went from Miami New Drama to tour and to Broadway, have a few commissions in the bag, AND I've worked in TV for the last 11 yrs. It's been less a path and more like a TV gameshow obstacle course. Imagine American Ninja, but without any prep and happening at random times in your life. You're walking down the street to the subway, and the ninja obstacle course just begins! And suddenly you're running, diving, dodging spikes...then the obstacle course stops. And just as suddenly, you're back to walking down the street thinking 'huh, what was that about' and then it begins again at seemingly random moments. That's being a playwright.

If someone were to ask the successful playwright/ninja competitor, "What were your keys to success?' They might say, "Quick feet, constant anxiety, agility, a deep mistrust of straight roads and clear fields, delusion, optimism, replaying childhood trauma." This isn't a game plan. It's a training manual for mental illness or a life in standup comedy: be in a constant, low-level state of anxiety, but also optimistic, paranoid, endure long periods of silence and ostracism, and maybe an occasional orgiastic burst of enthusiasm. And if you do survive all that...your colleagues may say 'sell out...it was luck. Or DEI. Or you slept around.' Rarely are there flowers at the finish line. Just people looking like 'huh...well they survived that. Probably cheated, but it doesn't matter. They're only doing August Wilson next year with the holographic avatars of James Earl Jones and Eartha Kitt, and produced by Steven Spielberg. Tickets will be $500 and go directly to the estate lawyers. It'll win the Tony for best celebrity holographs.'

There's no clear rhyme or reason, but there is only absurdity and a willingness to plunge headfirst into the Kafkaesque currents. And swimming in the absurdity will either make you one of the funniest people at the funeral or put you in the casket. It's the reason I don't do 'coffee and tell me about your career anymore.' Because the more I told my tale, the more absurd and unhelpful it sounded. Oh, you wanna know how I ran the obstacle course...

-I was at Juilliard and suddenly had a preternatural feeling that I was going to write and produce web videos. I had no experience but only an intense desire to pay rent. So I went to a libertarian conference -because I knew they had money- and I walked around with this very persuasive pitch. You wanna hear it? 'Hey, my name is Aurin I'm here to make videos for your organization.' I kept doing that until I scared enough people into pointing me in the right direction. Eventually, someone saw the flames in my eyes and got me a meeting the next day with the money ppl. I continued pitching 'I'm here to make videos' until they gave me a job. This could have taken months but my prophetic intensity got me a job in a week with a budget. How did I know to do that? Anxiety driven by hunger? Insomnia? Who knows, it just happened. Could I repeat it again? Don't know, but probably not. Where did that intense 'knowing' come from? Don't know. What advice do I have for you? Walk around like a stalker at various events until someone gives you a job? It might work or you might get arrested.

-So I was writing and producing web videos, and there was a surge in cops killing black people on film. So a news organization reached out to me to write something. And the first article I wrote went viral and that led to more articles b/c cops kept killing unarmed black people. I was writing for multiple publications, and that allowed me to fly out to Hollywood for general meetings. And this BLM story to Hollywood pipeline continued until...editors got tired of hearing about cops killing blk ppl. My writing didn't decline, nor did the violence. It was just the willingness to pay journalists for these stories that faded away...so I pivoted to writing/producing slutty comedic videos for a dating app until that app went out of biz. 

-After Juilliard, I read an article about a political satire being greenlit. I asked for a meeting directly and got it. I went out to Greenpoint. Before the interview, I stopped by a local bar for lunch. I asked for a sign. I used the bar bathroom and saw an ATM machine...above the toilet. And I just knew...this is going to go well. Truly. Yeah, it makes no sense. I saw something absurd before the meeting, and it calmed me, anchored me, gave me a knowing that was still swimming in the absurdity. And then I went into the meeting and got the job. What would have happened if the train had been late or I hadn't stopped in that bar with the ATM in the toilet? Who knows?

-A WONDERFUL WORLD tour workshop started the day the WGA strike began. Timing, synchronicity? I had a job. And the WGA strike ended as the AWW tour was winding down, and I was right back in TV. 

-The steep downturn in theatre happened when there was a huge explosion in TV opportunities. Wow, TV is amazing, so many playwrights...

-And then TV writing jobs imploded. The steep downturn in TV jobs after the strike coincided with the slow rise of theatre opportunities. What's the lesson? 

-In 2015, the first TV room I was in had 6 writers for 13 episodes. 5 of the 6 writers were active playwrights. 

- 11 yrs later, the current room I'm in has 6 writers...for 20 episodes. I'm the only playwright. 

The only lessons I've taken away from the last 15 years is: read "The Diamond Cutter" by Geshe Michael Roach. And after that... be nimble, be willing, be absurd, and willing to swim in the absurd. It probably won't be one path unless you're the .0001% lottery winner in this game. It will probably be several streams you have to enter before they merge into one you can stay in. Be optimistic but not annoying. Be cynical but not bitter. Be hopeful but not delusional. Well, actually, be delusional but not dangerous. Stalk for things...with charm. Make mistakes and then get back up. Embarrassment is fine, but long-term shame is not. Smile at donors, smile at the board. They will say things that rich ppl say who don't know the obstacle course you ran to get into the room. Smile and nod 'oh that's fascinating. Vacationing in St. Moritz? No, not for me this summer.' If they throw something to rile you up, throw it back 'well what do YOU think about (insert latest scandal or outrage)? I want to hear your opinion.' They will love you if you listen. And you might get inspiration for a character you write later on. Be whimsical, be amused by others and their POV. Anchor yourself in equanimity and compassion for everyone. We're all walking through our own obstacle courses. Empathy will save you and flow back into your writing. Be a playwright.

DGWG: Unity of Opposites

 UOO (Two Types)

Internal unity of opposites — the thing that is simultaneously killing you and protecting you. Clare's weight. Roy Cohn's closet. 

External unity of opposites — what Character A needs from Character B who is reluctant to give, and vice versa. The original Meisner framing.

Internal is the thing inside someone that protects them but holds them back. It’s the quirk that usually arises from past events (Previous circumstances). It's a defense mechanism or a shelter the character built around a wound. It protects them and traps them at the same time. They will either grow past these internal opposites, grow past and then backslide, or get scared and turn back. 

External unity of opposites is people needing things from other people who are reluctant to give them.

The most compelling stories aren't just about people needing things. They are about ppl needing things...from other people who are reluctant to give them. And vice versa. This unity of opposites keeps dynamic tension between characters. 

When the thing Character A most needs is precisely what it costs Character B most to give, you don't have to manufacture conflict. The structure produces it automatically

EXAMPLE: Clare lost a massive amount of weight and then her life went to hell in a variety of comedic ways. As it turns out, Clare's excess weight was a psychological shield. Now that the physical shield was removed, Clare was getting slammed on all sides from all the stuff she hadn't confronted. So the thing Clare hated most was protecting her soul...while it was also killing her physical heart. That is a unity of opposites within a character. 

When I sat down to fictionalize this person, something was missing. Exterior unity of opposites. So I added an older sister: Grace. Then I made the older sister an ONLYFAN content creator in the fat fetish community. So Clare lost weight and became a therapist, but her life was going to hell, while Grace had turned their family's genetic trait into an advantage for her: obese but happy, and had a husband, a kid, and a community. 

So now that they are at opposite ends...what do Clare and Grace need from each other that keeps them in continual conflict? Well, they're sisters, so they love and care for each other deeply and dysfunctionally. They have set up their lives in dynamically opposed ways so that what it takes to maintain their status is the opposite of what they can give. Grace expresses love through food. Clare expresses love through hunting men and lecturing people about health. As a newly skinny person she is trying to avoid all those all eating habits that the sisters grew up with. Since Clare can't lash out directly at Grace, she lashes out at her husband, who is feeding Grace. They engage in an increasingly hostile relationship because Clare thinks this guy is killing her sister, and Grace thinks her sister is jealous (which is true) and is trying to subconsciously destroy her marriage. But they're still sisters who love each other dysfunctionally. So they need each other...while also destroying the foundations they need in their personal lives. When Clare's disasters spill over into Grace's life there are legal consequences. Clare is about to be ruined, lose her therapy practice... and that is when Grace takes the fall. The big sister covers for the younger sister and takes the blame for a car accident. 

Clare feels ashamed but also knows she needs saving...in her mind, it's to 'help others' while being unable to help herself. Meanwhile, from the outside, the world sees the two sisters and assumes the skinny one is winning at life, so Clare wants to keep up those appearances. 

Meritocracy and Mediocracy

 A year ago the White House called it “Restoring Meritocracy.” Here’s what that word has always meant — and who it’s always protected.

Last week, the Supreme Court's conservative majority gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 6-3 majority, ruled that Louisiana's majority-Black congressional district was an unconstitutional use of race. Within an hour, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature approved a gerrymandered map designed to flip four Democratic House seats. Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting, said minority voters would find it “nearly impossible” to challenge discriminatory maps. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund said states could now discriminate with impunity.

The ruling was not a surprise. It was a logical conclusion.

One year ago, the Trump administration signed an executive order called “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” Here is what meritocracy has looked like in the twelve months since.

Racial profiling for ICE detention: constitutional. Drawing a congressional district to ensure Black voters can elect a representative: unconstitutional. A handful of oligarchs consolidating ownership of virtually all American media: legal. Guaranteeing Black farmers representation in the agencies that govern their livelihoods: illegal. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — created in 1965 to protect workers from discrimination — now explicitly prioritizes cases filed by white men, with district directors instructed to move those cases to the top of the pile. When EEOC staff struggled to find valid claims, the results clarified the project: in one documented instance, employees were asked to justify abandoning a white man’s discrimination case because the job he didn’t get went to another white man, and every other applicant in the pool was also white.

Then there is who gets to enter this country at all. The Trump administration suspended refugee admissions for virtually every persecuted population on earth. There was one exception. Between October 2025 and March 2026, 4,499 refugees were admitted into the United States. All but three were white South Africans — descendants of the architects of apartheid, fast-tracked on charter flights paid for by the U.S. government while Haitians, Afghans, and Sudanese refugees with approved applications remained stranded. The administration called it humanitarian protection. The South African government was more precise: “It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status for a group that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.”

The pattern is not subtle. Meritocracy, as defined and enforced by this administration and this Court, means one thing: the restoration of a racial hierarchy that was briefly, incompletely, and apparently temporarily disrupted.

This is not a new trick. It has a long history.

In the early 20th century, American medical schools imposed hard caps on Jewish students. Grades didn’t matter. Test scores didn’t matter. Most elite programs limited Jewish enrollment to five or ten percent of the student body. The justification wasn’t explicitly antisemitic — it was framed, as these things always are, in terms of fit, culture, and merit. Jewish students simply weren’t quite suited for medicine. They were, however, naturally gifted at pharmacy. So the Jewish students who wanted to be doctors became pharmacists instead.

Then the caps were lifted. The “natural gift for pharmacy” turned out to be a natural gift for medicine that had been artificially redirected. The talent was always there. The access wasn’t.

Think about what talent actually is. Not a gemstone buried in the chest of a chosen few, not a birthright distributed to the deserving — but something closer to an antenna. A capacity to receive. To tune, when given the right equipment and the right environment, to frequencies that translate raw human experience into something others recognize as extraordinary. The Jewish student who became a pharmacist wasn’t carrying a lesser instrument. She was carrying the same instrument, aimed in the only direction the system permitted. And when the system finally turned her loose, she calibrated instantly.

The same logic applied to Black women in medicine for most of the 20th century. Exclusion meant that Black women qualified to be physicians became nurses — earning less, building less generational wealth, serving their communities with less institutional power. “That’s just where their talent lies,” the story went. Then barriers began to come down. The number of Black women entering medicine surged. The “talent for nursing” was revealed to be a talent for medicine that had been deliberately contained.

Today the same story gets told about Filipino women, disproportionately represented in nursing. Naturally nurturing. Just suited for this. No. They’re suited for whatever pipeline they’re given access to. They are the latest group handed a lesser position and told it’s their destiny.

This is the meritocracy lie in its purest form: first you restrict access, then you point to the result of that restriction as evidence of natural order. It is a self-sealing argument. It cannot be disproven from inside the system it creates, because the system produces exactly the outcomes it was designed to produce.

What happens when you start dismantling the lie? The old guard does not cheer. They were told — and believed — that they were physicians because they were simply better suited for medicine than the people who became nurses and pharmacists. Their identity, their self-conception, their ego was built on that story. When the story is exposed as a mechanism of exclusion rather than a reflection of natural order, it doesn’t just revise history. It revises them.

This is the psychological engine behind every DEI backlash, including the current one. It is not about merit. It is about what the ego requires to preserve its own narrative. If I’m not a doctor because I’m smarter than the nurse who was denied my opportunities — then what am I? The ego does not quietly revise itself. It screams. It litigates. It gerrymanders. It charters planes for white South Africans while Afghans wait in camps. It puts Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court and calls the whole arrangement meritocracy.

The current administration’s “meritocracy” argument is not a policy position. It is a psychological defense mechanism with a presidential seal on it. Yesterday it came with a gavel.

And here is what that defense mechanism produces beyond the courtroom. When a system’s primary function shifts from excellence to exclusivity, the most important credential becomes belonging, not performance. You get unqualified people elevated to positions of actual consequence: running health agencies, making aviation policy, determining who gets to be a doctor. The ego doesn’t want the best surgeon. It wants the surgeon who confirms the story.

Which brings us, inescapably, to Kid Rock.

Kid Rock is not incidental to this administration. He is its clearest cultural symbol — a fixture at Mar-a-Lago, a guest of honor at inauguration events, the walking embodiment of what the backlash actually rewards: a white man of modest talent, maximum grievance, and complete confidence that the cultural real estate he occupies was earned rather than inherited. Bad Bunny, by any objective measure of craft, innovation, and global influence, operates in a completely different artistic stratosphere. He built something extraordinary without being handed the keys. That is exactly what the ego finds threatening. The ego doesn’t scream DEI at Kid Rock. It screams DEI at Bad Bunny.

This is not music criticism. It is a diagnosis. The same logic that elevates Kid Rock over Bad Bunny fast-tracks white South Africans while Haitians drown, puts the EEOC to work finding discrimination against men who lost jobs to other men, and seats justices who will spend a generation dismantling the brief window of genuine democratic representation in American life. The Kid Rock theory of merit has a body count. Yesterday’s ruling is part of it.

The meritocracy order was signed a year ago. In that year, the Court has made racial profiling legal and Black political representation illegal. The refugee program has been reserved almost exclusively for white people. The civil rights enforcement agency now solicits grievances from the historically dominant group while dropping cases for everyone else.

That is not meritocracy. That is the oldest arrangement in American history, freshly laundered and court-approved.

Justice Kagan said minority voters will find it nearly impossible to challenge discriminatory maps. The NAACP said states can now discriminate with impunity. The Florida legislature didn’t wait an hour.

That’s how fast the lie moves when it has the Court behind it.

DGWG Tip: Subtext

It moves beneath the world, the characters, and the words. When audiences have a creeping sensation of dread, fear, fate, motherhood, love, or a premonition of an explosion...it's moving. Subtext lives in the shadows and caves. It's implied, hinting at, or it's the elephant in the room that people are avoiding talking about..so that everyone is always thinking about it. There are 3 types of subtexts: what characters say, what characters do, and where characters live (words, actions, setting.)

A script can have brilliant subtext in its setting and wooden subtext in its dialogue. Or a character can speak with perfect subtext while their actions are screaming what their mouth refuses to say. The best work runs all three simultaneously. When that happens, the audience doesn't just hear the story. They feel it pressing in from every direction.

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SUBTEXT IN DIALOGUE

Three types of character subtext when it comes to what they won't say.

1. A character who WON'T say something is making a choice. They know exactly what they're withholding. Roy Cohn in ANGELS IN AMERICA knows he's gay, knows he's dying of AIDS, and refuses to say either thing out loud because saying it makes it real and real things can kill you. Every scene he's in runs on the pressure of what he's not saying.

2. A character who CAN'T say something doesn't have the language or the emotional access to name what's happening. The love comes out as control, or anger, or instructions. Think of Troy Maxson in FENCES. He loves Cory. The audience hears it. Troy can't find it. That gap between what he means and what comes out is the whole play.

3. A character who DOESN'T KNOW they're not saying it is the richest situation of the three, because now the audience is ahead of the character. Willy Loman insists he's well-liked while the evidence of failure piles up around him. He's not lying. He genuinely doesn't know. The audience watching him not know is the engine of DEATH OF A SALESMAN.

Know which one you're writing before you write the scene. The diagnosis changes everything about how you write the lines.

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SUBTEXT IN ACTION

This is where most writers lose the most ground. They write the subtext correctly in the dialogue and then stage it literally. The character talks about grief and then weeps. The character talks about rage and then slams a door. The body is just illustrating what the mouth already said. That's not subtext. That's redundancy.

Subtext in action is when a character's physical behavior says the thing their words are refusing to say. Not illustrates. Says.

The test for subtext in action: cover the dialogue and watch what the character is doing. Does the physical behavior tell its own story? If the character is just illustrating the lines, the action has no subtext. If the character is contradicting the lines, or doing something the lines would never say, the action is working.

Three questions to ask of every significant physical action:

1. What does the character think they're doing? 

2. What are they actually doing? 

3. And what are they refusing to do, which is why they're doing this instead?

Troy Maxson builds a fence. He never explains why. He explains the fence constantly, but never the real reason. Every theory he offers is wrong: it's not to keep Cory in, not to keep death out, not to protect the yard. It's because a man who cannot say "I love my family and I am terrified of losing them" can pick up a hammer and swing it. The fence is his love. His fear. His failure. All of it happening in the body while the mouth argues about lumber.

Floyd in SEVEN GUITARS pawns his guitar. Floyd will tell you it's practical. He needs the money to get to Chicago. But what Floyd is actually doing is surrendering the one thing he owns that makes him real in the world. Which is exactly what a man does when he's decided, without consciously deciding, to take the bet that might kill him. The guitar goes into the pawnshop and comes out again. Then Hedley severs his windpipe. Wilson knew. The guitar was the tell.

Hedley kills the rooster. No explanation required. The entire audience feels what that means for a man who says he's going to be a big man someday. He kills the one thing on the property that crowed every morning to announce that another day had come.

Willy Loman tries to plant seeds in the dark. At midnight, in a garden that won't grow anything, he's on his hands and knees with a flashlight trying to get something to take root. He's not gardening. He's having a conversation with his own failure that he can't have any other way. The seeds won't grow and he knows it and he plants them anyway. That's the most precise stage direction in American drama.

In A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, Blanche bathes constantly. Long, elaborate baths at inconvenient times. She says it's to calm her nerves. What she's actually doing is trying to wash off what she did in Laurel, which no amount of water is going to touch. The more she bathes, the more the audience understands she knows it won't work. Stanley doesn't need to expose her. She's been confessing with her body since Scene One.

Floyd thinks he's being practical about the guitar. He's actually surrendering. He's refusing to ask Vera directly if she'll come with him to Chicago. So he pawns the guitar and talks about Chicago instead. The gap between those three answers is where the subtext lives.

Objects as subtext. Objects in plays take on the emotional weight characters refuse to carry in their bodies or their words. The fence. The guitar. The piano in THE PIANO LESSON. Laura's glass unicorn in THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Hedda Gabler's pistols. Mama Younger's plant in A RAISIN IN THE SUN.

These aren't symbols decorated with meaning by a writer at a desk. They are substitutes. They are what the character loves or fears or cannot let go of, made physical so the actor has something to do with their hands while the mouth says something else entirely.

Laura's glass unicorn is the clearest example. It's the only one in the collection without a horn, which makes it less unusual, which means it fits in with ordinary horses, which means Laura secretly hopes she could too. She never says any of that. She holds the animal and talks about her glass collection and you know everything. When Jim accidentally breaks the horn and it becomes a regular horse, and she gives it to him as a gift, she's giving him the broken version of herself and calling it a keepsake. The object does in thirty seconds what a monologue couldn't do in three pages.

An object earns its subtext when the character's relationship to it changes across the play. Track that change and you're tracking the character's interior life without requiring them to explain it.

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SUBTEXT IN SETTING

The world of the play is not a backdrop. It is a character. More specifically: the setting is the antagonist's argument made physical. Whatever the play's thematic question is, the setting is the world's answer, usually a hostile one.

Three questions to ask of any setting:

1. What is this world's argument? 

2. What has the world already decided about the characters before they walk into it? 

3. And what will the physical world do by the end of the play that the characters couldn't do themselves?

If the setting doesn't have answers to those three questions, it's a backdrop. If it does, it's a co-author.

Troy Maxson's backyard has a ten-foot fence on one side and a four-foot fence on the other, and it faces the alley and not the street. That's not neutral description. That's a man's life summarized in a stage direction. He's hemmed in, partially hidden from public view, accessible from the back rather than the front. And he's building another fence on top of it. The setting argues: this man has been contained and is now containing himself.

The boardinghouse in JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE is a crossroads. 1911 Pittsburgh, a house full of transients, everyone passing through on the way to somewhere else in the Great Migration. Wilson didn't choose that setting for atmosphere. The setting is the thematic argument: these are people in transit between who slavery made them and who they're trying to become, and this house is the liminal space between those two identities. When Herald Loomis finds his song in that boardinghouse, he finds it in exactly the right place. A nowhere that is also an everywhere.

The Wingfield apartment in THE GLASS MENAGERIE is in a St. Louis alley. No yard. Fire escapes instead of windows. Tom describes it as a hive with a fundamentally enclosed quality. The word he uses is 'fundamentally.' Wilson would've been proud of that. The setting argues that the Wingfields have been structurally excluded from the open life and are now managing the enclosure by making it precious, filling it with music and glass animals and old movies. When Tom finally escapes, he steps out onto the fire escape, which was also a way out for the whole play and nobody took it until he couldn't stand it anymore.

The Overlook Hotel in THE SHINING. Stanley Kubrick builds a hotel where the geography is physically impossible, corridors that lead nowhere, windows in rooms that can't have windows, a hedge maze that the building seems to swallow. The setting is doing the thematic argument before Jack Torrance ever picks up an axe: this is a space that cannot be rationally understood, and a man who needs to be the authority on everything he surveys has been placed inside it. The hotel doesn't make him crazy. The hotel reveals what was already there by refusing to make sense.

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PUTTING IT TOGETHER

The stories that last are the ones where all three subtext layers are running simultaneously and saying related but not identical things.

In FENCES: Troy can't say he loves his family (dialogue subtext). He builds a fence instead (action subtext). The backyard has been hemming him in since before the play started (setting subtext). Three different statements about the same man's emotional life. None of them identical. All converging on the same ending.

In DEATH OF A SALESMAN: Willy doesn't know he's lying to himself (dialogue subtext). He plants seeds in the dark (action subtext). The house is surrounded by apartment buildings that have closed in on it over the years, blocking out the light that used to grow things there (setting subtext). The world the play takes place in is a physical version of what's happening inside Willy's head. He's been enclosed and he keeps trying to plant.

When all three layers work, you don't explain the play to the audience. The audience explains it to themselves. And they'll carry different versions of the explanation home, depending on which layer hit them hardest. That's not a failure of clarity. That's a play doing its job.

DGWG Tip: Dialogue

Dialogue is not just "what characters say." It's subtext in motion. The words on the page are 1% of what's happening. The other 99% is what the character won't say, can't say, or doesn't even know they're not saying. 

THE SIX FUNCTIONS

A line of dialogue should do more than one thing. This is not a suggestion. One-function dialogue gets cut in the room. Two-function is competent. Three-function is what people quote thirty years later.

1. Reveal character: not who they are, but how they think. Word choice, rhythm, what they avoid. Two characters can say the same rejection in completely different ways. "I appreciate your concern" and "I don't need your pity" are the same information and completely different people.

2. Advance plot: a line that changes what's possible next. A door opens or closes. A decision gets made that can't be unmade.

3. Create conflict: two people with different objectives talking at each other instead of to each other. If everyone in the scene wants the same thing, you don't have a scene.

4. Establish relationship: power dynamics, history, love, contempt. Who interrupts whom? Who defers? Who uses the full name? Two lines of banter can tell you more about a twenty-year friendship than a page of backstory.

5. Control rhythm and pace: short lines accelerate. Long speeches slow down. Interruptions fracture. Silence redirects. Dialogue is music. You're composing, not transcribing.

6. Carry theme: your characters argue about the play. Not abstractly but through the specific drama of their scene. The philosophical conflict dressed as personal conflict.

Test every significant line against this list. One function, it's probably filler. Three functions, protect it.

THE ONE DIAGNOSTIC QUESTION

Before you write a line, ask: what is this line doing that the previous line couldn't do?

This is the most generative question in dialogue writing. It forces every line to earn its existence by moving something the prior line left stationary. If you can't answer it, the line is probably just bridging to the next moment without actually doing anything. That's also how you find scenes that are stalling out. Find the sequence of lines where nobody is doing anything new, cut it, and put the scene where it needs to go.

DIALOGUE AND YOUR HPM (History/Philosophy/Metaphor)

This is the connection most writing instruction skips. The six functions above are craft mechanics. The deeper question is: how does the dialogue serve the HPM (history/philosophy/metaphor)

The most distinctive scenes in great work are almost always a character's HPM being performed through speech. Not stated. Performed. There's a difference.

Canewell's rooster taxonomy in SEVEN GUITARS goes on for six pages classifying roosters by regional origin. What is it doing? Everything. It's a man who knows the specific name of every specific thing in a world that has refused to know his name. The dialogue is doing all six functions, but what makes it transcendent is that it's simultaneously about nothing and everything at once.

Before you write a scene: whose HPM is being dramatized here, and what does it look like when it moves through speech? If the answer is nobody's, you probably have exposition dressed up as dialogue.

RHYTHM IS MEANING

This gets treated like decoration. It isn't. The way lines move against each other tells the audience what to feel before the words even register.

Short lines mean urgency. Panic. Desire. People who've lost the distance they need to think.

Long speeches mean weight, authority, interiority...or the performance of those things. A character who takes over a scene with a long speech is either the most powerful person in the room or the most frightened. Usually both.

Interruptions (marked with a dash or a slash) say: I can't wait for you to finish because what I need is more urgent than your right to finish. They reveal dominance, panic, love. Overuse and they lose all meaning.

Beats and silences redirect. A beat before a line changes the line. A beat after throws weight onto what comes next. In THE WIRE, McNulty and Bunk solve a whole crime scene using only the word "fuck" said in different rhythms and intonations. That scene works because the writers understood that rhythm is character is scene is theme. The word means nothing. The rhythm means everything.

THE REVISION CHECKLIST

Write the way you think. Then go back and look for:

-Every place a character answers the question they were asked. Usually they shouldn't. They should answer the question underneath the one that was asked.

-Every "I feel..." followed by an emotion. Cut it. Show the feeling through what they want, what they'll do, what they won't say.

-Every line doing only one thing. Ask what it would need to do to do two.

-Every scene where no one's tactics change from beginning to end. Scenes that linger are almost always scenes where nobody is trying hard enough or changing their approach when what they're doing isn't working. The longer the scene, the more the tactics should shift.

-The best dialogue is irreplaceable. It could only exist in this play, spoken by this character, in this moment. Nothing else could take its place. That's the standard.

DIFFERENT DIALOGUE LEVELS

One-function dialogue is what gets cut in the room. Two-function dialogue is competent. Three- and four-function dialogue is what people remember. Five- or 6-function dialogues are the lines people quote years later in their dreams or when they're drunk. Dialogue that makes its way to bumper stickers. You don't want a script filled with these moments, but sprinkled throughout an entire movie or play and you're cooking.

(IMO 3-function dialogue is the happy middle most lines can achaieve: advances plot, reveals character, AND one more thing: underlines theme, creates rhythm while delivering information, etc.)

EXAMPLES

“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” 

Explosive dialogue carefully positioned at the climax of A FEW GOOD MEN that accomplishes all 6 functions with 5 words. It’s character (rude, cocky officer), plot (getting Jack Nicholson to blow up and lose), conflict, establish relationship, rhythm and pacing (look at the lines that build toward this moment. It’s designed to build up to this moment) and carries the overall theme of a military coverup. 

"Get busy living or get busy dying."

-a call to arms in SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. It launches the story forward into the ‘living’ part after so much abuse and torture. It feels like the story turns a corner on this phrase.

"Fuck"

In “THE WIRE” there’s a famous scene where 2 detectives -Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce)- investigate a crime and only use one word: fuck. The dialogue is in the intonation, rhythm, rapport between the 2 detectives. It’s a writing challenge to the extreme degree that is all about tone, pacing, character while advancing the plot of the investigation. 

"Gurl"

SNL repeated the same challenge later on with the “GURL” scene as 2 blk women engage in a whole discourse with one describing her man and the friend responding with different intonations of ‘girl, gurl…gurrrrrrrl.’ 

"What IS a weekEND?"

-a lifestyle and worldview all in the phrasing and rhythm of 4 words. 

"To Be Or Not To Be"

-stalling. Hamlet knows what he needs to do: avenge his father’s death. But he’s stalls with the most famous interior monologue about how to we, as humans, should make decisions.  And he weighs the dilemma of human existence. It also has great rhythm flow, underlines the themes of the play, speaks to Hamlet’s character and establishes his relationship to the world.

DGWG Tip: Conflict and Expectation

CONFLICT

I've been trying to spell out in clear terms the different types of dramatic conflicts. And then I went to the PEN panel discussion last night, and something just clicked in my brain when the panelists were talking about novels vs plays. All primary conflicts are either cathartic or traumatic. So that by the end, the story is working toward a funeral or a marriage. And that is a literal or symbolic endpoint. It's about harmony and love vs. disharmony and death. Oedipus ends in tragedy, shame, mutilation, and separation from society. FRIENDS ends in wedding plots. The pilot spells this out at the beginning: it is about catharsis and how all our conflicts are comedic yet help us grow in relationships, roommates, and friendships. You can relax, no one is going to gouge their eyes out and wander the earth as a poor, wrecked soul. The only question is how we are going to maneuver to this endpoint? And on the way there, they may be moments of tragedy...but even that will serve the greater arc of where the story is going: toward catharsis/healing/unity.

In addition to the major notes, there are two minor types of dramatic conflict: poetic and philosophical. These minor note conflicts support the overall story and larger conflict. A poetic conflict is a married couple trying to fix a leak in their house. The audience knows that this isn't really about the 'leak.' The storyteller draws our attention to something small because it foreshadows what's going to happen in this domestic drama. In the Sundance movie HOW TO GET DIVORCED DURING THE WAR, the poetic conflict is LARGE and real: Russia invades Ukraine. But the real invasion and its ripple effects are all meant to serve the fictional characters in a domestic drama who decide to get a divorce one day before the start of a war. Do we care about the war? Yes, but we know that's a poetic metaphor for the characters' journey.

The other conflict is philosophical, and it is used much more in novels. It can be used in plays and screenplays, but very sparingly, because we would rather see philosophical conflict implemented into a dramatic situation. In COMING TO AMERICA, Hakeem walks into a barbershop, and the 2 black barbers and the Jewish customer are debating about Cassius Clay changing his name to Muhammad Ali. They go back and forth, and it's funny, but why is it there? They're debating about identity and whether you can change your name, aka change your fate. And in walks Hakeem, an African prince who had an arranged marriage and kingdom, but has fled. He changed his name and persona to come to America and look for a wife. The philosophical comedic argument underlies the main character, who is literally walking into the barbershop at that moment to change his life by getting a haircut to blend into NYC. The Muhammad Ali argument wins: you can change your fate. Most ppl accept Muhammad Ali's name change, and by the end of the movie, most ppl accept Hakeem's change.

But you can take a philosophical argument as a jumping-off point for something traumatic or cathartic. Case in point is the other Eddie Murphy movie philosophically paired with COMING TO AMERICA, which is also about whether we can change our course in life: TRADING PLACES.

In TRADING PLACES, two old, rich, white guys debate whether success is about nature or nurture. This is purely a philosophical argument between two people with no real stakes, so the writer knows they need to dramatize the nature vs. nurture debate into something active and somewhat Biblical: a bet. Take two people at opposite ends of the spectrum and switch their environments and resources. Dan Aykroyd is a young, successful protege who has led a privileged life. Eddie Murphy is a street hustler and criminal who has led a rough life. The two rich men -playing God and Devil in the Book of Job- decide to see what happens if they force the two hapless young men to 'trade places.' They give Eddie Murphy all the advantages of being a privileged individual, and they will strip Dan Aykroyd of his privileges and send him into poverty. Very quickly, Eddie turns his life around and becomes a successful stock trader while Dan's life goes to hell with alcoholism and violence. Eddie is experiencing the comedy of cathartic conflict, while Dan is getting slammed with tragedy after tragedy. But what makes the movie really satisfying is when our two Jobs wake up and realize they are puppets in a $1 bet. So Eddie and Dan team up to get catharsis: bring down the rich people who played with their lives. The black and white working-class unite to stick it to the rich. And they end up on the beach together, in love with their partners, sipping drinks in the sun. Symbolic wedding of harmony and happiness. 

The narrative trajectory we are on is trauma or catharsis. Epics do both. "War and Peace" is about marriages and divorce against the backdrop of the Napoleonic War. Over the course of over 1000 pages the tragedies and catharsis switch from the fictional characters to the war history and back again. Eventually, there is a grand catharsis on war, heartbreak, and love. 

TYPES OF CONFLICT

1. Traumatic - disharmony, death, separation

2. Cathartic: harmony, love, community

3. Poetic: a metaphor -large or small- that points toward a bigger conflict

4. Philosophical: debate about a worldview that's usually given to side characters or small moments. But it can serve as a jumping-off point for dramatizing the philosophy.

***DISCLAIMER: every story does not need to have each one of the 4 conflicts. But great stories usually have a mix of mini-pain and pleasure conflicts, as the beats go from harmony to disharmony to harmony. The types of conflict may fluctuate before moving toward their end point. ***

 EXPECTATIONS

And conflict is based on expectations. I think there are 3:

 

1. expectation of love: they have to woo, persuade, charm, love, sex, insinuate themselves into something. Outsider woos their way into an exclusive group. Our an insider falls in love with an outsider and has to choose between love on the outside or staying with their status.  Two families at war BUT Romeo and Juliet fall in love.

2. expectation of hate/fighting: have to fight for self-respect, power, money, status against an ‘other.’ Revenge: you killed my father and I am here to end your life. Or pride: i will prove I am better than you at this job, in this competition, at the Olympics. I will beat you and prove that I am a better or more worthy athlete, teacher, plumber, husband, etc.

 3. expectation of escape: got to get out of something uncomfortable, painful, life threatening. Escape from prison, concentration camp, an abusive partner, some sort of trap or constrictions.

The character starts a scene and expects one of three things to happen with someone else in that scene, literally or symbolically. If it's a job interview or a loan application, they expect some friendship or bond with the interviewer if they want to get that thing. But then blank happens.

 In FLEABAG, Phoebe Waller-Bridge enters a scene with the expectation of getting a bank loan, but -whoops- she lifts up her sweater and realizes she's only wearing a bra underneath it, and she flashes the loan manager. She forgot to put on a shirt. It's embarrassing but also indicative of her recklessness (sexual and professional), and it becomes a fight scene. Later on, we find the loan manager was accused of sexual harassment, so he really took offense to the unexpected flashing while Phoebe's character thought he was just being stuck up. So that one moment of conflict underlies her character, the loan manager's character and his guilt, and the trajectory of her story. The loan manager eventually gives her the loan, and we get love. And then escape.

IN SCHINDLER’S LIST it is about escape from a death camp. In OFFICE SPACE it is about an escape from ‘ dull monotony’ of corporate life.