a short meditation on playwriting

Sometimes if I am very very lucky, when I first turn on my airconditioning, the initial burst of stale air causes my car to smell like a Disney World ride. And that is a great great day.

As I am working on this playwriting project, I think I have encountered a valuable lesson. The characters must not fully have a handle on their world or their problems. That sounds like a given, but it is a really crucial thing to perfect. The characters cant fully comprehend the nature of their conflict. Which should be in the playwright's ability: to be so honest about their issues that they push (both themselves and the play) to the ends of thier know-how problem solving. Sort of like John Donne poetry, or my favorite movie, Broadcast News... both these things, the movie and the poetry, have unbearable conflict in common. John Donne's narrator as well as Holly Hunter's character absolutely are up to their neck in angst, one siding up in the protestant/ catholic rift, the other choosing between love and values. And they dont let themselves off the hook of the struggle, consequently the audience/reader have no clue how its all going to end up just as the character does not know.

Thats how you play it, thats how you write it, thats how you read it, watch it. Narratives... education... they just serve a purpose and take you down a road that exposes you to everything you dont know and dont understand.