Being a stage director comes with a host of responsibilities, most of which involve facilitating the coalescence of diverse talents from a creative team of actors, designers, choreographers, coaches, etc., around a compelling Production Concept that inspires their best work and that ultimately results in a powerful, cohesive aesthetic experience for their audience. And this all begins with a deceptively simple, naïve sounding question; “what’s this play about?” 

I say “deceptively simple” because good plays are, of course, “about” a lot of things; subtext and themes and side plots and character arcs and metaphors and morals and so on, and a good production will illuminate all of them. But that very complexity can seem overwhelming at first, making it difficult to apprehend and describe the ultimate narrative tapestry that emerges from all those colorful threads. But this is, of course, precisely what the creative team needs -and rightfully expects- from their director, and that’s where I’ve found a “deceptively simple” literary thought experiment to be quite useful: the Dramatic Action Summary Statement.

Simply put, the Dramatic Action Summary Statement is a single sentence summarizing the central, universal story of the play as propelled by the protagonist’s Driving Desire, stripped of all proper names, exact times, and locations. Think of it as sort of a “elevator pitch” headline for the archetypical essence of play—who does what, why, with what results—stripped of any topical considerations of specific times, places, or character names. Some examples from a few well-known canonical plays:

A fiercely effective military officer, seduced by ambiguous supernatural prophecies of a destiny filled with wealth and power, violently betrays his honor in an attempt to manipulate his fate to accommodate those prophecies, and finds instead only paranoid madness, disgrace, and the ultimate loss everything he holds dear, including his own life. (1)

A man entering the twilight of his life, clinging desperately to a worn, unraveling façade of the American Dream that has failed him time and time again, makes a final, tragic attempt to provide his family the last shreds of support he believes he can, leaving them grief-stricken and alone. (2)

In an effort to secure their futures in a rapidly changing society, a determined single mother emotionally manipulates her adult children into adopting her own anachronistic cultural values, only to drive them further into their own troubled internalized worlds. (3)

Blinded by pious pride, a willful patriarch disregards his family’s repeated warnings of obvious malicious intent and falls prey to a charlatan posing as a devout man of faith, resulting in the imminent loss of everything he holds dear, only to be rescued at the last minute by the intervention of his wise, omniscient king. (4)

(Titles of the plays summarized here are listed at the end of this post.)

Now, trying to compose such a radically lean, generic seeming description of a complex play can be frustrating, and some find the attempt frankly distasteful, complaining that it’s little more than an absurdly reductive exercise at rendering a nuanced, multilayered work of dramatic art into mere PR blurbage. And taking the resulting summary sentence at face value, that would be a valid critique. But while there may be some small PR value in the resulting statement itself, that sentence isn’t the goal. The real value of the exercise lies not in the artifact of the statement itself, but in the process required to arrive there. Sussing out what one sees as the central, driving dramatic narrative of a complex, multilayered play actually requires a very close interrogation of the script for clues—and therein lies the real value of the exercise.

And while most of my experience with this thought experiment over the years has been in the context of a director’s pre-production homework, I’ve discovered that playwrights, too, sometimes find it a useful script development tool, for more or less the same reason; the close analysis required to arrive at this kind of summary statement requires a certain kind of objective distance -seeing forests instead of trees. And should that prove particularly challenging at any given stage of development, it might be an indication of loose threads that may need tightening. If, for example, it’s difficult to discern which character’s actions are driving the main story, it may be an indication that too many character arcs are vying for attention, and so on.

This particular playwright-centered application of the exercise most recently arose for me during my collaboration with playwright Brad Bolchunos on an unrehearsed reading of his play Unmediated, for which I served as director. As he outlines in his blog post about that experience, during our initial discussions about preparing the script for the reading, his dramaturg on the project, Ciji Geurin, had urged him to better define for himself his intention in writing the play, or as he characterizes it in his post, “what am I writing about?” This struck me as exactly the sort of question the process of coming up with a Dramatic Action Summary Statement might help sort out, so I suggested the exercise to him. And if our subsequent discussions about the play are any indication, I believe he found it a worthwhile exercise.

But now some cautions …

It would be a mistake to think that I’m suggesting there is always a singular “right” or definitive summary of a play’s narrative essence to be found for every play. This analytic tool is probably most effective with certain kinds of traditionally structured plays that feature clearly defined protagonists whose stories drive a play’s overall narrative. The attempt to squeeze this sort of unifying, protagonist-centered dramatic action summary statement out of unconventional, abstract, improvisational and/or ensemble oriented scripts (Carol Churchill’s Cloud 9 comes to mind) might be more frustrating than fruitful.