New Playwriting Strategies: A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting

The arts landscape is changing; the vitality and relevance of theatrical forms is in flux; exciting new theater is evolving.Paul Castango's book emphasises the essential element of theater that still remains its strength, the relevance of language. Through thoughtful examples that include a wide range of writers and styles, the book effectively and efficiently examines the best of the new experiments in creating and expanding theatrical forms.This book has opened new levels of understanding and examination to my own work as a writer. I am a better playwright for having read it.

Words that stop on a dime to shift the beat of an action, characters that transform at the turn of a phrase from the sublime to the grotesque, and nouns that seemingly have no connection to each other building to provide landscapes of character, thought, and actions. These are just a few of the exercises and ideas contained within this extremely useful book. While the joy of writing maybe the first and foremost concern of the playwrights (Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, etc.) that Castagno uses as models in the text, it is a joy arrived at through rigorous thought and discipline. And it is this rigor of intellect along with a strong sense of theatricality that informs this book. Because in an era where many new plays bear a greater resemblance to fleshed out sitcoms or television dramas, Castagno presents strategies that remind writers of the possibilities and opportunities that writing for the stage offers over evening television. Succinctly, Castagno's book reminds the playwright that words are the ultimate weapon of choice.The book can easily serve not only a playwrighting text for both a beginning or more advanced class but also is a useful tool for an individual writer looking for ways to make his or her text breathe free of the constraints of the traditional well made play. From a first-hand standpoint, these techniques, along with the intellectual thought that informs them, provided the final step in my development as a playwright. Furthermore, I utilized the exercises for a workshop I taught at Tulane University this summer (in conjunction with a play I was having produced) and saw immediate results.

For those who are interested in exploring the technique of the language playwrights, Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, Constance Congdon, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Eric Overmeyer, Paul Castagno's book offers a hands-on, informative approach that is useful to working playwrights and to dramaturgs who work with new forms of playwriting.Prof. Castagno bases his technique on important theoretical approaches (using the ideas of thinkers such as Mikhail Bahktin and Russion Formalists) that inform the work of these new playwrights. I am currently using this book in my graduate seminar in playwriting, and my students are using the language-based model that Castagno has developed to create some very interesting and exciting new plays.One of the more interesting aspects of the book is Castagno's expertise in the field of commedia, which he brilliantly ties into the post-modern formalist technique of writers like Len Jenkin, who subvert archetypal characters and stage figures in their plays.In a field that is dominated by cookie-cutter "how-to-write-your-play" texts, New Playwriting Strategies offers a refreshing, subversive, and exciting new approach to writing plays. For those who are interested in adding more dramaturgical tools to their dramatic technique, I highly recommend this text.