New Playwriting Strategies

Paul C. Castagno is Professor of Theater at UNC-Wilmington, where he served as founding chair of the Department of Theater. He formerly served as Director and Head of MA programs at the School of Theater at Ohio University, and headed the MFA Playwriting/Dramaturgy programs at the University of Alabama. He teaches playwriting anddramatic literature, directs, and has published books and articles on playwriting and commedia dell’arte.

New Playwriting Strategies has become a canonical text in the study and teaching of playwriting, offering a fresh and dynamic insight into the subject. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition explores and highlights the wide spread of new techniques that form contemporary theatre writing, as well as their influence on other dramatic forms.

Paul Castagno builds on the innovative plays of Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate groundbreaking new techniques from a broad range of contemporary dramatists, including Sarah Ruhl, Suzan Lori-Parks and Young Jean Lee. New features in this edition include an in-depth study of the adaptation of classical texts in contemporary playwright and the utilizing new technologies, such as YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs to create alternative dramatic forms.

The author’s step-by-step approach offers the reader new models for:

• narrative
• dialogue
• character
• monologue
• hybrid plays

This is a working text for playwrights, presenting a range of illuminating new exercises suitable for everyone from the workshop student to the established writer. New Playwriting Strategies is an essential resource for anyone studying and writing drama today.

Introduction: Beyond the Tipping Point 1.New Playwriting Strategies: Overview and Terms Part I: Strategies of Language and Character 2. On Multivocality and Speech Genres 3. Polyvocality and the Ascendancy of the Hybrid Play 4. The Theatricality of Character 5. The Transformation of Character 6. Len Jenkin’s Dramaturgy of Character: From Stage Figures to Archetypes7. Mac Wellman: Language-Based Character8. Crossover Poetics: Sarah Ruhl and Suzan Lori-Parks Part II: Strategies of Structure and Form 9. Units and Building Blocks 10. Scenes, Acts, and Revisions 11. Foundations of Contemporary Monologue 12.Dialogic Monologue: Structure and Antistructure Works Consulted