The Roots of Drama: Revealing the Art of Character and Narrative

All drama begins and ends with its characters. Drama is conflict, and conflict requires intention, desire, a personal stake. Though the art of storytelling has undergone many changes since the ancient days of Greek theatre, its basis in character remains constant. The interplay of warring personalities is the foundation of drama.

Modern dramatists hold the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides to be the paramount examples of the craft. They contain nothing extraneous, no segues into exposition, no explosions. The battles, the suicides, the scenes to which Hollywood would devote half-an-hour and several million dollars, occur off-stage and are merely alluded to. Everything that matters is channeled through two or three characters at a time. We now scoff at simplicity in theatre and cinema, but for the ancient playwrights, simplicity was a powerful tool.

Keep this in mind as you develop your own characters. Before you stress out over whether your protagonist has brown eyes, eats deviled eggs, or listens to Peter Gabriel, figure out what he wants. Short-term, long-term, specifically or in general. Prioritize these desires and express them within different contexts. Ultimately your character may want to rise to the top of her company, make peace with her dying father, or transcend time and space and become one with the godhead. If she's spent a hot day doing yard work, however, then at that moment her desire for a cup of strawberry ice cream may be stronger.

On that note, competing desires are a great way to create conflict within just a single character, especially if they have unequal value in the eyes of the audience. Most of the drama in Hamlet uses the eponymous hero's inner conflict as a vehicle for action. Part of him wants simply to kill Claudius, another to expose Claudius publicly and so justify killing him, another to honor the memory of his slain father, and yet another to be rid of the responsibility altogether. And that doesn't even begin to cover his problems.

In short, you want to build your characters from the inside out. As though you were sketching a line figure, begin first with the bare lattice, the axis and corresponding nodes, so that the process of fleshing out your creation will have a kind of architecture, a skeleton to work around. If you are familiar with the writings of Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, you might identify this underlying motivational structure as the archetype, or perhaps a set of archetypes. Avenger, redeemer, destroyer: at once, Hamlet is all three. He avenges his father's death, redeeming himself by fulfilling his filial responsibility, but in the process destroys himself, his kingdom, and just about everybody he knows.

And what an unlikely candidate for these roles he is!

The first instinct of beginning writers is to express these archetypes in bold strokes, creating a hackneyed portrait of the gallant hero riding in on a pale horse, or descending in a beam of light from the heavens. What separates Hamlet from the stock characters of bad fiction is that he embodies his type (or types) so subtly. He is no musclebound champion, stoic veteran, or gleaming savior. For most of the story, he is a typically moody, naive, pseudo-intellectual teenager with a martyr complex and a chip on his shoulder. There is a comic element to his philosophical posturing, his "To be, or not to be," because as much as we understand and feel his guilt, suffering, existential turmoil and so on, we recognize that there is an enormous gulf between the person he is and the person he thinks he is. He wants to be the mythical hero, the dashing prince that ousts the illegitimate King Claudius from the throne in one fell swoop. Instead, he is human. He has fears, base impulses, and makes mistakes that cause him problems down the road. In a sense, his humanity defeats him. He does not save the day, get the girl and ride off into the sunset. That isn't what is profound about the story. If Hamlet's struggles were entirely exterior, we would regard him as a failure. The story's true narrative, however, is his internal conflict. Hamlet experiences anagnorisis, a transformative revelation, while standing in a graveyard, looking at the remains of a childhood acquaintance. He becomes aware of his own mortality, his weaknesses and failings, and is transfigured not into the person that he would like to be, but into the person that he is. An ordinary person, capable of ordinary mistakes. Yet his actions produce extraordinary effects.

Resist the urge to idealize your characters. Your audience will not identify with a cast of supermodels, prodigies, and golden immortals. At the same time, however, do not feel obligated, as seems to be the current trend in literature, to retain everything and everyone safely within the realm of the mundane. The most captivating narratives, whether comic or tragic, are transcendental in nature. This is what is so satisfying about even as depressing a story as Hamlet: whether we realize it or not, we intuitively sense his crossing from the ordinary into the extraordinary world. He is called by the ghost of his father to make this journey, and resists the call for four of the play's five acts. When he finally embraces his calling, the ensuing quest is brief. Hamlet duels with Laertes, kills Claudius, and dies. The story that we see ends in sorrow and ruin. Intuitively, however, we feel somehow that Hamlet has triumphed. By fulfilling the call in both mind and deed, he has crossed totally into the heroic realm. His death before a crowd of onlookers is practically a requisite of his transfiguration - for how could he remain afterward in the ordinary world?

Narratives of transcendence, however, need not be so literal. An interesting example of a story that disguises the hero's journey within the commonplace is The Full Monty, a film about a gang of working-class brits who decide, for a variety of reasons, to put on a full-exposure strip show. Whatever on the exterior compels them to this decision is incidental, because as a troupe, they face the same interior obstacle: an overwhelming insecurity about themselves, their social station, their looks, and their dancing ability. These insecurities, which initially make them reticent to expose themselves on stage, also prevent them from being honest with themselves and the people around them about who they are. For example: Gaz Schofield (Robert Carlyle), hoping to maintain partial custody of his young son, tries to appease his ex-wife by searching for a job he does not want, while secretly intending to earn money and better his situation by stripping. Likewise, Dave Osborne's shame at being overweight not only leads him to second-guess his decision to take part in the act, but also makes him so afraid of taking off his clothes in front of his pretty wife that, in order to avoid sex, he leads her to believe that he is cheating and no longer wants her. We identify with these men because, like us and all ordinary human beings, they have fears, insecurities, weaknesses - yet they manage, each in his own way, to overcome their interior limitations. Like Hamlet, each undergoes his own anagnorisis - for Gaz, the realization that his son loves and respects him no matter what he does for a living; for Dave, that his wife desires him in body and mind - and so together they become free to bare themselves, literally and metaphorically, on stage before an audience of their peers. On the surface, none of them has changed into what he would have liked to be: Gaz is still a working-class stiff and Dave remains a fat slob. As they are, however, they perform with absolute confidence to raucous, sincere applause. Everyone watching, both in the film and in reality, knows that a deeper transformation is taking place than a striptease. We are witnessing the transfiguration of these men on stage, as if upon an altar, into heroes, inhabitants of the extraordinary world. They have conquered their demons and are no longer like we are. Accordingly, the film ends with them exposing themselves fully, their backs turned towards us as though to insinuate that, as inhabitants of the ordinary world, we are not worthy of beholding them in their transfigured form, their "full monty." The frame freezes and fades to black. As heroes, they have departed for a realm unknown to us, and we are not capable of following them. At least, not yet.

It seems strange that, by default, we do not prefer comedy to tragedy. That narratives apparently as bleak as Hamlet or as frivolous as The Full Monty can inspire such passion and enthusiasm in us. On some level, however, we understand that the visible plot is irrelevant, a series of lies strung together. The real boon is the secret window that is hidden within all good drama, enticing us with rumors of an undiscovered country but neither telling us its name or how to get there. We do not see but rather sense this transcendental crossing in drama. Without it, comedy is mere diversion; tragedy, mere masochism.