Writing for Stage and Screen:
Creating a Perception Shift in the Audience
by Sherry Kramer
“I have been waiting a decade for this book. Not since Lajos Egri’s classic “The Art of Dramatic Writing” have I been so excited and inspired by and grateful for the ideas contained within a text on dramatic writing. Reading and digesting the lessons in this book can be of greater value to an aspiring dramatist than years in an MFA program. Whether you are writing for the stage, screen or audio, this book is an invaluable teacher and guide to have by your side throughout the development and revision process.”
“It’s hard for me to think of anyone who has shaped the way I think about playwriting more than Sherry Kramer. While most of my education as a playwright was awash in silly rules surrounding plot mechanics, Sherry showed me how plays are organized in more meaningful and fundamental ways. While others taught me the structure of playwriting, she taught me the poetry of it.”
“Sherry Kramer is a brilliant and uncommon mind, someone who mixes a keen understanding of narrative structure and mechanics with a reverence for theatrical magic. I will never forget the first time I heard her talk about the DNA of plays, how they code themselves line by line, how they reveal to an audience how to understand them – and, to their writer, how to be faithful to their core questions. As a former student, I’m still using the many tools she gave me, both when writing a new draft or when in the throes of rewrites. Sherry is an artist and a teacher, and her ability to harness pedagogy to illuminate instinct is one of her many unusual gifts.”
This book is a structured look at the way audience members progress through a work of timebound art. Using plain-spoken vocabulary, it is designed to help playwrights, screenwriters, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and actors discover how to make work that will mean and matter more to their audiences. The book creates ways for artists to re-see multiple aspects of the artform, asking them to decouple from and then reassemble their ideas about the nature of dramatic event. Nothing that happens on the stage or screen can ever matter as much as the event of meaning that happens in the audience. The successes of a timebound work of art are not a matter of character development or an actor's journey or any of the craft of the art—not to the audience. They may talk about Lear’s struggle as they leave the theatre, but they have come to understand their own. This is the treasure the audience is searching for when they engage with a work of art, and this book is an attempt to show artists how to draw the treasure map that will help them find it.
Writing for Stage and Screen is written to appeal to timebound artists and writers at every stage of their life--whether in university or graduate school or working professionally. As a book for use in the classroom, it is appropriate for undergraduate playwriting and screenwriting classes and all areas of MFA graduate drama and screenwriting programs. Film, streaming series, and plays are referenced throughout the book, making its concepts accessible to all artists who work in timebound art. Multiple exercises, developed with MFA writers in The Iowa Playwrights Workshop and The Michener Center for Writers give artists entrance points to help them both create and consider their work.
-
This book does what no other playwriting book in my experience has done, it offers a new way of seeing and conceiving how theatre makes meaning and carries emotional impact in performance.
Suzan Zeder, Professor Emerita and former Head of Playwriting at University of Texas at Austin
-
This book is a work of genius--and I honestly don't say that often--if at all. Doesn't matter what you do in theater-- act, write, direct, design...this book allows for a deep perception shift that will open you up to a new way of imagining what is possible.
Dina Janis, Director, Actor, former Artistic Director of The Dorset Theatre Festival
-
Sherry Kramer understands the clockwork of plays. And because it is an understanding that applies -- quite remarkably -- across all boundaries of style, intention, or form, her approach is as refreshing and clarifying to the writer of a dark commotion as to the writer of a costume comedy. By focusing on the ways that a play comes to life not on stage but rather inside of an audience, Sherry gives to writers that thing we all crave: a thoughtful way to make good choices.
Steve Moore, Playwright
-
Sherry Kramer is the best kind of playwriting guide — generous, ingenious, and wise. She is an audience’s best friend and the fairy godmother of storytelling. Without Sherry’s big ideas on structure, magic, and perception shift, I’d be lost as a writer and teacher. I plagiarize her daily. Most books on the playwriting craft are derivative and oddly traditional — Sherry’s guide is both the tornado and yellow brick road. You will never go back to thinking about drama the same way again.
Austin Bunn, screenwriter, playwright, is an Associate Professor at Cornell University.
-
Sherry taught me not only the craft of playwriting, but she helped me find the soul of it. Her wisdom is matched by her humor, as this book will be a boon companion to her thrilling dramatic work.
Kirk Lynn, Founder and Co-Producing Artistic Director of the theatre collective Rude Mechs in Austin, TX, and head of the playwriting area in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin
-
Following her courses and workshops, Sherry's students consistently make use of her vocabulary and approach in responding to each other's plays and working through problems in their own work. Sherry's approach helps them achieve clarity about the dynamics of their work and about how plays work in general.
Art Borreca, Head, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, University of Iowa
Press
Beckett’s Babies Podcast
Episode160. INTERVIEW: Sherry Kramer