2: The Playwright

What Does a Playwright Do?

A playwright designs a blueprint for action. Like a wheelwright who crafts wheels or a shipwright who builds boats, a playwright is a craftsperson. Just as a skilled artisan follows both creative and practical steps to produce a chair, a bowl, or a Swiss watch, the playwright follows a thoughtful process to shape a playscript. But unlike those finished products, a play is not complete on the page. A script is not the art itself—it is a set of instructions for creating the art. The playwright’s role is closer to an architect; architects don’t build buildings, they show how buildings can be built. Likewise, playwrights don’t make theatre—they show how theatre can be made. Playwriting is often seen as a solitary act, a lone figure scribbling by lamplight, deep in thought. And yes, many playwrights spend hours drafting scenes alone, like a shipwright quietly assembling a boat in their garage. But theatre is fundamentally collaborative, and a play cannot live on the page alone. The writer must eventually invite others in to read, interpret, perform, and bring it to life—like pushing that handcrafted boat into the water for the first time to see if it floats.

Beyond being a craftsperson, the playwright is a storyteller. Unlike the griots of West Africa, the imbongi praise poets of the Xhosa people, or the traveling bards of medieval Europe, playwrights rarely tell the story themselves. Instead, they create characters—people with desires, flaws, and conflicts—who interact through dialogue and action. These characters are embodied by actors onstage, who give voice and movement to the story the playwright has built. As we discussed in the introduction, storytelling is one of the oldest and most vital human technologies. If you want to understand a culture, pay attention to the stories it tells. Stories preserve a society’s values, fears, taboos, and aspirations. From the Mahabharata, Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and The Iliad, to Beowulf, stories reveal who we are—and who we imagine ourselves to be. Human beings are obsessed with stories. We seek them out constantly, consuming them across every available medium.

But what is a story? A story is a structured way of communicating experience and meaning. It presents a sequence of events—real or imagined—that involve conflict and change over time. There are many ways to shape a story for the stage, and we’ll explore some of those in the next section on dramatic structure. What matters most is that a story has some kind of internal structure, even if it appears chaotic or nonlinear. Immersive theatre experiences like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (2011–2025), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which audiences wandered around a warehouse styled as a 1930s hotel, might seem loose or open-ended. They are in fact tightly structured. Every moment is designed to guide the audience through a carefully constructed world. At the center of this structure is conflict. Conflict arises when characters want things they can’t easily have, especially when they want things from each other. The more urgent and irreconcilable these desires are, the more compelling the drama becomes. A playwright’s job is to raise the stakes and sustain tension for as long as possible. For example, imagine I’m buying my morning coffee. I want coffee. The café has coffee. I have money. End of story. There’s no conflict, no drama, and no reason to care. But if I forget my wallet, the café is out of coffee, or I desperately need caffeine before teaching an important class—then suddenly the stakes, however small, begin to rise. Still, these problems are minor. Most plays revolve around far more urgent needs: love, survival, justice, dignity. Finally, for a story to matter, something must change. Change gives a story its shape and meaning. Characters pursue their desires, encounter resistance, and are transformed by the experience. Without change, there are no stakes. No arc. No story. Now, if during my coffee run, I had a sudden flash of insight that led to a scientific breakthrough and saved millions of lives—then that moment might be worth dramatizing. Otherwise, probably not.