Diverse experiments in playwriting over thousands of years mean a too-narrow definition could shortchange the multitudinous manifestations and methods of creation that constitute the art form.
Playwriting is difficult to pin down because it bridges oral cultures and cultures based around the written word – a play can be something you watch, listen to, or read. The best and most general definition for playwriting is that it is form of preparation for performance. We know of many plays that have been written and performed over the last 2000 years but a play can also be something that is never written down, or even something that is written down but never performed. There can be a play without any words or a play that is only words. If an artist records a conversation and uses the transcript as a performance text, or finds a text and arranges it for actors, all of these diverse actions: recording, transcribing, arranging, and contextualizing, are playwriting.
The first known playwriting competitions were held in Athens over 2000 years ago so we can assume the origins go back further than that. Presented in festivals alongside singing, dancing, fights, and animal acts, Athenian drama was the most high tech entertainment on the menu. Indeed, playwrights utilized some of the most advanced technology of the day, namely the written word and actors, to a create plays that were dialectic in form and content. Early plays combined monologue-style narrative with dialogue scenes, relating stories that emphasized conflicts between people, ideas, and people with ideas. Portraying these stories required the coordinated efforts of multiple artists from different disciplines, establishing theatre as a collaborative form. It proved to be an ideal medium through which to explore the tensions between the individual and society as a whole – always a salient topic in the city-states where theatre has historically thrived.
Aristotle claimed that a man called Thespis invented both character-based acting and playwriting simultaneously when he stepped out of the dithyrambic chorus (a large group of men recounting a familiar mythological tale) and spoke in the voice of the hero of the story, altering the point-of-view of the language from third-person to first-person. It is more likely that this innovation was gradual, but Aristotle’s anecdote illustrates nicely the ‘special effect’ that makes playwriting compelling: multiple voices and multiple points-of-view contained within a unified work of art. Adriano Shaplin