Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I’m undoubtedly repeating myself when I say I have never been able to make my way through Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. In an early chapter, he advises the writer to start with the premise of a play. The one quoted in his entry in Wikipedia entry (I’m writing in a diner and don’t have the book handy) is “stinginess leads to ruin.” In other words, a theme the dramatic action is designed to illustrate. I find this such wrong-headed advice, I can’t bring myself to continue to his other ideas.

Why do I find this wrong-headed?

There have been a number of attempts to dramatize Aesop’s fables, and none of have been successful. I think it is because the audience understands that the stories don’t exist for their own sake, but to set up the morals at the end (e.g., “slow and steady wins the race”). There are times when we turn to the editorial page for an explicit opinion, but we tend to resist it when we want to be entertained. So, while Aesop hasn’t served as the basis of, say, a successful Disney feature, the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm Brothers get adapted again and again.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t ethical concerns in the Anderson and Grimm stories. Of course there are. But they are implicit in the stories, not the reasons for the stories.

The reason for all this throat-clearing is that I have the strong hunch that Andrew Stein’s play Disruption began out of Stein’s impulse to explore the theme of the danger A.I. poses to humanity, of its capacity to, yes, disrupt human relations. From there, he created a pair of disrupters and a group of disruptees. Specifically, he created a tech entrepreneur named Nick and, under the guise of wanting to invite them in on the ground-floor of a can’t-miss venture, in collaboration with an associate, uses a group of his friends as subjects on which he can test the efficacy of an algorithm he has developed. The play is largely about the consequences of his meddling. As you might guess, they aren’t pretty. But then, the play feels it has been constructed mostly to illustrate Stein’s thesis.

Except for a scene in the homestretch of the play. Mia (Irene Sofia Lucio) and Jill (the always-welcome Elizabeth Stanley), playing sisters, have a heart-to-heart about their fractious relationship, and all of a sudden there is the sound of human beings. Stein isn’t trying to prove anything in the scene. He gets out of the way of his themes and allows characters who have suddenly acquired souls to have a believable encounter. He doesn’t tell us what to think about them, but rather to enjoy two people we suddenly see as three-dimensional.

This gives me hope that Stein will one day do this for an entire play.