I think the collaborative nature of theatre serves to strengthen writing skills considerably because it forces the writer to think multi-dimensionally. You have to ask questions about the material that you don’t necessarily have to ask if you’re writing just straight fiction.
You have to figure out will a designer be able to
You don’t have to solve the problem for the designer, but you have to be able to open your mind to the question of what challenges will this pose for a scenic designer, for a lighting designer, for a sound designer, for a production designer? Those kinds of questions, the writer has to be wrestling with while they’re writing.
There’s also the element of suspension of disbelief that is unique to theatre. When you go into a film, when you go and see a movie, for example, everything is pretty much fed to you, spoon fed to you. It’s all there on the screen, and the student who’s watching a film is just receiving, in a sense, not necessarily being asked to actively participate other than to receive and to listen and to absorb and integrate the story.
The theatre — you have to, by nature, walk into the space and say, “I surrender my disbelief. I am willing to sit here in the dark with these people to the right and to the left of me and believe that that one wall that is the backdrop of the set is actually extending all the way around. And this is a real room where this scene is unfolding or, in fact, we’re not indoors, we’re outdoors or we’re in space or wherever we may be and that that sound effect is, in fact, a helicopter or whatever it might be.”
There is a real level of participation with the imagination that an audience member is required to do in the theatre. I think the writer writing for theatre needs to always keep that in mind, needs to write with the audience in mind and the audience’s journey in mind in a way that is different than other writing disciplines.
