Smoking, Drinking, Swearing, and Dark Humor on Stage

Izzie

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The ten page play I am working on is a story that has been stuck in my head over the last month. So far, it has broken several of my "Do Not Write This" rules: no writing about College Kids, Teen Pregnancies, The Voice of Reason, and/or Drama Queens." Too much of that in undergraduate college writing workshops.

Interestingly, to me anyway, it is better than I thought it would be. The characters are college kids who had teen pregnancies, one a Voice of Reason and the other a Drama Queen, but those are the things that brought them together and helped them find meaning. Or something. No finger wagging. Perfect? No. Next big hit on [insert theatre district here]? No. But I think it will turn out well and is making for good practice.

Because I am practicing, I have some questions on potentially offensive content on stage. Are these things problematic to the point I should not include similar elements in future work:

1. Drama Queen swears. In two languages, even. A lot. I thought it fit her personality. Used for emphasis and is not at random.

2. Teen pregnancies. I didn't glorify them, but the characters ended up with some level of success in life. They're not the epitome of mental health and I don't know if I would call their outcome "defying the odds," but they didn't end up living in a dumpster or whatever after school specials would have you believe.

3. Drug references. Drama Queen went on a drug binge. See above about mental health, defying the odds, and dumpsters.

4. The Voice of Reason. She has baggage though, so is that a good thing?

There's a lot of banter, so no praying for a moment of comic relief and ending up laughing at one line that isn't very funny because there is so much drama you Must Laugh At Something. Thing is, I have seen an audience look afraid to laugh at gallows humor. Well, more than once. And one of the works was mine. And it ended up with someone pulling me aside and saying they were concerned. Yes, the person was serious about being concerned about my mental state because of something I wrote.

Guidance?
 

Bloo

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A lot depends on your intended audience and if it remains true to the characters. You should also ask yourself WHY you are writing this. Is it to shock or does it serve a purpose?

If your audience is college age/new adult audiences or those that attend "fringe theater" performance (I hate that term LOL I say as a member of a named "Fringe Theater" group) then yes cursing, drugs, etc are acceptable and such plays have seen success. In fact, a lot of mainstream shows feature this kind of behavior. Tony nominated musical NEXT TO NORMAL features quite a bit of cursing and drug use. AVENUE Q features even more cursing, talk about masturbation, and puppet sex. It also gave us the songs "The Internet Is For Porn" and "If You Were Gay". DOG SEES GOD features characters who are in High School (and are pastiches for the Peanuts Gang) engaged in homosexuality, bisexuality, drinking, doing drugs, cursing, suicide, and bullying. David Mamet paints pictures with the "f-bomb" (see Glengarry Glenross or Oleanna) and even that old standard Neil Simon "cursed" in his plays. In THE ODD COUPLE, Oscar drinks like a fish (when I've played him (twice now) I've always played him as trying to drown out his personal sorrow through booze) and the entire group of poker buddies smoke.

NOW if you are writing a piece for High School students to PERFORM or see, then you're going to find a lot less success with these kind of tropes (mainly the cursing), but even that is becoming less and less of an issue. I wrote a 10-minute monodrama for a young actor that didn't have any cursing in it. I showed it to a friend of mine, a HS English and Drama teacher, and he said "you need to have this character curse." When I asked "wouldn't that limit the audience?", he shrugged it off and said "not really." This is a teacher at a very small school in Kansas.

I think all these things are fine, as long as they are true to the characters. If it is there to shock or just because you can, then they aren't necessary, but if they are true to the characters and serve a purpose, then go for it.
 
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Izzie

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Thank you!

Makes a lot of sense. The types of work produced in my area seemed to have been striving for universal appeal for about six years and is starting to becoming diverse in target audience again. I live in a town full of people who are very difficult to offend, so I'm not sure what happened there. I dropped out of the world until recently, and I do not have the best sense of what is considered generally acceptable.

Writing for teenagers and writing to shock are included on my "Don't Write This" list, and I do not see myself removing those two anytime soon.

ETA: Oh dear, I inspired a blog post.

A character struck me as the smoking, drinking, swearing type. Whether or not I wrote her well enough to convey that I do not know.

Still not writing for teenagers or to shock anytime soon. Good rules, I say.
 
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JulianneQJohnson

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You don't mention this in your post, but it's in the title, so I wanted to add something. If you write it into one of your plays that the character must smoke onstage for some reason, that causes a variety of performance issues these days. Many states have a ban on smoking in public spaces, including onstage in a production, which caused problems for the tour of Jersey Boys, if I remember correctly. Even if that's not a problem, fire marshall codes for any sort of open flame have gotten very cautious, often needing most of the stage and costumes to be fire-proofed. Using a lighter onstage is considered open flame. Many productions have gone to electronic cigarettes, even to the extent of finding ones that have vapor, but no nicotene. These electronic devices would work fine so long as the character doesn't have to make an issue of stomping it out like Sandy in Grease.

Now characters speaking about smoking, not a problem. Doing it? Much more difficult than the days when all one needed to do was substitute herbal cigarettes.
 

zander

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All of the things you mention are fine and are used liberally in nearly every modern professional production. I agree that smoking is becoming problematic, but there are always those vapor cigarettes you can use if a character must smoke.

You do seem to be giving yourself a lot of arbitrary rules though (not writing for teenagers, not writing for college, not including pregnancy, etc... ask yourself why these rules are important to you? Just because, or is there some other reason? Do you think they're cliche? Pregnancy is a pretty momentous event in a person's life, it can't really be cliche - the way you handle it might be cliched, but the event itself isn't cliche. That's like saying "I don't want to write about sibling relationships, that's so overdone." Just make sure your take is fresh and personal and it won't be cliche.

Some other things I noticed that you might want to consider: I obviously haven't read your piece, but from hearing about it, I wonder if you haven't fallen into a trap that afflicts many playwrights just starting out. It seems as if you have a play in mind that brings a few characters together to talk about their experiences. I'd urge you to think about conflict and objective. Plays are performed live; they're about action, and in order to have action, you have to have characters going after something, trying to get something out of someone else. If they have no prior relationship, and are sharing experiences together, then there's nothing at stake between them and the result can often be a flat and dull play. Make sure to have conflict (when I say conflict, I don't mean sniping or criticizing, I mean characters pursing different objectives in relation to each other.)

Again, I haven't read your play, but from your brief description of it, that occurred to me. Take it for what it's worth.
 

Bloo

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Good comments on smoking on stage! In 1999 I was in a production of The Odd Couple where we actually SMOKED on stage (which was interesting as 4 of us had JUST given it up). When I did the show again, in 2012, it was strictly forbiden for us to smoke on stage, have an open flame, etc. In one scene, as Oscar, I had to flip open a zippo lower my head and act like I was lighting my cigar from behind a table.

We used the "puff" cigars and cigarettes, which lasted about 2 a show the rate we were using them LOL
 

Izzie

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Thank you for more responses! Very helpful.

Was on the fence about stage smoking for the reasons mentioned. I recall the "puff" cigarettes in a play that a former classmate had produced a few years back, heh. The vaporizers can look like the real thing (my husband uses one), but many liquids have a smell when exhaled. Not great for small stages and those who deal with migraines.

I once went to a reading when I was in college for a two act play that was being completed and intended for production. The playwright knew my teacher. I'm not sure how many plays she had produced.

The dialogue was natural, though nothing happened. I had to leave during the second act for some reason, but a friend of mine watched all of it. I asked him how it ended, and he said it wasn't anything more than a two hour conversation on...nothing. I was thankful I had to leave. It reminded me of some short stories I have read in literary magazines. Amazing use of words, unfortunate absence of plot.

What I had been guilty of in the past was what I refer to as "Using characters as pawns for my agenda." Minimal character development with beating people over the head with whatever political or philosophical garbage I had on my mind when I wrote a piece. I'm not sure what compelled me to write that way, probably that I was an angry twenty year old who hadn't yet discovered the beauty of volunteering for a cause, but I realized how awful agendas could be when I watched a two hour sci-fi movie in a cramped, cold theater with my husband. I like sci-fi, I think it can be a great avenue for discussing a variety of topics, but the characters were flat. It sunk in more recently when I saw Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends, which was fun but left me thinking, "Okay, you're a former Roman Catholic. And?" Scripts need more than an agenda.

Work of the moment has a plot and the characters have some personality, which is a first for me. My rules are based on interest. I'm open to change and trying new things, but I spent too many years doing writing I found tedious to want to stretch further at the moment. I will eventually, but it's not where I'm at right now. Put it on the to-do list...
 

storygirl99

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Don't worry about any of it--all that matters is the characters and the story.

The main reason I would avoid having characters smoke onstage is that it stinks for the audience to see somebody fake-smoking, it takes them out of the play. I recently saw a play (In Arabia We'd All be Kings) where nobody smoked onstage but the characters ran outside for a smoke or ran out of smokes or griped that they didn't have money for cigarettes. It worked well since these characters would definitely have smoked, but it prevented the problem of onstage smoking.