Structure

Just because you can make a play longer doesn't mean you should.

In the case of Leave, which is kicking off Season 2011 for Urban Samurai, I feel like parts of it could use a little more room to breathe.

The trick is, which parts?

If you've already made your point succinctly, there's no point in belaboring it and repeating yourself.

But if the characters get a chance to grow and deepen, feel more like people and less like mouthpieces for the author, that's all to the good.

When you start poking at the thing, to make any real changes, everything needs to be up for grabs. Then you can sort out where the strongest stuff is, and where it might be better.

Picking it apart, how about the way it begins and ends?

Right now, the script begins and ends in a graveyard. And the grave marker never goes away.

The character of Anne visits the grave. Someone she knows is in it.

Given my penchant for ghosts, I suppose it could also be her grave.

Except that she says, among other things, "If I'd done everything I could, everything I should, this boy wouldn't be in the ground."

So, not her.

Over the course of the next hour and a half, we meet four young men.

"I shouldn't have let him go back," she says.

Well, that means, in the context of this story, the military. One person isn't involved at all, so he's safe.

Two are active duty, one is inactive but former military who would go back, under certain conditions. So we have three to choose from.

At the end, we find out whose grave it is, and how and why they died.

It's not a mystery story.

But I still think it's important that we know up front, "Somebody's going to die."

That's the kind of world in which this story exists.

To do a play about the military and pretend nobody dies is cheating.

I did that in earlier drafts.

Of course, in earlier drafts, we were in "peacetime."

It's important to know the stakes.

You will get to know these people. Hopefully you will grow to care about them.

And you are going to lose one of them.

I suppose I could just bring the graveyard and death in at the end.

But that feels like a sucker punch.

"Ha! Gotcha! Didn't think I was going to kill one, did you?"

Maybe you forget it's coming. Maybe you stop seeing the grave marker on the side of the stage. Maybe that's good. But I think it should still be there.

Hanging over everything these people say and do is the fact that some of these words will be the last thing these people say to each other. Some of these things will be the last thing they do for each other.

Suspense. A foreboding. A sense of dread. I don't know.

If the play gets longer, the real trick is to make the audience care enough that they want to come back from intermission, even though they know one of these characters won't last the night.

Because it's easy to put aside the paper, click to another site, turn down the radio, change the channel on the TV, and avoid dealing with it.

We're still at war. In two countries. And soldiers and civilians on both sides are dying every day.

Most of the time, you'd never know it.

And there's something wrong with that.

Of course there's romance and comedy and sex and conflict. In fact, that's most of the play. It's not all one big downer. Death's just one part of it. But it is part of it. It's a mix of things, like life.

Trying to figure out how to keep the mix balanced, while the script grows and changes. That's the tricky part.

I think it still starts and ends with the grave. Now, where does it go in between?