Would you be happy to have the phrase “contrivance alert” dotting a review of your play? If that doesn’t bother you, how about “the script is stuffed with academic and psychiatric jargon”? Or “the characters often seem to be mere receptacles for the ideas they espouse rather than fully fleshed-out people”? These and other comments grace a review in The New York Times (2/12/16) of the play “Smart People.”
Aren’t we suppose to write plays that SHOW people struggling not TELL their struggles? I need to consider this review each time I sit at the computer to write a play, or what I write could become “a marathon series of seminars, not a persuasively drawn drama.”
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