Q&A: On Characters that Bleed

Dana Lynn Formby is back to shine a light on grief, structure and the onstage manifestation

CD: Dana, I am thrilled to welcome you back to teaching at Chicago Dramatists!  What have you been doing, and how has it informed your approach to teaching?

Dana: I have been grieving, honestly. Both my mother and father passed away within a month of each other, and I just adored them. They were my heroes, my reason for writing, and it has been tough readjusting. Grief pulled me inward, as I am sure it does for many, so I started writing prose and have had an absolute blast. My short story Orion’s Belt was published in the Saturday Evening Post. It came in fourth in their Great American Fiction Contest.

CD:  Congratulations!  It’s a haunting and beautiful story.  In it, you continue your investigation into the lives of blue-collar people. I think they remain underrepresented in American storytelling. Am I just unaware of a vast body of work? Or is there a failure of representation? 

Dana: I think a good number of early and midlevel career playwrights, no matter the themes they write, all fight to be heard. There are only so many venues and so many slots, and we compete against a lot of dead guys. My writing, be it in Orion’s Belt, where two young girls discover the finality of death at too young an age; or my play American Beauty Shop, which shows the collapse of the American Dream; or my current novel, Just Another Trailer Park Fairy Tale, in which a young girl discovers the horror created by unchecked wealth and power, tells the struggle of people who live on the short end of Capitalism’s stick.

CD:  I think of you as the Queen of Structure and just brilliant as using structure to diagnose dead air in plays.  But the class you are teaching this quarter is all about Character and your students are going to build a full-length play outline by starting with the character.  How do you meld structure and character?

Dana: Aristotle explains how character is at the center of plot through the concepts of peripeteia and hamartia. Peripeteia is the reversal a character goes through. Some would call it change. I call it a perception shift. Hamartia is the flaw we often hear about in character development. Often, the flaw leads to the perception shift. With that context in mind, it is impossible not to meld structure and character together.

Also, for me, the craft of playwriting is rooted in my love of acting. Stanislavski, the early 1900s Russian acting theorist and practitioner, blew my mind wide open when I first read An Actor Prepares. The book is written as a student’s diary of an acting class. One moment in particular has stayed with me ever since. The teacher tells the students that they have a light on their heads, and wherever they put their focus is what the audience will see. Many students light the audience, and the actors cannot be seen. But one successful student lights their scene partner, because that is where their focus should be. That image of a student with a light on their head is something I use to ground myself in the world of my characters. It keeps me from shining exposition on the audience and leaving my characters bored, onstage, and in the dark.

CD: One of the features of your class is that students will have a reading of their work by professional actors.  What's the value of that?  

Dana: Plays are meant to be heard, not read. They should not exist solely on the page. Actors are trained to read plays and can pick up on subtext that novice readers often miss. Many times, the conflict of a play only becomes clear through performance. Giving playwrights actors to work with allows them to see whether the three-dimensional aspects of their text are coming through. It helps them understand what is landing and what is not.

CD: You mentioned how deeply the loss of your parents has affected you.  And I know that your mother also had a profound effect on your teaching.  What did you learn from her?

Dana: When I began teaching my mother, a janitor at a nursing home, writing concepts from my MFA writing program, she showed me that stories belong to everyone and that writing isn’t about credentials, it’s about connection. She had a particular insight into the concept of Onstage Manifestation, or OSM, which is key to how I understand sculpting a moment on stage. An OSM is an object that represents an intangible idea or something off stage— more about this “off stage” use later. The OSM can be traded between characters, which gives a play movement and allows characters to transform.

With all that in mind, my mother and I were watching the movie Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze over Christmas break during my first year of graduate school. It is one of our favorite films, so of course, we both have it memorized. The first time Patrick Swayze says “ditto” in response to “I love you,' my mother yelled, “That’s an OSM. It means love.” I told her, “Sort of, but it’s not an object.” She argued back, “Yes, it is, because it changes hands when she says ‘ditto,’ which is what he usually says to her, ‘I love you,’ the saying changes hands. Plus, when he says ‘I love you,’ it’s his perception shift. He never said ‘I love you’ before." She went on to say, “All OSM is a metaphor for big feelings exchanged between characters.” She was right. That is how I learned OSMs can be words. And that is how I learned to listen to my students, as they are the best teachers.

Now, about that “something off stage.” I was teaching a class at Chicago Dramatists, and one of my students mentioned how they had started tracking off-stage manifestations. I asked what that meant. He explained it referred to ideas that are spoken about but never come on stage. In that moment, I realized OSMs were even more powerful than I thought. For instance, in Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet holds a rose in her hand and talks about Romeo’s name, he is off stage. Shakespeare uses the rose as an OSM to bring Romeo onto the stage through metaphor. This became an incredibly valuable tool for me as a writer. If there is something off stage in my writing, I ask myself how to bring it onstage in the form of an object (sorry Mom, sometimes words are not enough, but in the case of Ghost, you were correct) so it can easily be traded between characters.