A Theory of Drama

Once upon a time I was called upon to teach storytelling.

Watteau, Actors of the Comédie-Française, between 1711–1718, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (source)

One of the courses I was asked to teach at the New Hampshire Institute of Art was Storytelling. It was a case of the old joke, What do you need to know to teach a dog a trick? More than the dog. I was no authority. But I felt confident that nineteen-year-old art students would not gainsay my thoughts about it.

Coincidentally, for the first time, I was having such thoughts. This was around when Warner Brothers put out Wonder Woman in 2017. I remember walking by a boy of perhaps seven on the way out of the theater. I overheard him say to his mother, “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life.” His mother began to lecture him, but I wanted to give him a high-five for his independence of judgment. I had seen worse, but I was older.

Critics described Wonder Woman as having third-act problems. That was true, but the problems were downstream from a bigger one: the writers didn’t follow through with the character they had created in the first act. Perhaps unwittingly, they established Diana, the titular character played with aplomb by the mouthwatering Gal Gadot, as a religious conservative. She defies her mother so that she can better serve the will of her heavenly father, namely Zeus. Her divine mission is to slay Ares. Ares, in disguise as Sir Patrick Morgan and played by David Thewlis, tells her that he never meant to bring war, but light. Kids, Lucifer literally means “light bringer.” I think that the writers got to the end of the second act—in which Diana’s glorious display of valor at Veld inspires the demoralized soldiers to proper action, and she rewards the best of them (Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor) with her goddess-y affections—before they realized that they had accidentally ended the story.¹

People criticized Thewlis for lacking credibility as a villain. But in revealing him as Ares in the midst of a third-act flail, the writers undercut the most viable source of conflict for a religious conservative, a realization that her faith was misplaced. The final battle had no stakes because its very premise validated the hero in advance. Furthermore, the setting for the movie was World War I. Obviously the execution of Ares was not going to end war. By the time Thewlis and Gadot came to blows, there was nothing for the audience to do except wait for the movie’s emesis of CGI to abate. Diana’s express realization, at the end of a film that would have been pretty good if it had rolled credits 45 minutes earlier, was somehow the importance of love, which didn’t make an iota of sense.

Mysteriously, Wonder Woman aroused my sense of plot. I had never cared about it before. And here I was being asked to teach it.

I was enthusiastic, but my first attempt at the class didn’t go well. I led it like a screenwriting workshop, using The Anatomy of Story as a text. That was overkill. Also it turned out that three-act dramatic structure is not straightforward to teach to a room in which many students aren’t writers. I needed to scale everything back.

The fix was to switch the text to Long Story Short, written by a prominent figure in The Moth scene. Students had to come up with a new short presentation in the Moth format every week. I had to come up with a theory of drama that I could explain to them. So I did. Franklin’s Four-Step Theory of Drama goes like so:

1. Status Quo. There is some kind of stasis in place that provides a frame of reference for further action. This is the “once upon a time” position of the story.

2. Upset. Some aspect of the status quo reveals itself in a manner that disrupts it. It is not enough that it is different. For the purpose of drama, the upset should be palpably unjust.

3. Impelled Action. The upset forces the hero to respond. For the purpose of drama there must be better and worse ways for the hero to answer the upset. For choosing anything but the best one, the hero is punished with more upset. This back-and-forth between Step 2 and Step 3 can continue as long as the story demands it.

4. New Status Quo. Finally the hero addresses the central injustice in the story, and it is resolved. But there must be something different about the state of the world relative to Step 1, otherwise there was no point to the journey. An important feature of the new state of the world is a revelation to the hero.

This is hardly the only way to do drama, but if you need to start somewhere, it is an effective and simple way of thinking about it.

My second attempt at teaching the class went much better. I was spared the heartbreak of grading writing assignments demanded from unwilling authors. Students had the opportunity to develop their oral presentation skills. A few of them turned out to be naturally hilarious in a way not known to them prior. We could diagram stories according to the above structure to analyze why they worked or not. One of the in-class projects was Let’s Fix Wonder Woman.²

Subsequently the institute’s enrollment cratered to the point that they had to give the class to another teacher. Then the whole operation kicked the bucket. I leave my knowledge about the matters here to be discovered by them who are meant to find it.

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Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book.

1. Feminists complained about that conclusion to the scene, but in fact it was the only somewhat Greek thing to happen in the whole movie.

2. One of the solutions played on the tension between Steve’s compromised pragmatism and Diana’s purity of purpose. It turns out that Ares of the 20th century can’t be killed in the manner of a sword battle on the Athenian plain, and Diana has to account for the complexity of the modern world at some sacrifice to her noble but simplistic ideals. Steve, inspired by Diana’s straightforwardness, throws himself into the immediate moral needs of the fight in front of him, but at the ultimate cost. Diana learns a hard lesson, not about love, but human mortality, to which she has hardly ever been exposed.