Exposition

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > STRUCTURE > SHAPE > DIAGRAM > PT. OF ATTACK > EXPOSITION >

'I miss the city, but I don't need it anymore. By a certain age you're writing what you already know, and wherever you live, you take it with you.'

-- Arthur Miller

Exposition is giving us information about the past -- about what happened before your Point of Attack. Since the Point of Attack in most contemporary plays comes very late in the game, there's a premium on weaving in enough information about what's happened before that so we can get our bearings.

Exposition is like awful medicine -- we need it, but nobody wants to know it's going down. So you need to do this without our realizing what you're up to.

In the good old days, you could just send the maid out with her feather duster and have her chatter on about all the terrible, mysterious, scandalous, wonderful things that have befallen the family during the last 50 years. And for a change of pace, you could shove the butler out instead. This doesn't cut it anymore.

The Exposition Rule: Just give us what we need to know, when we need to know it. Playwrights knew about Just-in-Time management long before the Japanese figured it out. And it works as well for plays as Mitsubishis.

But if you're dead set on delivering the first installment in one dose, there's always . . .

The Narrator

Fortunately, Exposition is something else about structure that you don't have to think about much . . . If your central characters have a shared past. And if you've controlled the amount of Subtext you allow into the dialogue. Then Exposition will usually flow off your characters' tongues seemingly on its own. And we won't mind.

Now, the exception to that Exposition Rule . . .

Harold Pinter rose to fame and fortune by taking the daring step of removing nearly all traces of Exposition in his early and great full-lengths: THE BIRTHDAY PARTY and THE CARETAKER. Your average audience doesn't necessarily get off on this sort of thing, so don't pounce on it as a solution.

When you do this, you leave your audience in the same annoying [to them] situation as an Open Ending does. Without Exposition, we have no way of knowing if any of the characters should attract our sympathies.

When you have no idea if the sweet piano player hiding at that boarding house is being hounded by two guys from the mob because he saw something he shouldn't have, or by two guys from the FBI because he burns down orphanages, you've got no way to get your bearings. Or to be crass about it, you don't know who to cheer for. You can't tell the players without Exposition.

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