Authorial Spokesperson

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'One theme I trace through all my work is this kind of fluidity of identity. In a lot of my plays, from FOB to M. BUTTERFLY, people become other people. It has a lot to do with the nature vs. nurture question. To what degree do you have an inherited identity, and to what degree is your personality shaped by the influences and environment around you? This question is intimately related to my own desire to know myself.

-- David Henry Hwang

Attention must be paid to such a man. So Linda tells her sons in DEATH OF A SALESMAN after Willy has veered dangerously close to being the jerk of all time. That's the function of an Authorial Spokesperson: telling us the theme if you think we'll miss it or come to the opposite conclusion. But remember that audiences are usually smarter on this score than playwrights think.

If your theme is complicated -- or not part of the currency of the nation's moral landscape -- and you wonder more than a few times while writing if the audience will really get it, you may need one of these folks. Authorial Spokespersons are usually drafted from . . .

The central character
The Narrator of the story
A significant secondary character

These Spokespersons don't need to speak directly to the audience. Linda does a fine job making Arthur Miller's theme clear to the audience by giving her sons hell. But sometimes even that is too oblique for the nature of the theme and direct address to us is the only way to be sure we'll get it.

Charles Fuller took this approach in A SOLDIER'S PLAY. The narrator and central character Davenport tells us in his final monologue to the audience that the conflict we've seen was a result of "the madness of race in America." And he tells us this so we won't go home thinking it was just a grand murder mystery.

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