Point of View

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > CONTENT > CHARACTERS > PT. OF VIEW

'I didn't consciously decide I was going to write the play from the point of view of the women. But my mother was a feminist in her time, and she always made me feel that I was somebody. Japanese men were very chauvinistic, especially in those days, but women had a way of adapting things, of handling the men. That's one of the things I wanted to show . . ..'

-- Wakako Yamauchi

A play's Point of View is instantly determined at the moment you decide who your primary Character will be. It's through this Character that you'll be telling the story. And it's through this Character that your audience will be watching the story unfold. So that decision is critical.

You don't have to limit your Point of View to a single Character. If you have what's really a group of Characters as your primary interest, they'll collectively set your Point of View.

This is what Beth Henley did with the three sisters in CRIMES OF THE HEART.

And not incidentally what Chekhov did in THE THREE SISTERS.

These group-characters usually develop in plays where the writer is more interested in what happens to the group than in the outcome for one member of that group. Henley goes to the extreme with this in CRIMES . . .

She's daring enough to halt development of the Suspense Plot just short of a Climax -- and thus never resolves for us what will happen to the sister who tried to murder her husband.

We don't miss this Climax [much] because the Emotional Plot ends in a kind of Climax when the sisters as a group achieve what they've wanted in their relationship among themselves.

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