Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212.

Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. 

Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage is a book that would have been helpful a century ago but could not have been written then; it would have prepared everyone for the winds of change that began then and continue today. This volume avoids prior emphases on form and structure and instead focuses on diverse methodologies and aesthetics. It provides hindsight into where playwriting has been and, more importantly, makes suggestions, even offering practical exercises as a guide to the current situation and the future of the craft. Every chapter in this landmark publication explores alternatives to Aristotelian structuralism, first articulated in Aristole’s Poetics (ca. 330 BCE). The essays have been carefully and logically selected to outline alternatives to a linear structure with its unities, singular plot line, and heroic characters. Sara Freeman’s 2023 publication Playwriting, Dramaturgy and Space begins the quest for a new direction. Decentered Playwriting takes that quest for new perspectives and presents them in full bloom. 

Philosophers have observed that space and time are the two constants in human experience, and playwrights have often structured their works according to time sequence (i.e., Hamlet occurs during nine months in his life). Decentered Playwriting begins with Sarah Johnson’s chapter “Playwrights as Architects of Third Space: The Dramaturgy of Japanese Traditional Performing Arts.” Johnson’s suggestion is to lay aside, for the time being, the narrative of time and explore the possibilities of space. With that declarative beginning, the following three chapters examine playwriting on “nothingness,” praxis, and hip-hop. Few playwriting guides of the past have availed themselves of philosophical foundations for dramaturgical analysis, but these chapters wrestle with the philosophical roots of Sartre, Kant, and Paul Butler, respectively. 

Decentering Playwriting takes another leap by advocating alternatives to the well-made play, the epic sagas of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett’s existential wanderings. There is, instead, a vigorous emphasis on giving a listening ear to the people, issues, and connections that form the web of a playwright’s immediate social and cultural life. The book outlines how theatre can and should focus on contemporary themes rather than myths, on the daily lives of people rather than heroes, on stories about supportive relationships instead of linear plot lines, and on valuing interconnectedness over stock characters. Characters that emerge from a variety of cultural contexts, including Indian, Hawaiian, Indigenous, African, Filipino, and others, are explored throughout the book.  

Decentered Playwriting has sixteen chapters that present a meaningful guide to fresh writing methods with pedagogical techniques that often focus on emotional memory of cultural expressions and the ingredients for attentive relationships. This guide emphasizes the connection each writer has with their own family, local identifiers, animal interactions, local rituals, and the interactions with the wider community. Instead of exploring the universal, this study challenges playwrights to fully examine the particular, beginning with the self in community. Faculty, students, and theatres seeking approaches that reflect contemporary social and artistic sensibilities will be interested in what this text explores.  

Each chapter forwards a unique voice for a new aesthetic and its cultural context. Essayists of Native American, African, Indian, Cuban, LGBTQ, and other identities are included. In addition, unique and constructive methods are also represented, such as the archeology of identity or the analyzing of human experience as one dimension of a community eco-system rather than the solitary hero or victim narrative.  

Chantal Bilodeau’s chapter titled “Decentering Humans” offers a challenge to seasoned and aspiring playwrights: “Every play should aspire to fundamentally change our relationships to the world and to each other, and to ‘dethrone’ the human species while emphasizing that despite growing uncertainty, safety and connection are still possible” (81). According to Bilodeau, plays can present how humans are entwined with all of creation where everything is dependent on others for their existence and well-being. This interconnectedness is vital in character development to shift each one past a stereotype or two-dimensional portrait.      

Each chapter provides an array of options for interpersonal analysis and collaborative methods for devising scripts for stage performances. This is especially true in Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James’s chapter, in which the community as author is valued above the individual talent. The process is presented as a shared venture instead of assuming that a play is the expression of the solitary voice who is bringing the latest tablets from a mountain peak to an eager audience. This new trend might be viewed as a modern variation on the playwriting processes at the Globe in London (see Gary Taylor, “Why Did Shakespeare Collaborate?,” Shakespeare Survey, vol. 67, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 1-17).   

This book picks the ripe fruit for an epic theatre that is not bound by traditional rules for the stage. Brecht’s alienation effect (verfremdungseffekt) once served as an alternative to the well-structured play, but the chapters in this volume move beyond Brecht. Authors here instead explore how characters have meaning not because they present the alienation dynamic but because they do the opposite: illustrate the social fabric of their relationships. Diane Clancy describes how the character’s identity “aligns with the fabric of your own being” (163). The emphasis in each chapter is on new concepts and methods that focus on liberation, personal integrity, and communal experience for devising new work.  

Although each chapter presents new and creative playwriting approaches, the careful reader will note that Wole Soyinka, Paula Vogel, María Irene Fornés, Augusto Boal, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, and C. C. Mehta have paved the way for the current climate where the voices of Decentered Playwriting’s authors will now be heard and absorbed. They also laid the groundwork for jettisoning colonial perspectives, moving away from Western styles, and incorporating marginalized communities. Every chapter deconstructs those previous norms and advocates a performative nature that emerges from those that previously had no voice.   

In summary, this contribution to the field of playwriting is a significant and practical development. If Decentering Playwriting had been available during my teaching years, I would have clung to it as a lifeboat that is headed to a new land.