Grace & Peace!
I’ve been working on a play for a few weeks now, which I intend to be an exploration of sexuality from a moral perspective. I’ve written a few scenes with some vulgar words, mainly to emphasize how college kids talk, but I plan on having scenes later in the play that illuminate those language choices as poor.
Should I stop this?
I think your chief concern should be this: a character’s speech should be consonant with who they are as a character, not in any typological way (i.e., “bad” guy=“bad” speech), but in an authentic way that relates to the various aspects of their personality, their environment, etc. and to how they have learned to use language to get what they want. I was once in a literary office and had to read a play in which a group of high school bullies, mustering up as much bile and hatred as they could manage in order to think of the worst insult they could hurl at their victim, wound up yelling: “titwillow.” It was precious and absurd and funny for all of the wrong reasons. The sort of prudishness which leads to that kind of absurdity is the enemy of authenticity when it comes to depicting or expressing the world as it is.
Considerations of your audience have limited uses. I can only think of two: 1) to better enable you to ingratiate yourself to an audience by meeting their expectations; 2) to better enable you to challenge an audience by subverting or upending their expectations. For me, if I found I could not challenge my audience, I would question whether or not ingratiating myself to it would be in any way worthwhile for anyone involved.
(In general, though, I think it better not to speak too much [or too loosely] of
an audience, as if the individual characteristics of the people watching the play are elided by or subsumed into one thing that can be coherently or definitively labelled, defined, etc. Read Howard Barker on this in his book: “Arguments for a Theatre.” His distinction between the Humanist Theater and his own Theater of Catastrophe in this regard is provocative:
thewrestlingschool.co.uk/catastrophe.html.)
While I understand that you might feel very strongly about strong language, I have yet to come across anything in a play that attempts to illuminate why “those language choices” are poor (or anything analogous) that did not sound like a tortured public service announcement or that was not representative of a forced moralism. For me, that sort of thing winds up proving that the play was more about making a point than about people, and I would prefer to read a well-written polemical essay than watch a (however well-meaning) polemical play.
There’s no need to apologize for your characters or for you to editorialize in any way in your play. What is more important: the integrity of your play, or the integrity of your message, whatever that might be? The site I linked to above has this wonderful quotation: “In this instance of theatre [the Theater of Catastrophe], the audience is relieved of the infantile burden of being brought to the author’s point of view - who cares about his point of view? - we ask him to be imaginative.” All you need to do is be imaginative. And keep writing!
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
