My Playwriting Philosophy

The Power of Dialogue and the Stage

Laura J. Axelrod, Author and Playwright

I have often asked myself why I write plays, especially when the going has gotten hard. Make no mistake, playwriting itself is rarely an issue. It’s dealing with the business side of theater that has proven to be so difficult for me.

While creating this website, I realized that for 35 years I’ve been writing plays. That’s an exceptionally long time. The great part about playwriting is that I can do it in the privacy of my own home. I have not sent my plays out every year, but I have dreamt, considered, planned and wrote for all that time.

In the beginning, what attracted me to playwriting was the idea of having a shared emotional experience in a community. I liked the idea of an audience, of lessening the loneliness of life. For much of my childhood, I felt alone. To be honest, many times I liked being by myself. I could climb trees, dissolve myself in music and think of scenarios that would make me have feelings. Happy feelings, sad feelings, empowering emotions. I realized very early that an external element could help me process ideas and emotions that seemed overwhelming otherwise.

I don’t know if that a flaw in my character - using external elements to process internally. But in hindsight, I see the pattern.

My first attempt at Dramatic Writing was to write a movie. It was similar to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but the girl in the end gets taken away in a UFO. It was about 100 pages, as I recall. I had no idea how to format it. I think I had character name followed by semicolon. The internet wasn’t around at that time, though we did have a dot matrix printer and a kind of computer. I remember thinking that I could somehow film it, although I had no access to film equipment. I wanted someone from my school to do a film soundtrack, but she said it was too similar to Close Encounters, making it my first rejection. I didn’t save the draft.

About two years later, while still in high school, I auditioned for a performing arts school and I was accepted. The monologue was Martha from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In hindsight, it must've been strange for a 16-year old to play a 50-something drunk character, but the performing arts school went with it. I’m grateful they did because it was the start of my playwriting career.

Martha notwithstanding, I wanted to play characters who were like me. Back then, I didn’t know too many fictional characters who were like me. That explosion of kids entertainment would take place in the 1990s, when the Millennials came along. Entertainment and art didn’t seem to portray kids in a realistic light back then. It was as if drama and movies were created by men who had a messed-up idea of what girls and women were like. Or they wanted to dictate what I should be doing and thinking.

The other confidence builder was becoming part of a theater touring group where we played characters who were just like us, facing challenges that people our age faced. I had to audition to get in, and I was grateful to be included. We devised our own scenes, and the leader noted how I had a natural talent for creating conflict and being able to work with an audience’s emotions. I felt powerful, and for a girl in the 1980s who was often told to how to behave, this had an enormous impact on my direction in life.

Reasons for Playwriting

This is where the origin of processing emotions in a community setting. When I studied Dramatic Writing in college, it was my baseline. I didn’t know that I could go beyond that. Or even that there was something more. I mean, that couldn’t be it, right?

The next step, as a playwright, was consider the idea that my work could transport people into a different world. I suppose all work does that to some extent, but I wanted people to have experiences. Because I was naturally optimistic about humanity, I thought if they could see or experience injustice - even if it was just temporarily - then they would do something about it.

And that was a terrible flaw in my thinking. First off, I don’t know if people will do something about it. Look at the amount of injustice in the world, and it seems to get worse every day. I also had an experience in my personal life that left me grappling with that idea. Finally, my first play was about injustice and my experience was it was far easier for people to get mad at the playwright than at the injustice.

To be clear, highlighting injustice is a good thing. All writers take risk when deciding to go in that direction. On the other hand, having expectations of what an audience’s reaction will be doesn’t work. These days, I’m more inclined to be thoughtful in my approach to demonstrating injustice on a stage. Am I taking highlighting injustice, or am I somehow confirming the existing biases of the audience? Technology already highlights our reality. Through TikTok, Instagram, Blue Sky and X, people can see how others live. The audience has become the author in that way.

Documentary Theatre

These days, my desire to provide an audience with an experience outweighs the impulse to process emotions through drama. I want to bring experiences to an audience and give them enough room to figure out what they think or feel about it. My work tends to veer toward documentary theatre. Much like my film, “Becoming Colonel Cullmann,” I enjoy providing a snapshot of a place and time. Having lived in a variety of places at pivotal times, I want to bring those periods to life so audiences can have a deeper understanding of history and regions of the United States.

For 35 years, I’ve been writing, taking notes and documenting my life and what I’ve seen. I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of pages. I’ve kept newspaper articles and ephemera from each period and place. This has been a lifelong effort, and it’s one that I haven’t written about previously for a variety of reasons. As I grow older, the authority I speak comes from my observations and experience. I’m not the only person who witnessed history. I am just one writer. I prefer to see myself as having one piece of a large puzzle. I look forward to sharing that piece with you.