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Playwright John Guare tells Missoula audience dialogue is the playwright’s primary tool
Summary
At a University of Montana President’s Lecture Series event in Missoula, playwright John Guare argued that dialogue is the essential instrument for building a play’s dramatic world, illustrated with examples from Shakespeare, Chekhov, Harold Pinter and Guare’s own work. A question-and-answer period and book signing followed the lecture.
John Guare, the American playwright and council member of the Dramatists Guild, told an audience at the University of Montana in Missoula that “the main tool the playwright has is dialogue,” and that dialogue serves as the gateway to the play’s interior life.
Guare opened by placing the playwright’s task in musical terms: “When dialogue is working right, meaning when the play is cooking, it is music,” he said, arguing that dialogue supplies the clues actors, directors and designers use to build a theatrical world.
Guare used examples from theatre history to show how dialogue shapes dramatic meaning. He cited Shakespeare’s sensory metaphors, Harold Pinter’s…
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