Keep it simple, stupid: The discovery of "mirror neurons" reveals a brain activity that gives playwrights a shorthand for stage communication. (Photo: iStockphoto/Isabel Mass, from Science Daily)

MICHAEL WELLER, author of The Ballad of Soapy Smith, which opened Friday evening at Cyrano’s, led an informal, free workshop for playwrights Friday afternoon in the café adjacent to the theatre.

Among the 15 or so attendees who sat around the table were writers whose works have been produced on stage and others starting out, but also a few actors who were interested in writing even if only for an engaging three hours.

I’ve attended similar workshops, for dramatic writing and also non-fiction prose. Michael Weller’s was one of the best and, as in other workshops that give writers something valuable to take home, he stressed the basics, which are always easy to forget, especially when you’re trying to tell a complex story.

Weller was simple and direct and effectively organized. His ample personal warmth and charm did not detract from his message.

Here’s the heart of what Weller had to say:

No matter what, make it a story, and tell that story in such a basic, simple, heart-to-heart way that a child – the child in all of us – can grasp the essentials.

That was Weller’s principal lesson, if not in those exact words. His child, for example, is not so much a child as an unsophisticated, plain-thinking man or woman who needs to understand everything that transpires on a stage by receiving clear signals, else he or she is lost or, worse, irritated.

This person – Weller calls him Herman, or Hermione if a woman – demands the obvious. Events on stage must be readily comprehensible, and at the right time. “Bargain with Herman,” Weller suggested. Raise questions and expectations, and then answer them—not necessarily immediately but at some correct point.

Herman is willing to wait if he senses the writer has honorably entered a pact with him to reveal the mysteries, to answer the questions: Don’t worry, Herman. I won’t let you down.

The playwright’s duty is to anticipate Herman’s questions: What is he thinking at what point in the drama? The audience must be able to track the story and its details, and the writer must know how that tracking is proceeding.

“Give them [the audience] what they want to know but not before they want to know it.” – that’s a key rule for the dramatist to know, Weller said. Know your inner Herman.

“Be stupid. Ask the stupid questions. Know what your work means on the ground,” he said. He quoted Brecht who apparently said something to the effect that the writer should never get lost in the overtones.

Other points that Weller raised:

*** Even in a documentary-type play, there must be an arc. The narrative must begin with a “normal situation” becoming abnormal or upended, which eventually leads to a resolution.

[James Liszka, dean of UAA’s College of Arts & Sciences and a professor of philosophy there, has written (in his The Semiotics of Myth) that every myth or story encompasses a departure from an unmarked (normal) state of being to a marked (disturbed) state, to some new unmarked state. Stasis > destabilization > stasis. The gunslinger comes to town, terrifying the people. The sheriff subdues him and restores the peace.]

*** An audience anticipates intention in a character, and Weller believes this may be due to what are called (after recent scientific discoveries) “mirror neurons.” These allow a person, through normal brain activity, to experience in the mind some part of a bodily action while watching another person engage in that action. Someone picks up a mug of coffee, skis down a trail, pets a dog, and we can "feel" the picking up, the skiing, the petting. The same neurons fire in the watcher as in the doer. If this is true, it makes it easy for an actor to communicate with the audience.

*** Weller’s advice to writers, especially those starting out: Adapt the form of a strong story.

There’s no rule that says one must invent a story not told before. There’s no shame in stealing the outlines of an existing tale. Weller himself has written a play adapted from a novel. The key, he said, is to find a story with a “strong tension down the middle.”

*** Any character who enters a scene should be full of intentions – to justify the entrance, among other reasons.

*** Don’t have passive characters. If someone in a scene is ignoring another character or is afraid to interact with another, it’s better if that person is doing something – anything – rather than nothing. If necessary, have him or her thread paperclips with a string, he suggested. Anything.

*** The words spoken by characters on a stage are a vocalized set of intentions. Aristotle, Weller recalled, said that the spoken words don’t matter. It’s the motion, the drive, the inexorable unfolding of the play.

*** Several times he referred to Synge's Riders to the Sea as a play that unfolds by stimulating questions in the viewer and then patiently answering those questions until the audience knows everything that must be known.