Playwright in a Novel, Playwright in a Film

7 min readOct 10, 2022

This book I’m reading is not the first book to do this, but it is the latest and it is enough of a trend that, when it happened in this book, I may have said, out loud, “Oh no, not this again.”

It’s this thing where novelists and screenwriters put a playwright in their piece. In these works, the playwright always becomes super successful and gets famous and rich and, I have to assume, receives all the accolades the writer dreams of, but in theatre form. My sense is that they do this because they don’t want to write about a writer too close to themselves. If they’re a novelist, the protagonist can’t be a novelist, that’s too close — and a playwright, they imagine, is like a novelist but more social and glamourous. A screenwriter imagines that a playwright is like a screenwriter but artier and nobler.

I’ve read and seen a lot of works with playwrights in them and the plays are ALWAYS a triumph within the narrative. They always end up with a hit. They are always on Broadway or the West End or featured at the National Theatre in London. It is tremendously easy to become a hot famous playwright in a novel or a movie. It seems to be a particularly sexy fantasy for other writers.

But I know a lot of playwrights. I even know a lot of very successful playwrights and I’m quite certain that while their lives are full and interesting, they are never nearly as glamorous as these other forms make them sound. Their paths to success are never simple. There is no overnight success for a playwright. It just doesn’t work like that. And there’s something so wild about the fantasy that it does. It doesn’t work like that for other writers, either, I’d imagine. You don’t just meet the right person at a party and instantly end up on the New York Times bestseller list. You don’t write your first film in a drunken stupor that weeks later is featured on screens across America.

But this story line is so common now, this one of a playwright catapulted to success, that it has started to feel like a trope. The trope within this trope that I often see recurring is the playwright revealing important things about himself and his personality through his work. We see scenes in his life repeated onstage, sometimes word for word. (I’m saying he and his because it is almost always a male playwright who is the subject of this work.) The novel or film includes whole swaths of the playwright’s plays so we can learn more about him. Or maybe so we can understand the Freudian echoes or Jungian archetypes operating beneath. Those “plays” almost always suck and they are almost always enormous hits in the story. Do bad plays become hits in real life? Yes. All the time. I’d even say most of the time when I’m feeling cynical. But these plays are not SUPPOSED to be bad in the book or movie. They’re supposed to be genius. And aside from being bad, they just don’t function well as plays. Like, they’re not theatrical or dramatic. Maybe every writer thinks they can write a play? I don’t know — but nothing makes me want to throw a book across the room like a novelist’s epic “brilliant” play in the middle of the story.

The book that made me think about this is Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. It is beautifully written and artfully constructed except for the theatre stuff. It’s an interesting mix, though, because some of it is spot on, theatrically speaking. She has the atmosphere of the field and the vibes of the location down. She has spent some time in theatres. She probably has some actor friends. But there are these moments where the story moves so dramatically away from the possible. The actor who gets drunk and writes a brilliant play (that is secretly punched up by his wife) and that play becomes an instant sensation and then another and another until they’ve got a country house in Connecticut or somewhere. It’s like this novelist knows what actors are like at a party but not how the economics of playwriting actually work in this era.

I was rolling my eyes at this instant success of this instant playwright (no development necessary for this wunderkind!) and then (slight spoiler) in the second half of the book, we learn that the instant hit was manipulated into position by the wife. She blackmails someone into asking and paying for a production at Playwrights Horizons and when no one comes to that production that she bribed into existence, she calls all their friends. But even this is improbable. Are theatres impervious to being bought? Nope. If someone offered them enough money, I have little doubt that arrangements might be made. But how would a criminal from Philadelphia know which theatre to put pressure on? How would he know who to throw his cash at? I feel like you’d at least need to know a TINY bit about the theatre business before you bought your way into it.

Also — I’ve tried to get all my friends to come out for things in New York City and that this wife could fill up an off-Broadway house on such short notice, with their friends, feels like some magical thinking. I think the author thinks this means the wife character cheated her way into helping her husband succeed — but having the skill to browbeat all your friends to come out for a show one night is probably actually what one needs to succeed. If you can get a couple hundred friends to come out and support you, you’re probably 75% there, as far as a theatre career is concerned.

So this little revelation certainly helps mediate the question raised by the sudden random success of the playwright earlier in the book — but it doesn’t explain how this sudden success turned into a celebrity style career. Even the most famous contemporary playwrights still struggle to have their work produced and very few of them are treated the way the one in this book is. I can’t think of one. (Not a living one, anyway.)

I am starting to find this trope very transparent. Every time I encounter a playwright in a work in another genre, I feel like I understand how they ended up there and why the author chose that particular profession for their protagonist. Maybe I’m hoping that the next person who wants to write a playwright will consider what tropes they’re falling into and either learn a lot more about the theatre world or choose a different profession for their protagonist. I do not blame this author (Lauren Groff) at all. The transposition of one kind of writer to another is very logical but it raised a lot of questions for me.

Is this book the story of this author’s life? I would never assume so — but then, the way she writes the playwright’s life as such a direct reflection of his life makes me think it must be. I actually think playwrights are less inclined than other writers to write autobiographically but you’d never know it from the way they’re depicted in fiction.

It’s like, it must be so nice to be a fictional playwright in a novel or a film! You never have to struggle with producers over your rights. You never have to talk to a theatre’s administrators about where they’re going to get the incentive money to put up your play. You never have to fight with directors over the way the show is going. You never have to cry in the greenroom about how the actors fundamentally misunderstood those lines. You just go to fancy parties, have fun artistic friends and drink nothing but champagne after shows! It’s a dream! Who wouldn’t want to be a playwright?!