Day #6 and a half: “Playwright” vs. “Playwrite”.

Playwright. “play”, from the Saxon “plega“, meaning “recreation”; and “wright,” from the Old English “wryhta“, meaning “worker.”  First recorded use of word: 1687.

I have always been one of those people who compulsively corrects others when they misuse or mispronounce a word.  I am a ruthless proofreader and grammar snob.  Anyone who has ever made the mistake of asking me to edit a paper for them can verify that this is true.  It’s not just because I am ridiculously picky, it’s also just because I love words and find them really interesting.  And that’s part of why the word “playwright” fascinates me.

Lots of people think it’s “playwrite.”  That seems to make sense.  “Play” is the thing.  “Write” is what you do.  Logical.  Because the verb is “playwriting.”  So you might think, oh, the noun form should be “playwriter.”  Like, if you’re in the act of dog-catching, you’re a dogcatcher.  If you’re in the act of shipbuilding, you’re a shipbuilder.  So if you’re in the act of playwriting, you should be a playwriter.  Right?  Like screenwriters.

WRONG.

Here are the other words in the English language that end in “wright”:

wheelwright: one who builds and repairs wheels (a vital job in the agricultural communities of the Middle Ages)

millwright: one who builds and mends mills and performs other highly-skilled agricultural carpentry work

shipwright: one who builds and mends ships, from wooden frames to sails and rigging

wainwright: one who builds and mends wagons (and also, if I remember correctly, barrels)

What do these all have in common?  Besides backbreaking manual labor you couldn’t pay me enough to do for a living in the 1600′s?  Originally these all referred to the guilds of craftsmen and artisans – the Shipwright’s Guild, the Wainwright’s Guild, etc.  They were acknowledged to be specialists in their trade who provided a vital service to society.  During medieval times, sacred pageants depicting stories from Scripture were used as teaching tools for the mostly-illiterate public; wagons with scenes of well-known Bible stories would roll through town, kind of like floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade if each float stopped in front of you to present a short play teaching you a moral lesson.  (And with fewer of these, more’s the pity.)  But the principle is the same.  Anyway, the medieval guilds helped produce these pageants, so the Shipwright’s Guild might be in charge of the wagon where the story’s going to be, like, Jesus and the apostles out on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus calms the storm.  Because you’d expect the Shipwright’s Guild to be better than anyone else at building something that was supposed to look like a ship.  But does it follow that the dudes from the Shipwright’s Guild are necessarily the best at writing about ships?  Not so much.  So they decided that there should be a Playwright’s Guild too.

I like this for several reasons.

#1) It’s an acknowledgment that writing plays is toil and labor.  Is it harder than all other forms of writing?  I don’t necessarily think so.  I think my friend Tommy the poet should be called a poemwright.  But that’s not a word.  But it recognizes that there’s as much wright-ing as writing in the craft – wrestling with an idea, sitting in front of your computer or typewriter for hours until you feel like your forehead is sweating blood.  Writing is hard.

#2) Writers aren’t just artists, we’re also craftsmen.  When I sat down to start writing this play, I had about a handful of what I felt were truly brilliant lines/moments/ideas.  If you’re an artist, you know what I’m talking about.  The stuff that pops into your head fully-formed, out of nowhere, and is like effing brilliant by any objective measure.  Some people call that “inspiration” or “the muse” (although please don’t ever say that in my presence because I think it’s incredibly douchey). I’m Catholic so I call it the Holy Spirit.  But whatever you call it.  We all have those little gems of brilliance.  The problem?  You still have to write a whole f***ing play. That’s the craftsman part.  There are little bits and pieces sprinkled throughout this play that I know are really good because I didn’t think of them.  I mean, I didn’t work at them.  They just dropped into my lap from God.  But my job is to turn those things into a story, and wrap characters around them, and that part is where the “wright” comes in.  The building, training, skills.  The practice of a trade.  You can draw a picture of a really pretty ship, but if you can’t build it and sail it to sea without it sinking ten feet out of port, you are not a shipwright.

#3) If I may just wax political for one brief moment . . . we live in a world where there’s a wide perception that “theatre people” and “blue-collar people” cannot ever be the same people, that a Venn diagram of artists and, say, guys who build mills, cannot possibly overlap.  In this red state vs. blue state nation we live in, of “Joe the Plumber” and “Real America” and “the East Coast liberal elite” and all that crap, we’ve lost sight of this one crucial fact: that theatre used to be a place where people came together.  In Ancient Greece, plays were part of free public festivals.  In Shakespeare’s time, plays were highbrow enough to be performed for royalty and lowbrow enough that audience members ate standing up and then threw their food garbage down on the ground, and plays were often preceded by, like, firebreathers and dancing bears.  When did Shakespeare start being snobby?  Do people who say that have any idea how much of it is innuendo and fart jokes?  In Portland, where people wear jeans to the opera, that line is blessedly more blurred than in other places; but it’s hard to escape the fact that we live in a country that’s divided on ideological lines, that there will always be people who think defense spending is a better use of money than bringing back the NEA’s individual artist grant and fellowship program, that movies and TV are egalitarian and accessible but plays apparently aren’t.  And when that stuff starts to get me down, I like to remind myself that the word “playwright” came from a time when artists and skilled laborers were once all part of the same team, when it wasn’t unusual for a bunch of burly medieval wheel-menders to get together and say, “Let’s put on a show!”

Says Aston Parkhurst in his fabulous article “Understanding the Meaning of the Word ‘Playwright’: A Proud Title”:

The word “wright” means one who builds. Used as a suffix, it indicates what someone builds. The word “playwright” has a different root from the word “screenwriter.” It recalls an earlier time when playwrights were not just people who put words on the page, but skilled artisans on whom the other guilds relied. The word “playwright,” it is plain to see, is not the writer of plays, but rather the builder of plays. Drama is not transient – it is not merely words on the paper. It is, at its highest, a construction. It is words placed together to build a chapel – a monument that stands for generations to come. The word “playwright” is a proud title. To call oneself a playwright is to be a builder of plays, and to understand the meaning of the word is to understand the power and responsibility that comes with it.

Hell yeah I’m a playwright.