Like the famous Chekhov’s Gun, a playwright needs to resolve the most important dramatic questions posed during the play effectively.Īs your tension mounts and the audience engages with the action of your play, specific questions might arise in their mind that ramp up their engagement.
So in the end, you should avoid the same mistake they made when writing your play’s ending. Needless to say, the viewing public was far from impressed, as this reversal lost more viewers than their increasingly unsolvable plot complications. When the scriptwriters of the once breakout soap opera faced a plot that had sidewinded itself, they pulled a Deus ex machina.īobby Ewing emerged from the dead to the shower scene sequence where Pam had dreamed all the months of preceding action. Okay, if you are not 80 years old, let me explain. Making your ending credible is essential in creating an authentic audience experience. It often defies audience suspension of disbelief if your ending is not drawn directly and logically from the preceding plot, such as introducing a new character, device, or event to tie up loose ends. It comes from Ancient Greek and Roman theater, where an actor playing God descended from a “machine” to the stage and rescued the actors/characters from their inevitable plight. A novice playwright may face too many plot complications and interwoven narrative threads and decide to throw up their hands and create a cheat ending.ĭeus ex Machina is a plot device where a playwright pulls “god out of the machine” and solves a seemingly unsolvable problem by an unlikely and unexpected occurrence. The secret behind poorly received and quickly forgotten plays is playwrights who fail to deliver a satisfying ending. It just needs to be an ending consistent with the elements of the preceding action.Ĥ.
This resolution doesn’t mean that the ending needs to be happy. This believability will address all the questions created by the storyline and resolve them to satisfy the audience’s expectations. The spectator holds off judgment, sees beyond the staged performance’s artifice, and engages in the drama as it unfolds.Īn ending must be plausible and in keeping with all the preceding actions. Ultimately, suspension of disbelief in a theater is a trade-off between the audience and the playwright. Writing a killer ending to your play can tie up all the careful weaving of the dramatic narrative and deliver a sense of deep satisfaction to your audience. Create a Plausible Conclusion to the Dramatic Build Up Crisis and climax often form the apex of the dramatic narrative, which then slides into falling action and the inevitable denouement. Your protagonist should face increasingly difficult obstacles until they are faced head to head with their inner obstacles in one final stand. Set Up a Clear Course of Cause and EffectĪ great ending to a play is a sum of its parts and should follow a cause and effect structure, as each moment and scene creates a satisfying conclusion through a process of escalating tension. It doesn’t need to be a happy conclusion, but your audience should infer much of your closing from the believability of the preceding events. When you find yourself using characters’ dialogue to explain the closing elements of your play, chances are you need to look back into the earlier stages of your play to rectify the situation.Ī successful ending should feel inevitable if you have built your scenes towards a purposeful outcome. Let your closing themes convey themselves by events and actions, while not relying on dialogue as a dumping ground for closing revelations. Try to write the scene so that the audience can figure out their answers on their own. The ending should answer the questions raised in the story, but you should achieve this by showing rather than telling.
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