"All the World's A Stage" or "What constitutes a 'play' "?

Perhaps the more pointed question is, "is a play a play as long as the dialouge is interesting, or must there be a well-designed conflict and significant action to qualify as a play"?

As a playwright, I'm constantly asking myself this question. Two people talking at the dinner table about whatever it is they find interesting at that particular moment - does that constitute a "play"? Is a "play" different than "theater"?

I believe the key component a play needs to have is conflict. That conflict needs resolution, whether it's black, white or gray. If you engage the audience and they leave thinking about what they just watched, that's also theater. If you have a producer with money or with connections to money, a director, a cast, stage crew and a venue...then you can put up whatever you want wherever you want and call it what you want. Make sense?

In the February 29, 2008 Hollywood Reporter, there was a review of Austrian playwright Peter Handke's show, "The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other", performing at the National Theater in London.

27 actors. NO dialouge.

(Wait! There's more...)

The Reporter said "for the most part the play holds attention, but it lacks dramatic cohesion...". Is this a play? Or theater? Maybe the lines of distinction are blurred, at times. Playwright, screenwriter and director John Patrick Shanley, who won the Academy Award for Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay for Moonstruck, and was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Drama Desk Award and Tony Award for Best Play for Doubt, said, "If you want interesting conversation host a dinner party, but don't write a play." Peter Brook, a British theater and film director who has won multiple Tony Awards, stated, "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged." Brooks also said, "...to do theatre there is only one thing one needs: the human element."

Tony and Oscar nominee David Mamet, who won the Pulitzer for Drama for the play, Glengarry Glen Ross, is known for his dialouge-driven plays and films. I enjoy his work very much. Some say his plays and films are all about the dialouge and therefore, the "conversation" is everything.

Others say of Mamet that to describe his plays as conversation with little action is misleading, as there is deep action in his plays - that his plays are masked by the conversation. Maybe it's just that all the success and accolades Shanley, Brook and Mamet have garnered means that whatever they write, it's considered "theater".

Chime in if you have an opinion, you theater folk, you. Or I'll just sit here and whistle to myself - and call it "a play".