About Playwriting (A Lecture)

“If you look
under your hood,
you will see that
in the middle of
the intricate landscape
that we call
the human brain,
there lives…
a little seahorse.”

This book is part of Nico Boon’s doctoral thesis at the Associated Faculty of the Arts (KU Leuven/LUCA School of Arts). His research started out as an investigation into the legacy of the well-made play, but soon morphed into a more paradoxical, ambiguous, and tentative inquiry. In About Playwriting (A Lecture), Boon approaches playwriting as a practice of continuous improvisation, in which chance, rhythmic intuitions, auditory awareness, bodily impulses, shapeshifting, and experimenting are more important than fixed narrative structures, or clear meanings, or distinct boundaries. He views playwriting as a transgressive enterprise that always refuses to choose a definitive form. This is Book 1 in a series of works about playwriting.

“The thing is:
a clock is not time,
a map is not a landscape,
a mirror is not an eye.
And a plot is not a play.”