ABSTRACT
Why is it that in plays we are drawn to, whether it be Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly, Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, or Jez Butterworth’s The Ferrymen, a “secret” is often the hidden or invisible engine of the play? Perhaps as a playwright you have been writing a play when a primary character suddenly loses its forward momentum. Your play feels painfully obvious or transparent and you don’t know where to take the play next and you sense the dreaded “writer’s block” taking over?
