Innovative and intense with emotion, the drama of Joyce Carol Oates is as unique as her unmistakable voice, which can be clearly heard in each work's dialogue, soliloquy, or chorus. These plays, written to be performed, make for exciting, provocative contemporary theater and are a brilliant testament to the genius of this enormously gifted artist. Writing for the stage when one has written primarily for publication, to be read, is an extremely challenging task, though it's difficult to say why. Yet, as the fiction writer begins the task of writing drama, he or she discovers that the techniques of prose fiction simply do not apply to the stage. In a memory play, the central character may speak to the audience as a narrator, but only to introduce the action in which, then, he or she will participate.
Description simply is.
Many a gifted prose writer has failed at writing plays for lack of, not talent exactly, but an elusive quality that might just be humility. In itself, humility won't make a fiction writer or a poet into a playwright, but it is a helpful starting place. Drama, unlike prose fiction, is not an interior esthetic phenomenon. When tension is resolved, it must be in purely emotional terms. Drama remains our highest communal celebration of the mystery of being, and of our being together, in relationships we struggle to define, and which define us.