“Decentered Playwriting is an attempt to both reach back to underrepresented story-creating techniques, as well as investigate new methods to writing works for the stage. This textbook is for playwriting and dramaturgy students at intermediate and advanced levels, for teachers of dramatic writing, and for established and emerging playwrights looking for new ways to explore and expand their craft. It offers practical advice, historical analysis, theoretical context, and writing exercises from an array of theatrical methods. Our contributors span 5 continents, curated from a diverse spectrum of artistic and academic perspectives, and unified by a craft-forward approach.
“…we’re not using the master's tools to dismantle the master’s house; we’re sharing different kinds of tools to build different kinds of houses.”
We offer Decentered Playwriting as a gentle primer to the infinite ways one can approach the craft of writing plays and teaching playwriting. It aims to amplify and diversify a conversation about what playwriting is by presenting suppressed and novel tools for all to use. The approach of this text does not focus on what plays should do, but on what they can do. This attention to various forms encourages intercultural and inter-methodological application, inviting playwrights to assess, re/define, and generate their own projects. To invoke Audre Lorde, we’re not using the master's tools to dismantle the master’s house; we’re sharing different kinds of tools to build different kinds of houses.
— Breaking, Examining, Reassembling:
An Introduction to Decentered Playwriting
(Dunn, Holmes, and Hunter)