David Ball Play Summary

Author Background Information Originally from Stamford, Connecticut, David Ball serves as an award winning playwright and novelist. He has taught playwriting, directing, theatre history, and literature at Carnegie-Mellon, Lawrence, and Duke University, while also serving as the Artistic Director at the Pittsburg Metropolitan Stage Company. He has published several plays, with his two most known being Assassins! and an adaptation of Woyzeck. Ball also currently serves as a Jury and Litigation Strategy consultant for Malekpur and Ball Consulting. He has been coined as one of the nation’s top CLE speakers and trial consultants. His book Backwards and Forwards has been one of the best selling theatrical books for over 28 years.

Book’s Scope In less than one hundred pages, Ball provides his readers with an easily digestible, post-modern approach to understanding the basic elements of a script, using examples from Hamlet to make his technique more clear and understandable. His main focus circles around “action” and how it affects and shapes the entire plot structure of a play. Instead of giving you a strict set of rules to follow in order to successfully
Chapter one, “What Happens That Makes Something Else Happen?”, identifies plays as a series of actions, with each event followed by another. The second chapter, “What Happens Next?”, describes a play as a series of dominoes, where the first domino/trigger event causes the next domino/event to occur. Ball also emphasizes the importance of studying the play “domino to domino”, avoiding any misleading interpretations of the play. Chapter 3, “But Do It Backwards”, discusses the importance of studying the events in a play in reverse order. Ball states, “Going forwards allows unpredictable possibility, while going backwards exposes that which is required.” (Ball