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For a playwright, words are the heart and soul of a character. My drama students are currently (hopefully) learning this as we delve into scene analysis before we even begin thinking about performance. The words are the key to all dramatic action – every impulse, every look, every gesture has to grow from an understanding of the playwright’s words. The actor serves to bring those words to life with full import and understanding.

So why in tarnation can’t modern playwrights offer us something not so liberally seasoned with salty language?

Last month I saw Neil LaBute’s play “In a Forest Dark and Deep” at the Vaudeville Theatre in London. It was a play worthy of merit for many reasons: a perfect example of Aristotle’s principles of unity of time and place, a well-crafted exploration of a dynamic relationship, a play with characters and subject matter that would entice people to the theatre who might not normally think they like theatre. Two fine actors that most people recognize from their television work – Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams -- were yet another reason to like this play. It’s the kind of work I’d love to point out to my students as an example of what theatre should be, or recommend advanced high school students use for forensic competition or scene study…but I can’t.

My reluctance isn’t so much a reaction to the references to drugs and sex (the characters are adults, after all) as it is held in check by one simple distracting element: the language. Billy, the brother played by Fox, is limited to a vocabulary that uses 4-letter Anglo-Saxon crudities in every possible grammatical form. Betty’s language is only half as seasoned as her brother’s, but then her character is a professor of English.

In fact, it seems like so many modern playwrights and screenwriters have fallen into the vulgarity trap that it is becoming increasingly challenging as a person who loves words to find anyone who can still turn a phrase or craft a delectable sentence in a film or play with modern characters that does not involve cursing. Is this because playwrights are holding to the adage that ‘art imitates life’, and, if so, is this really what our modern life has been reduced to? Have expletives become so much more acceptable in social discourse than I remember from my teen years just two decades ago? I can wield a blue phrase with the best of them, but am still amazed to hear so many people younger than myself using such language with no hesitation about time or place or present company.

I’m no prude – I just think language should elevate our thoughts, especially language used in performance. What the playwright gives to the actor to craft a character should be richly layered with meaning and nuance. A four-letter epithet now and again should add zest and spice to a character, or give us a momentarily enhanced glimpse of that character’s world view, but should not be the main ingredient around which actors are forced to craft an entire performance.

Next: thoughts on what this means for educational theatre