Places to Yell

You hear the ocean. You hear the lifeguard blowing a whistle. Maybe a gull. 
Full throated screaming 
Little girls in orange bikinis jumping up and down, little boys so skinny you can see their ribs sticking out, their shorts hanging down to their boney knees.
Kids screaming their heads off clutching their father’s hand.
Nobody shushes these kids. We watch them and we laugh. We are jealous. We want to shout with delight but adults don’t do that kind of thing. 
So we listen and laugh.
Laughing is the closest we get to screaming.

So where can we yell?
Under a bridge? Too easy. Also, too cinematic. That kind of yelling is strictly for show. 

Yelling during sex? In a positive way? That’s fun! 
Not what I’m going for.

What about yelling in a forest? 
There is a name for that in Hebrew. Reb Nachman taught it to us hundreds of years ago: Hitbodedut. This is what it’s called. When you go into the forest and yell at God or into God. Also called begging?
Also from Nachman: Go at night when the world is at rest. 
Why is this important? Because there are fewer voices reaching for God? Maybe?
It would be odd to see thousands of people in the forest at 2AM screaming for God’s attention, right?
Maybe not.

What about the page?
My characters care passionately for something or someone.
They rarely scream full throated. But I want my audience to know that these characters feel deeply. That’s a kind of yell, a desperate call for love or to love. Or to get what they want. In my plays, they need to want something badly enough for me to write about it.

Baking isn’t considered screaming.
Unless you’re adding poison to the batter.
Ah, see maybe anything can be turned into a scream. 

One of my students taught me that all poetry is about desire.
If that’s true, what is playwriting about?

Wanting. Characters who hunger for something.
Another form of desire.
And isn’t desire-- deep desire-- a kind of scream? A scream dressed up or stripped down as something in three acts. Or two.
And more often in my case one.