The young playwrights in undergraduate advanced playwriting at the University of Southern California School of Theatre are beginning a discussion about the characters in Late: A Cowboy Song by Sarah Ruhl.

We have talked about the critical need to know one's characters. The more you know about the characters that you intend to include in the world of your play, the more organically the story will flow. Investigating your characters intensely will deepen your understanding of their desires, hopes, secrets, fears, and dreams, which will resonate in your writing, hopefully making it clearer and more powerful.

Our consideration of Ms. Ruhl's characters shall begin on the Cast of Character and production information pages. Immediately, Ms. Ruhl begins the characterizations of the three individuals populating her play -- Crick, Mary, and Red -- as she notes brief attributes of each on this page, including mention of the pace of their speech patterns. Dichotomies are at play that should pique one's interest whether you are an actor preparing for a role or a playwright observing the ways that another playwright builds her characters, the description of the place also hints at character: "a silhouette of a messy kitchen." Although we do not know, at this point, whose kitchen it is, we may wonder if its messiness illuminates something about the nature of its owner. That the playwright wants the messiness to own a hyper-realism also provokes curiosity about the ways that we should consider the characters given the nature of their physical world.

In the notes on production, Ruhl reveals a bit more about character: the colors of the kitchen, "Reds, blues, greens -- think of Rothko," which may illuminate something of its owner.vvShe also tells us that Crick is obsessed with modernism and Mary with open land. Since we know that Red is a cowboy, we can begin to deduce a connection between Mary as a lover of the open land and Red as a cowboy, one who naturally is a part of or desires to be a part of such a landscape. And all this before the play even begins.