WHEN PLOTS DON’T THICKEN

“Yes--oh, dear, yes--the novel tells a story,” wrote E. M. Forster in “Aspects of the Novel.” “Melody” or “perception of the truth” were qualities that Forster esteemed higher than plot, but any novel’s first job, alas, was to hook the reader into turning the page to see what came next.

It’s the same with plays. This might seem obvious, but one increasingly hears the argument that plot is a vestigial device that theater ought to hand over to movies and TV. Director Peter Sellars was saying it a a few weeks ago on this page. Plot was fine “in its place”--but it was a lowly place. Theater at its best offers visions, not diagrams of who-did-what-to-whom.

But think. Has there ever been a good play that didn’t take its characters on some sort of emotional journey, from this point to that? Doesn’t such movement constitute the plot of a play? And isn’t it important that it be a well-conceived one?

Take that famously static play, “Waiting for Godot.” “Nobody comes, nobody goes--it’s awful.” But, in fact, “Godot” is full of comings-and-goings, and makes its own journey. It doesn’t reveal who Godot is. But it does reveal the two tramps who are waiting for him, and the fact that they’ll be waiting again tomorrow.

That’s all that “plot” means in a play--how the characters fill time on their stage: what they say and do. It’s necessary that they do something because we can’t see into their heads, as we can when we’re reading a novel. If the novelist can offer private information about his characters and still feels the need to put them into motion, how much more so the playwright.

But that doesn’t mean that the play has to ride on cast-iron rails. Today’s audiences have heard so many stories that they are very quick to put two-and-two together. Indeed they rather enjoy having certain things left unexplained--another familiar experience in the real world.

Take Harold Pinter’s “Old Times.” What had the two women meant to each other before the younger one got married? That’s up to the viewer. But he has no doubt that the older woman has returned to lay claim to her. Will she or the husband prove the stronger combatant?

This fairly primitive question may not be what Pinter wants us to take away from “Old Times.” But the question is what keeps us in our seats, so that the rest of the play can work on us. And it’s not accidental to the play. “Old Times” is as much what’s happening between its three characters now as what happened (or didn’t happen) between them then. A good play is its story.

But the story these days can be very faint. “Blue Window” was the story of a party--a window through which we discovered seven lives. The story can be told backwards--”Merrily We Roll Along” shows its characters getting younger and nicer with each scene. The story can hop around, as did “Green Card,” a mosaic of the history of immigration. The story can take eight hours to tell, as with “Nicholas Nickleby.”

All that’s needed is a sense of movement, a sense of bringing the audience closer and closer to a moment when it can say: “I see.” Revelation is the goal. The plot is the route to the goal.

So the plot should be, yes, well-made. Not in the airtight sense of “All My Sons,” with everything either a cause or an effect--not if the playwright doesn’t see life that way. But well-made enough to take the audience on a coherent theatrical journey without lost time and blind alleys.

Some plays that I’ve seen recently have started out on promising journeys but failed to make it home. Keith Reddin’s “Highest Standard of Living” at South Coast Repertory begins as a heavily plotted tale. Plots are, indeed, its essence. The young hero (a wonderfully jumpy Jeffrey Combs) discovers that everybody in Moscow is out to get him--and, later, everybody back home in America as well.

But rather than mounting in ingenuity, as a Feydeau farce would (Feydeau’s plays also run on fear and paranoia), Reddin’s story falls short of invention in the second act. Rather than an infernal machine, his tale dwindles into a willy-nilly fantasy. The most most frightening aspect of paranoia, official or individual, is its logic. This nightmare was too easily explained away.

William Hauptman’s “Gillette” at the La Jolla Playhouse delivered very nicely at the final curtain--literally with a knockout punch. At that moment, both the viewer and the hero said: “I see.” (He saw that a man can’t afford to trust even his family. We saw how this miserable message gets processed into the male mystique.)

Along the way ‘Gillette” also delivered lots of laughs, as when Hauptman’s boom-town rats tried to out-swagger one another. But some scenes were simply too far-fetched--as when the hero and his uncle camped out in Salvation Army furniture on the Wyoming flats without providing a roof for themselves.

This did allow a laugh as they and their lady friends got swamped in a cloudburst. But it was a stupid laugh, as in one of those Burt Reynolds CB movies--which “Gillette” showed other signs of wanting to be. The finest tall tales get the details right.

Plot isn’t everything in theater, obviously. Vivid language, powerful imagery and sheer story-telling momentum can shore up an unlikely tale. Shakespeare often gets by with murder as does Sam Shepard. But lesser playwrights would do well to test their stories against real life, even when dealing with stylized material.

That’s not simply because audiences won’t buy scenes that are too divorced from what they know about human behavior. It’s also because real life is so much more unexpected and interesting than a playwright’s first imagination of a scene may be.

A good example is “13 Down,” a new play by Robert Schrock at the Cast Theatre. It concerns a public defender (Peter Lempert) assigned to defend a young accused rapist (Ken Roht). The rapist, a born manipulator, senses that the lawyer is homosexual, and proceeds to induce his life story, which also involves a rape. The results are unlucky for the prisoner.

One can imagination what a dark, insidious confrontation this would have been in thehands of, say, Genet. Playwright Schrock doesn’t claim that kind of nightmare power. He presents his play as a real-life situation, which, however, he hasn’t sufficiently imagined it in real-life terms.

The viewer wonders where the guard is during all this noisy confrontation; why this lawyer has so much time to devote to this one client; why the lawyer is so easily deflected from finding the youth’s story; why he’s so quick to tell his own story; why the youth doesn’t see that it’s to his self-interest to play up to his defender, not to break him down. One asks the same questions one would ask if one were actually sitting in on their interview.

These questions don’t disqualify the situation as having the makings of the play. In fact their answers could add complexity and interest to the play. The guard could be a subtle representation of the authoritarian father that the rapist talks about. The pressure of the lawyer’s other cases could explain why he’s such an easy victim to the prisoner’s seductiveness. The seductiveness could be seen as the youth’s tragic flaw.

Coincidentally, that very day, a caller on a talk show had mentioned that smart prisoners try to find an excuse not to use a public defender, figuring that a private attorney (hired at state expense) will represent them better. Whether or not that’s true, the notion that the attorney, too, was on trial here, would have added texture to the scene.

Besides adding texture to the story, all this would have given the actors something more to play. Actors are all that the playwright has to make his case. Unless they’re given something real to do (not just strike attitudes), the play is going to seem hollow and fake. If, in the old phrase, “passion spins the plot,” the plot also spins the passions, and playwrights can’t afford to get cavalier about it. Oh, dear, yes--plays tell a story. Badly or well.