Playwriting the Pressure: How Atmosphere Shapes Dramatic Action
On barometric shifts, emotional weather, and the truth between the lines
Your wife is giving you the silent treatment. For reasons you suspect but can’t—or won’t—name.
Your kid storms through the room in a fury. No words. Just heat.
The dog won’t stop watching you. Something’s off.
You’re having a hot flash. There’s something stuck in your right foot, and your left shoe, almost mockingly, is untied again. A fly is circling the room. The husband is hungry. So is the dog. You’ve planned nothing for lunch, and the kitchen is a disaster.
And I’ll be honest—that last example, that little fugue of domestic bliss, is a faithful account of what was happening between 1 and 2 p.m. today in my apartment in Baltimore. The others? Just familiar scenarios we’ve all lived through in one form or another.
Here’s what they share:
None of it is dialogue.
But every bit of it is doing something.
These are the unspoken forces—the quiet tensions—that shift the temperature of a room and, in doing so, change the outcome of the day. I’m not talking about where the tension comes from. I’m talking about what it provokes. What it pushes into motion, or pulls apart.
The Unspoken Pressure in the Room
I’ve long been a proponent of stillness in storytelling.
In real life, we experience it all the time. It’s not always dramatic, but it absolutely hastens or throttles forward action, whether internal or external. It can make someone shut down, open up, walk taller, stoop lower, enter or exit a situation, or go full bore right through your stomach.
Stillness doesn’t mean nothing’s happening. Stillness is where the pressure builds. And pressure…let’s talk about that.
So, lately, I’ve been wrestling with atmosphere in my stage plays. Not just in the scenic sense, but in the emotional barometric sense. The way tension expands or contracts in a room. The way the air shifts around a character before they ever open their mouth. The temperature. The weight. The charge.
Think about the emotional weight in your dialogue—and then ask: what is the atmosphere doing around it? Because when you name that pressure, you get closer to the consequences. And consequences are where the drama lives.
Sometimes we are so busy writing the lines that we forget the biggest thing of all: What the room is doing to the people in it.
A Page From My Story
I was on the phone with my dramaturg this week, reading through my new memoir play, and we got to the part—the really bad part—a page pulled straight from my actual life. A horrible, awful, very bad page. The one where I got the call that my twin sister had finally passed away.
Now, I should say…any time I got a call from New London, Connecticut, it was never good news. But even knowing the bad was coming, even carrying that dread around like luggage, nothing prepares you for that phone call. A random ring at three in the morning. And I knew. I knew before I answered. I picked it up, and the moment hit.
The room I was standing in… ceased to exist.
All the color drained to black. A high-pitched frequency squealed in my ears. My blood pressure shot through the roof. It felt like someone had broken a chair across my back. The body remembers.
So when I tell you that moment was very real…obviously, it was real. And yet. As I read that section aloud with my dramaturg, none of it—none of it—was on the page. It was just dialogue. No pressure. No temperature. No percussive shockwaves. No sign that the room had collapsed around me, leaving me buried under a heap of shrapnel and shattered glass.
So now I have the task of walking back through that moment in the script. And getting it right. The dread. The shift. The weight. All the invisible forces pressing in. All of it has to find its way into the play. Otherwise, we don’t get the full picture. We miss the truth of what that moment felt like…and that feeling is everything.
Now you say to me, Audrey, isn’t that the actor’s job?
OKAY, SATAN.
If you absolutely don’t know what’s happening in the room, and you absolutely don’t care, and you truly, deeply want to leave it all up to discovery in the rehearsal room—this is your life. You do you.
But….
IF YOU KNOW IT, NAME IT!
Walk through your script, the one you’ve lived with a little. The one where you know there’s more to uncover…stop every few lines and ask:
What is the pressure in the room right now?
Not the plot. Not the dialogue. The pressure.
If you can get close to it, if you can sketch the invisible weight of the scene, everything deepens. The moments get richer. The stage directions get sharper. And the truth? The emotional truth becomes unassailable.
Ways and Means
One of the ways into this practice is to imagine that your play is being translated for audio. What are the pressure points you’d want your listeners to “hear” and “feel” through the airwaves? Here are some examples I came across when I was translating my piece The Garment for radio:
A woodpecker flies into the studio
Stage direction:
The window flings open. The bird disappears. The room holds its breath.
Atmospheric reading:
That’s it. No psychology lesson. No over-directing. Just a clean, observable shift in pressure. It tells the actors what kind of space they’re in. It tells the director the temperature of the moment. And it gives the designers something to echo in the light or sound. That’s the goal: not to micromanage emotion, but to shape the atmosphere around it…so everyone else has a richer place to play.
After Vell yells “ENOUGH!” and the room freezes
(Vell slams a metal tray.)
VELL:
ENOUGH!(Frozen silence.)
BLUE:
I tell you what. I'll come back from this cigarette and none of this shit will have happened.
Atmospheric reading:
This captures a tonal shift where the air freezes. That silence isn’t neutral. It’s thick. Everything that happens afterward is framed by it.
When Blue interrogates Lorraine’s body language
BLUE
She? Who the fuck is she?VELL AND LORRAINE
The bird!(Tapping halts. Silence.)
(A tonal shift… the room tightens.)
BLUE:
(to Lorraine) What is that thing you keep doing, that darting your eyes over at Number Two when I ask you a direct question?(Lorraine darts a glance at Vell.)
Atmospheric reading:
First of all, the tension in the room is already tight because there’s a woodpecker making a racket, and it’s harsh. You could blame Blue’s bad behavior on the noise—reader, you could—but truthfully, she’s going to be one hundred percent that bitch either way. But I digress. What we’re seeing above is not just a line of interrogation, it’s a rearrangement of power in real time. When Blue calls out Lorraine’s “darting eyes”, the room doesn’t just go quiet…it contracts. Lorraine shrinks. Vell flares. Everyone freezes, just for a breath, recalibrating the new center of gravity. The silence that follows isn’t neutral; it’s vibrating. The tension isn’t in what’s said. It’s in what Blue noticed. What Lorraine revealed. And what the room can’t unhear. That’s atmosphere doing the heavy lift—not the dialogue, but the pressure around it.
TL;DR
Atmosphere is not an accessory. It is not an afterthought. It is the living pressure in the room that shapes every move, every breath, every choice your characters make. If you name it, you give your play a pulse. You give your collaborators a place to stand. And you give your audience something deeper than plot to hold onto. So write the air. Write the heat. Write the weight of the thing pressing down. Because that is where the truth lives. And that is where your play takes flight.
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Audrey Cefaly's plays (Alabaster, Maytag Virgin, The Gulf, The Last Wide Open, Trouble) have garnered the Lammy Award, the Calicchio Prize, the NNPN Goldman Prize, the Edgerton, and a Pulitzer nomination. Her works have been produced at Signature Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Barter Theatre, Merrimack Rep, Florida Studio, Florida Rep, Gulfshore Playhouse, and countless others. Cefaly is a Dramatist Guild Foundation "Traveling Master," an Arena Stage playwright cohort, and a recipient of the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference. She is published by Concord Theatricals, Applause Books, Smith & Kraus and TRW.