Kitchen's recipe for a good story

How dramaturge Jeff Kitchen cooks up life-like characters using a 'special cutlery'

- SACHIN JOSE

Jeff Kitchen is a chef, but of screenplays-a dramaturge whose clients include top playwrights in Broadway and screenwriters in Hollywood. He has a set of special cutleries and secret recipes to cook a good story and serve it as a dramatic plot. One of his special cutlery is the Enneagram, a psychometric framework that posits that there are nine personality types. He says it not only helps him develop credible characters, but also construct an engaging plot.

"Everyone focuses on the art of storytelling rather than the craft of the dramatist. This is why 99 per cent of scripts get rejected," says the California-based script consultant, whose students include Oscar, Emmy and Tony award winners. One of them is Ted Melfi, whose 2016 directorial, Hidden Figures, was nominated for an Oscar in the best picture and best adapted screenplay categories.

If it was Greek physician Galen's four temperaments-sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic-that made Shakespearean characters multidimensional, it was Enneagram that helped Kitchen add complexity to the characters he created. Before discovering the psychometric tool, he mostly drew upon his own knowledge of the people around him. "I know a lot about how people operate in the world, but it's nowhere near as comprehensive as Enneagram," he tells THE WEEK.

Kitchen is not the only person to use personality types to develop characters. Isabel Myers, who devised the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with the help of her mother, Katharine Briggs, was also a novelist who used typology to build her characters. Her first novel, Murder Yet to Come, won the National Detective Murder Mystery Contest in 1929.