My co-administrator Arimintha recently published a collection of her one-act plays. I asked if she would share something about her experience with writing for the theatre...
I have been writing one-act plays for over ten years. I was
fortunate to get involved with a theatre that would produce them and then lucky
enough to have some of my plays produced for The North Park Playwright Festival
at the North Park Vaudeville and Candy Shoppe.
Recently, I took some of these plays and some others that I
had written and and collected them in book form. It is not a collection of every
play I’ve ever written. Such a book would be too long, and there are some that I still
probably wouldn’t put in.
A few factors go into how I write. Some involve story, I
often start with a kernel of something – perhaps a visual I want to see, an
issue I’m facing, or a subject I want to write about. Something’s Brewing was based on a creation myth I had started when
I couldn’t sleep one night and then further expanded upon a few years after I
had originally wrote it. Have a Nice
Death was based on the visual of a Goth cheerleader. It’s In the Cards was based on the idea that Fate was a card
dealer.
What I really want to talk about is why I write one-act
plays and things to keep in mind when you are writing them.
I write them because they happen to be easier to get
produced. The theatre I worked at produced one act plays every month and a lot
of playwright festivals are looking for those as well. To have a full-length
play produced can be very hard. You often have to either fund it yourself,
or be already established. It’s not impossible, but it is much more difficult.
The other reason I do it is because I find that it is all the
space I need to get a story across. I have been told I have brevity of pen and
when writing one-act plays, this is a good trait to have. Boltin’ and Joltin’ was written for a short screenplay contest. I
was given some parameters and a maximum page count. When I looked on the
forums, many people were finding it hard not to go over the page count and also had trouble trimming what they wrote. My advice is to keep the parts necessary
to your story. You may have a line you love or a subplot that you think is
awesome, but check if it supports your story or if it can go without it. Decide if it is necessary to the story or it's just your ego talking. When
there is a call for submissions, you want to give them a complete play, not
something that is part of a larger work. Even if it is from a larger work, it
must be able to stand on its own and be a complete story.
Keep your staging simple, your cast small, and have a
minimal amount of set changes. You only have so many pages to tell your story
and a lot of times people will choose your play based not only on the material,
but also how easy it will be to stage. A cast of ten or more is unwieldy. Intricate sets and lots of set changes are not always feasible. When I was
directing for some playwright festivals, I would go through the first page
and look at how many actors I would need to work with. Because these were plays
that were less than 10 minutes, anything with more than four characters or more
than one set would get put into the pile that wasn’t going to get read. There
may have been some really great plays in there, but because of limitations, they
had to go to the side.
The last part is about formatting and following
instructions. If you are
submitting for a specific venue, follow the instructions given. The quickest way
to be put into the rejected pile is to not follow instructions. In terms of
formatting, if you are going to direct them yourself or they are being produced at a theatre that does not have hard and fast formatting guidelines, you can mostly make your own. The main thing to remember is to make it easy for the
actors to read and make notes on. If submitting to a more mainstream venue, I would
recommend using software like Celtix. It is a free program and has tools for various
formats such as stage plays, screenplays, radio shows, etc.
I enjoyed very much writing these and rewriting them for
this collection. As I read through them, some of them took me back to my early
20’s, which sometimes seems like a lifetime ago. I wrote these to be easy to stage in smaller theatres which don’t have a lot of resources. Some of these I directed and had a specific theatre in
mind while I was writing. Some I wrote and were produced later and then it was
up to the director to decide how to stage them. All of them were written with the limited resources of small
theatres in mind and I hope you enjoy them.
To order Something's Brewing & Other One-Act Plays
please click the button below
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