Second set of field notes:
“No Experience Necessary,” session on writing short, 8-10 minute plays.
I walk into the Performing Arts Center, luckily something that is somewhat familiar to me because I’ve been taking Introduction to Theater this semester with Jim Anderson, the proposed speaker. Unfortunately, his wife has been hospitalized, but Gary Burton will be taking his place.
At first, I was a little leery to show up in the first place, class had been cancelled this morning because of his wife’s illness, so I wasn’t sure if we would still be having the seminar or not, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try. So I found the room number set down for it, and waited. 4:30 came around and still nothing. Finally, I heard a few voices down the hall talking about whether anyone would show up for this, so I set out on an adventure to find the voices. I came upon a Mr. Gary Burton, who politely showed me to the room that we had decided to move it to.
It is currently 4:39 p.m., and so far, it’s just me here. This was actually somewhat of a surprise. I had never been much interested in theater in high school, but decided to take it in college for fun, and found it to be quite interesting and enjoyable. When we were prompted in our class to write a short play, I was so excited, because I love to write short stories just for my amusement, and figured turning one into an 8-10 minute play would be a breeze.
Boy was I wrong. It’s not hard, per se, if you know what you want to write about. The most difficult part is lengthening out the plot, making sure you get out all the information you want the audience to know through dialogue. Stage directions are somewhat useful as well, but the biggest part of it is expressing it through a character’s dialogues. Ten pages for a short story is a breeze for me, but a play, using only dialogue and a few stage directions, is hard to stretch out for ten pages. Dialogue goes a lot faster than a story, where you have to explain inner feelings of every person, and minute details like the color of the walls, what the people are wearing. But when you’re actually visualizing that, on stage, it’s unnecessary to include that in dialogue, destroying a lot of your “filler” for your story as you convert it into a play.
We’ve decided to wait a little longer for “stragglers,” but right now it’s 4:44 p.m., and still no signs of anyone else interested in the art of writing plays. So it looks like it’ll just be me and the speaker, something that I wasn’t expecting and am certainly going to take advantage of.
At 4:46 p.m., someone else finally shows up. So it’s just the two of us and our speaker.
Promptly at 5:00 the prompt will be available on the website.
IF YOUR PLAY IS CHOSEN, IT IS NO LONGER YOUR PLAY. IT’S THE DIRECTOR’S PLAY. GET OVER IT.
We go over formats, a sample play.
The format is extremely important, because the way the format is setup, plays are roughly 1 minute per page. So if you have ten pages for your play, the play should be roughly 10 minutes long.
We are confined to three actors and must take place in one location with continuous real time, meaning that we cannot have any time skips.
We go over “The Six Elements of Drama,” as defined by Oscar Brockett, after the original in Aristotle’s Poetics. Luckily, we’ve gone over these in my Introduction to Theater class, so this is nothing new to mean.
Exposition – the revealing of past events or important information the audience should know in a small set of dialogue.
Music: interpreted as whatever you hear on stage, whether it be actual music or SFX.
We also covered “Notes for Playwriting – 14 Basic Story Principles.” Which basically breaks down the play into bits. (This is more needed for someone writing a one-act, which is a 40 minute play.)
We also go over some character notes from Sam Smiley’s Theater textbook.
“Plays are built around conflict.” – Gary Burton
Conflict, character, plot, and action – 4 major points of playwriting.
ANALYZING:
This is probably one of the most rewarding things that I have done in my college career, and also one of the most fun.
I received my prompt at 5:30.
It had to be in a confined space, with exactly 3 characters, including the color red.
I had so much fun with this. I wrote about 3 neighbors in an apartment building who get stuck on an elevator, one of them is highly claustrophobic.
I was sort of worried about this, because for someone reason…I almost felt that it was too romantic when I sent it in, but it was too late.
I checked my email all throughout the, knowing that I wasn’t going to hear until about 3:00, but I thought maybe they’d get done early. At about 2:30, I still hadn’t heard and was about to give up, get in my car, and go home. Just before I shut my laptop, I hit the refresh button one last time, just in case, and there the email was. Sitting in my email inbox with the title, Congratulations, 24-Hour Playwrights! I opened the email and shrieked with glee when I found that they had chosen mine to perform that afternoon at five. I rushed up to the Performing Arts Center, excited to watch them rehearse my play, and was thrilled when my theater professor, Jim Anderson, told me that he loved my play. For those of you who don’t know, my theater professor is friends with James Earl Jones, a.k.a., DARTH FREAKING VADAR. This boosted my ego as a playwright by about 600 percent.
Seeing something I wrote performed on stage was a completely new thing for me, and to be truthful, I loved the feeling. To see people laugh and truly be entertained by my writing, was truly inspiring. Something that I feel I will definitely be doing more.
I did this as part of the Week on Writing, something that I did just for class. But I was surprised to find something that I was good at, that I enjoyed. Taking a story and breathing life into it. Putting actions to words and seeing those actions right in front of me. Seeing how these actors has taken it and put a completely new spin on it. Truly amazing.