It's weird. This whole ten-minute play thing. I've never heard of anyone going to a night of theatre where they saw 10-minute plays (and I'm excluding Directing-Class One-Acts and school one-act festivals). Maybe it's just because I'm such a pleb that I wouldn't have heard about 10-minute play festivals. Meh.
I thought that the trajectory of the plays we read (and I mean plot, character development, overall story) was much different than what I'm used to reading for this class. There is so much back-story, and even story-story to convey in such a short amount of time. I don't know if was just me, but all the plays we read for today seemed somewhat underdeveloped. It seemed like these should have been scenes of more complete plays. I really liked "That Midnight Rodeo" because it seemed like it's own complete play. It's weird, my first two years I did almost exclusively one-act plays. Maybe I've just gotten used to thinking about full-length plays.
It's important, I think, to create such full characters in such a non-full story. I think a lot of that comes from the off-the-page work; i.e. all the stuff the playwright knows about the character, but doesn't necessarily show up on the page. For example, the author might now that this character's favorite kind of jeans are Levis, or that his wife's biggest fear is losing control of their house. I mean, all of these thing are important anyway, but when you have so little time/room to develop, it's important to go in with these things in mind.
Another thing; I think that you have to have in mind where things are going, because you don't have any room for the characters to write themselves as much. That is, it seems like you should come into the project with pretty clear ideas for the characters, rather than wandering around the story, letting the characters fill in the blanks. When a play needs to be so tight and concise, there isn't much room for that kind of stuff.
I think there was more, but I can't really remember, since the internet logged me out as I was trying to post it last time. So if I think of it, I'll put it in later. Sorry 'bou' tha'.
KG
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No worries -- what's here is good: short plays must be characters driven; they must be tight and concise; they must have a plan rather than wandering and letting the characters do what they will; those characters must be full and interesting in and of themselves. Good.
ReplyDeleteSometimes you see something like and Evening of Short Plays. More frequently, it'll be Three Short Plays by Whomever. Or sometimes An Evening of the Absurd: Three Short Plays. Or whatever. Personally, they're never my favorites, and I always prefer full length plays. But people love them -- they're easy to stage and mount. Two can suck, and if the other is good, people feel like they've spent a good night at the theater. And student contests and productions are chock full of calls for 10 minute plays. So we shall see.