It's interesting: the "comedic" 10-minute plays were a lot different from the dramatic ones. I thought there really wasn't going to be much of a difference - I thought they would be similar structurally and content-wise, but the comedic ones would just touch on funnier subjects. I found the comedic ones to be quite different; I found there was less suspense (even comedic suspense), less buildup, even. I thought it was mostly just banter and situational comedy. I felt that I was kept in the dark a lot less in the comedic scenes than in the dramatic ones.
I look at a play like The Philadelphia, and I get fairly intimidated, because I think, "how the hayballs am I supposed to write something like THAT?" We talked earlier in the semester about how that kind of dialogue is pretty funny, but for only a short period of time. Especially the banter with the waitress and the kind of beers she's checking off the list. I might go mad if I had to listen to three acts of that. There also seemed to be less character development in the comedic ones. Maybe it's just the ones we read, but it seemed like these ones had less character development, and that most of the humor came from the lines or the situations, rather than the characters themselves. Anything for You was a possible exception, but even that, I thought was fairly predictable.
I guess a lesson I would take away from all this would be pacing. 10-minute plays, especially comedic ones, really need to zip along and don't have any time to dawdle. And it feels like SOMEthing has to happen. It doesn't have to be anything huge, but I don't think you can do a 10-minute Uncle Vanya. If you sat around watching people do their everyday thing for ten minutes on stage, and then it ended, I think you'd be pretty pissed off. You don't have the time of a full-length play to get the characters interesting enough for them to do nothing.
I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot from the first entries, so I'll probably just leave it at that. Woot.
KG
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Let me say first that a comedic ten minute play version of Uncle Vanya would be AWESOME, and I long to see it, and maybe you should try it. That said, I see your point and agree -- something has to happen in these plays; they're too short to get character-driven enough. In fact, you even preferred plot in the long character driven pieces.
ReplyDeleteAnd let me add that you can absolutely write dialogue as snappy and funny and quick as David Ives. You get the basics down this weekend, the idea, the sense, the general plot. And then you revise and revise and rehearse and revise and revise and rehearse and revise. And then it's perfect. That kind of tightness takes lots of rewriting -- it doesn't come out that way for anyone. But you'll get it. I know this.