And it's always a good idea to write your play so that it can be produced, if necessary, with minimal set and technical requirements. How up is up? These days, with TV shrinking our attention spans, you'd better have a very good reason to keep an audience in the theater for much longer than two hours.
How long is that? Anywhere from around seventy or eighty minutes and up. THIS IS THE TYPE OF PLAY YOU WILL BE CREATING FOR THIS CLASS.įull-Length Plays - Full-length plays are also called evening-length plays, because they're long enough to be their own evening. So the moral of the story is to write your one-act with the most minimal set and technical demandspossible. My play The White Pages opened for Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile and had to make use of largely the same set, with canvases painted like bookcases and a desk brought on to make it look more like a bookstore. Not likely to happen.Īnother common situation is that a one-act precedes a play that's not quite long enough to be an evening unto itself. Each of the other one-acts already has its own set requirements, so suddenly the theater is faced with building four different sets for one evening. Let's further say that your one-act has two distinct settings, requiring two different sets and a set change in the middle of an already short play. Why? Let's say that your one-act is on a bill with two other one-acts, a common scenario. And for practical reasons, it's a good idea to keep your play to one set and as few scenes as possible. At this length, a play can fit on a bill with a pair of other one-acts, and if your play is suitable for high school production, thirty minutes is a good length for a competition play.Ī good one-act focuses on one main action or problem there's not time to get into complicated layers of plot. Arguably the most popular length for one-acts is around a half-hour. While technically, the one-act gets its name from having only one act (however long that might be), it's more commonly thought of as a play that isn't long enough to constitute a full evening. One-Act Plays - One-acts can run anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more. In fact, because many contests disqualify entries with more than ten pages, it's a good idea to adhere to that page limit religiously. It typically takes place in one scene and runs no more than ten pages. A good ten-minute play is not a sketch or an extended gag, but rather a complete, compact play, with a beginning, middle and end.
Ten-Minute Plays - Ten-minute plays have become very popular in recent years with the advent of The Actors Theatre of Louisville contest. Types of Plays - Plays come in all shapes and sizes. Good playwrights typically have patience and perseverance to spare. readings and workshops) before getting fully produced. It can be a long road, particularly because now more than ever, plays tend to get plenty of development (i.e. But how do you do it?īefore your play can teach and please anyone, you have to write it, rewrite it (probably over and over again), submit it to theaters and hope that one of them will want to produce it. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the dramatic "poet" (that's us) had the power and the duty to "teach and to please," and it's a tradition that lives on to this day. Live actors and a live audience make for an immediacy no other art of the written word can duplicate.
The Play's the ThingThe stage is a magical place.