Chapter 2
The Ten-Minute Play: A Definition
A ten-minute play is a play that when produced on a stage lasts ten minutes. Now, that seems simple enough, right? Usually one page of dialogue and stage directions equals about a minute of stage action. Just to be certain, you should always have a couple of informal readings after you’ve done a draft of your ten-minute play to verify that it runs ten minutes.
A ten-minute play is not a sketch. It is a very short play that has a beginning, middle, and end. The more successful ones are light on exposition and strong on setting up a conflict, and have characters that are established almost immediately. Each of the characters in the ten-minute play (and hopefully there won’t be too many) should have his or her own arc. Your characters should start off at one place and end up in a different place at the end of the play. Hopefully, there should also be some surprises along the way.
Many playwrights write plays that are longer than ten minutes and then attempt to fool producers and publishers by making the font size very small, creating large margins, or single-spacing the dialogue. Don’t. Producers and publishers are on to you. A ten-minute play plays ten minutes on the stage—end of story.
When Did Ten-Minute Plays Begin?
You could say the ten-minute play goes back to 1923, when Pierre Loving published a book of ten-minute plays by such renowned playwrights as August Strindberg, Arthur Schnitzler, and Ferenc Molnar. No one is certain whether these playwrights were specifically asked to write ten-minute plays for this anthology or already had them in their collections.
Real interest in ten-minute plays, however, began in 1978 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where Jon Jory was the producing director. Mr. Jory wanted to give beginning as well as well-known writers an opportunity to participate at his theater. Some of the writers that wrote plays for that early festival were Douglas Turner Ward, Lanford Wilson, Israel Horowitz, Marsha Norman, and John Guare. The theme that the playwrights were instructed to write about at that first festival was “Holidays.”
Many of today’s top playwrights, from David Mamet to Tony Kushner to Christopher Durang, have written ten-minute plays.
Ten-minute plays can be both incredibly easy and incredibly difficult to write. On the one hand, you don’t have all the multiple subplots, the abundance of characters, the many scenes, etc., of a full-length play. But you still have to create a story with a beginning, middle, and end; believable characters; dramatic tension; and a story that makes theatrical sense. If nothing else it’s a wonderful exercise in learning how to condense a story to its most important elements. It’s a way to learn how to write concise, “only what must be said” dialogue that moves a story rapidly to a conclusion.
Popularity of Ten-Minute Plays
Ten-minute play festivals have become increasingly popular with theaters over the last few years for several reasons. Perhaps with the popularity of the Internet, music videos, and television, full-length plays are not quite as much in demand as they once were. There was a time when if you went to the theater it wasn’t unusual to see a play that ran two and a half to three hours with two intermissions. Those plays are produced far less frequently today. Another reason ten-minute play festivals are very popular today is that they’re relatively inexpensive to produce. Because the festivals present a group of plays, the set must be simple and flexible, and props kept to a minimum.
Yet another reason is that ten-minute play festivals get larger audiences because there are so many writers, actors, and directors involved. Everyone involved will invite their friends and colleagues to see their work.
One final thing to think about is that writing a ten-minute play can be a great way to introduce yourself to a theater or theater company. Successfully submitting your ten-minute play to their festival means an opportunity for you to introduce them to your work, whether you usually write one-acts or full-length plays.
Basic Rules for All Ten-Minute Plays
What follows are some basic rules to keep in mind before starting a ten-minute play, some essentials that many successful ten-minute plays have in common. We’ll look first at tips on structuring your play, then at suggestions specifically oriented toward getting your play selected for performance in a festival. As with any art, not all the rules must always apply.
Writing Your Best Ten-Minute Play
• Make sure the conflict in your play is strong and immediate. The sooner you set up the conflict, the better.
• Make sure your play has a conflict and isn’t merely an argument between characters.
• If you can set up obstacles along the way that can be believably resolved in ten minutes, by all means do.
• Some sources suggest finding a metaphor and revising your play around that metaphor.
• Every detail in your play should relate to the action of the play.
• Try to keep your cast small. In a ten-minute period you really don’t have much time to develop many characters. In general, you don’t want to have more than three characters in your play.
• Each of your characters should be very different from the others. Since you probably will only be dealing with a few characters, this shouldn’t be too difficult.
• Your characters and story should be believable. I know this may seem obvious, but even in a surreal play we need to have a scenario and characters that we, the audience, can somehow identify with.
• You characters should all have very clear goals (i.e., what they want). They should have different goals from one another.
• You don’t want to have characters entering and exiting all the time; it can get too busy.
• Keep your exposition to a minimum. You want your characters to say what they have to say without getting into long-winded stories or monologues. Most ten-minute plays are dialogue driven. Don’t feel you need to tell your audience what to think. Just show them why to think it.
• If you can show it, there’s no need to talk about it.
• Try not to telegraph the ending of your play too early. If we can figure out the ending too quickly, we miss the fun of taking the journey.
• You must be certain that the ending of the play resolves itself in a way that is believable. I’m all for twist/surprise endings, but make sure that the action of your play earns it. There is nothing more frustrating for an audience member than to see a play with an ending that’s not justified. They’ll feel duped, that they wasted their ten minutes.
• Every detail you’ve set up in the course of your ten-minute play must come together and pay off at the end; otherwise your audience will feel shortchanged.
Getting Your Ten-Minute Play Performed
• I’ve read in several ten-minute play guidelines that the play should be between 1500 and 1700 words. I’m not quite sure if that’s always the case, but it should give you a sense of what some theaters expect, and can be used as a gauge.
• Keep stage directions to a minimum. They take up valuable space in your script.
• Keep your props and costumes to a minimum.
• Keep your set simple. You don’t want to create an elaborate set that requires time to set up and break down. Remember, ten-minute play festivals want to be able to move smoothly and quickly from one play to the next.
• Try not to have too many technical requirements for your play (i.e., sound, light cues, etc.). Remember, your play is just one of many in an evening of ten-minute plays. The lighting and sound designers need to do many evenings’ worth of cues. Try not to overburden them with too many cues for just your play. Too many cues could prevent your play from being selected for production.
• Make sure your play is ten minutes long. Before you send out any ten-minute play, have several readings of it to be sure it’s ten minutes; end of story!