Chapter 10
Interviews with Playwrights of Ten-Minute Plays
What follows are interviews with some well-respected playwrights who have had a fair amount of success with their ten-minute plays. I specifically asked questions that I felt would be of value to playwrights as well as actor/playwrights. I found many of the responses to the interview questions insightful and illuminating. When different playwrights answer the same question in similar terms, it’s a probably a sign that the advice may be of value. You’ll also notice that several of the playwrights have a difference of opinion on certain matters pertaining to ten-minute plays. See which advice is most helpful to you while working on your play. I’ve tried to include playwrights from different backgrounds, countries, and approaches.
Jenny Lyn Bader has published seven ten-minute plays in Smith & Kraus’s annual Best Ten-Minute Play series: The Popcorn Sonata (City Theatre); Past Lives (Center Stage, NY); The Third First Blind Double Date (New Georges Performathon); One Night at Your Local Superstore (Café Theatre at George St. Playhouse), Valentine’s Play (Stageworks/Hudson), Best Friends (W.E.T./“The Love Plays”), and Oppression and Pearls (Largo at the Coronet Theatre, Los Angeles/“Standing on Ceremony”). Other short works include Worldness (Humana Festival of New American Plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville), published by Dramatists Play Service in Heaven and Hell; Miss America (New York International Fringe Festival, “Best of the Fringe” selection); and The Joint Collection (Mile Square Productions). Her full-length plays include Mona Lisa Speaks (Core Ensemble); In Flight, which won the North American Actors Association Playreading Festival in London; Manhattan Casanova, winner of the Edith Oliver Award (Eugene O’Neill Theater Center); and None of the Above (New Georges), available from Dramatists Play Service. She is director of artistic development at Theatre 167.
Glenn Alterman: What was it like for you writing your first ten-minute play? Was it your plan to write a ten-minute play, or did it just work out that way?
Jenny Lyn Bader: I immediately enjoyed the experience of having to set up a play so quickly. I love writing beginnings, and the beginnings of short plays can fly particularly fast.
There was a point in time when a lot of theaters began doing ten-minute plays instead of short works of more varied lengths. One reason for that trend was the popularity of the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s National Ten-Minute Play Contest, a well-respected institution that has launched a few careers. Perhaps another reason was the “squishability” factor. Theaters found they could squish more plays into a single evening, establishing relationships with more writers. I believe the first one I ever wrote was written for such an evening. The theater announced a theme and invited a bunch of writers to submit. So the first time I wrote one I did know it was supposed to be ten minutes long.
But it’s certainly happened that I’ve written a ten-minute play when I wasn’t meaning to do so. One of my first ten-minute plays I had planned as a full-length. . . . There was a commissioning program at a regional theater, and I applied to it with a script outline and proposal for a full-length play called The Third First Blind Double Date. The literary manager wrote me a nice note saying that the commissioning program had unexpectedly lost its funding and they wouldn’t be paying anyone to write any plays, but their script committee had been intrigued by my idea. They thought it was a wonderful idea for a play and said they thought I should go ahead and write it anyway.
This glimmer of encouragement was invaluable to me at that early point in my career when most people just look at you funny if you say you have an idea for a play. So I sat down to write the full play. The idea seemed like a complex theatrical one, offbeat and somewhat experimental, and I imagined it would take much time and space to execute. But suddenly I found the whole idea coming out at once: quickly, concisely, and in ten pages.
At first I was concerned that the play wanted to be shorter than I wanted it to be. But plays do want things, and I think it’s best to listen to them.
The opposite has happened, too. I once started writing what I intended to be a ten-minute play and the characters simply wouldn’t stop talking to each other—and that became a full-length play. The play wants what it wants. And characters often have minds of their own, too.
Alterman: Did you come up against any obstacles in writing your first ten-minute play? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?
Bader: The main obstacle is always figuring out how to put a whole play in a space that would normally be reserved for a scene or two—and taking its structure seriously. Naturally I had the usual “second act problems—what in the film business would be called “third act problems,” and what in the ten-minute play business might more accurately be called “page nine problems.” You don’t want the energy to sag as you are nearing the end of your story. So around page nine, I had to figure out what might be exciting enough to top what had come before.
In one case, the play, Myth America, You Are Beautiful, written for the Primary Stages American Myths Project and later expanded into Miss America, involved two pageant contestants: a traditional beauty queen and a contemporary, politically correct contestant. In private, the politically correct contestant, Miss California, who is the more smooth and polished of the two, gives the politically incorrect one, Miss Texas, her careerist vision of the pageant. I wanted her words to come back later to jeopardize her chance at the crown. I thought Miss Texas might simply repeat what Miss California had said privately in public. But on page nine, I said that there’s no way out . . . until I think of something better. Then I decided that it should come out that Miss Texas, a scrappy, self-made gal not above a few underhanded tricks, was taping their conversation—so when we hear Miss California’s words again, we hear her own voice on a recording, in a dramatic moment where Miss Texas makes a plea for the crown and also reveals she has been wearing a wire.
In this particular case, I took a potentially dull event—one character repeats what another has said—and made it into a more dramatic one. I did so by making the event more physical and more theatrical. It also added a layer of intrigue, providing more of a payoff of the scene that had come before. In every ten-minute play I write, I try to push myself to offer an unexpected twist before the play ends, whether it’s a story twist or an emotional twist.
Alterman: Do you find working on ten-minute plays any different from working on one-acts or full-lengths? If so, how?
Bader: Ten-minute plays are written with greater economy and efficiency. In a way, it’s a little like writing a poem. In another way, it’s a lot like writing a play that’s been condensed. The challenge is to compress the dramatic experience. How can a play that clocks in at ten minutes have the excitement, the impact, the emotion of a full-length play? I feel that the structure needs to be managed a little differently, too. Unlike a full-length, where setups and payoffs are layered in over time, a ten-minute play has a setup that gets paid off momentarily. So you need to be careful that this doesn’t feel too clunky—that payoff doesn’t follow setup one page later. In a way sometimes the setup has to be more subtle. If you’re trying to set up a mystery or a question in a full-length, the audience has 50 pages or more to forget about it. But anything you plant in a ten-minute play they may remember all too well. That makes it important for you to avoid obvious setups. But it also gives you the chance to offer a lot more payoffs. You can pay off several different setups and feel pretty confident that the audience will recall them all, since they just saw them planted a few minutes ago.
Alterman: What do you feel constitutes a good ten-minute play?
Bader: The best ones hit all the marks of a full-length play. There should be a beginning, middle, and end. It should have story surprises, like an ending that seems to go one way and goes another. It should move at a clip, with pacing that is strong throughout and accelerates toward the end. It should have a structure, not just a texture. Each character should have a journey or character arc—growing or causing another character to develop.
The very best ones tell a story in a unique voice, offer up a complete world, and somehow defy expectations.
Alterman: What mistakes have you noticed writers make when working on ten-minute plays?
Bader: I’ve seen writers who feel an interesting conversation, perhaps one that they had or overheard, makes a fine ten-minute play. Or that an intriguing mood is enough to sustain a play that’s so brief. Or that they can just ruminate on an idea or image for ten minutes. But even the shortest play has to get you from point A to point B. The biggest mistake writers make is staying on point A, repeating an idea without development, or writing a one-joke comedy, where characters reiterate their point of view and gain no insights. A novice playwright will think that just because a play is very short it must be more like writing a scene or a sketch. But a scene and a sketch do not need to accomplish as much as a play, do not need to have as much of a sense of movement and transformation.
Alterman: Do you have any additional advice for writers who are about to attempt their first ten-minute play?
Bader:
• Try to draft as much of it as you can in one sitting, which can help give the piece a sense of momentum. If you can’t finish and need to set it aside, at least make notes or an outline for the rest of the play.
• When you return to the draft, ask how you can give it more clarity and shape.
• Be a ruthless editor—every line should have a purpose.
• Maximize the sense of conflict in the time and space provided.
• Consider the theme that you are expressing, think of how you might deepen the expression of that theme, and make sure its counter-argument is also expressed.
• Try reading it aloud, not just as a whole, but once through from the point of view of each character to make sure each character has a through line and moments of discovery—and, where possible, that each actor has a variety of emotional opportunities. Imagine from the perspective of each character how you might make that person more defined, more layered, and more complex.
• Ask yourself where the climax of the play is and if tension is building up toward that point.
• If you want it to be widely produced, use only one set. Many theaters will not produce short plays that require set changes.
• Surprise yourself by creating an unexpected moment.
• Always remember: it’s not a ten-minute scene, it’s a ten-minute play.
Don Nigro is the author of over 300 plays, and his work is produced all over the world. Samuel French has published 135 of his plays in acting editions. Many times a finalist for Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award, he has written multiple works featured in Lawrence Harbison’s yearly Best Ten-Minute Plays and other anthologies.
Glenn Alterman: What was it like for you writing your first ten-minute play? Was it your plan to write a ten-minute play, or did it just work out that way?
Don Nigro: I am by nature an irrational, instinctive sort of playwright. I don’t trust rules, don’t believe in rules, don’t want anybody telling me there are rules. My approach is to trust the impulse, however strange, and see what happens. This has resulted in plays of all shapes and sizes, investigating a great many different sorts of conventions, often subverting, blending, maybe inventing them. So I probably happened to write a number of ten-minute plays without thinking of them as that. They were just shorter plays where the impulse resulted in something that happened to play ten minutes or less. It was Actors Theatre of Louisville that actually got me paying attention to staying at or under the ten-minute playing time, through their contest, and for a number of years I found that sooner or later in any given year I would come up with something that met their criteria, and to my surprise I actually enjoyed that. I never forced anything to be a ten-minute play. I just observed when something I was writing had the potential to be that, and if it turned out to be one, I sent it to them.
Alterman: Did you come up against any obstacles in writing your first ten-minute play? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?
Nigro: Sometimes a play will start out fine and just stop on you. Or you’ll seem to have finished it but you can’t help feeling there’s something missing or something wrong with it, but you’re not sure what it is; or you think you know what’s wrong but don’t know how to fix it at the moment. I keep pushing at it, but if it continues to resist, I never force it. I’ll put it away for a while. Now and then I would write something that I thought was going to be a ten-minute play, but it just wanted to be a little longer. Not much longer, just a few minutes. But if it really felt to me like that’s what it needed to be, I never cut things out just to pare it down for the sake of some contest or something. If the play wants to be a twelve-minute play, let it be a twelve-minute play, and send it somewhere else. I did cut The Sin Eater a bit when Louisville wanted to produce it, because it was running long and it was in a program with other playwrights who were all operating under the same restrictions, but I restored the cuts in the printed version, so it actually plays several minutes longer now. What I cut was several things the director really liked, but things not absolutely essential to the structure. It’s a better play with those things restored, but it’s no longer a ten-minute play.
Alterman: Do you find working on ten-minute plays any different from working on one-acts or full-lengths? If so, how?
Nigro: In some respects, with a shorter play, you have more freedom to be a little crazier, to try odd things that perhaps you couldn’t sustain for a longer period of time. In the theater you are always limited by the amount of time you can actually get people to sit and pay attention. They are more likely to put up with something bizarre for fifteen minutes than for two hours. But when you get down to ten minutes, there’s another sense in which you have less freedom, because every second matters. Of course, that’s also true for Long Day’s Journey Into Night or any play, regardless of the length—every second of every play matters, and you don’t want more than you need, ever, whether the play lasts three hours or five minutes. It’s just that in a ten-minute play, you have fewer seconds. Everything counts. Again, true for any play, but you can kid yourself with a longer one, maybe. In a ten-minute universe, you can’t kid yourself. Either a moment helps you get where you’re going or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, that’s what you cut. The ten-minute form makes this very clear to you as you’re working.
Alterman: What do you feel constitutes a good ten-minute play?
Nigro: I suppose what constitutes a good ten-minute play is what constitutes any good play, of whatever length: it pulls you in and gets you to care and carries you along to a place you didn’t realize you were going that, once you get there, feels mysteriously inevitable. You’ve just got less time to do this in a ten-minute play. Not easy. But it can be very satisfying. A full-length play like King Lear is the dovetailing of many smaller actions into one larger one, like streams flowing into a river. A ten-minute play tends to manifest one swift, clean action. But if it’s a good one, it suggests a whole complex universe of possible implications.
Alterman: What mistakes have you noticed writers make when working on ten-minute plays?
Nigro: I don’t want to characterize other people’s work, but mistakes I’d try to avoid would be trying to stuff too much into the box, or presuming that because it’s so short, structure doesn’t matter, or, conversely, presuming that because it’s so short, structure is the only thing that matters. Sometimes a two-minute song can be a more powerful experience than a grand opera. But it’s got to be done just right. And that, for me, is mostly a matter of instinct. You hope you start out with good instincts, and that your instincts get better as you learn more. But you’ve got to trust them. If the play feels right to me, then I just trust it. What looks like a mistake to you might be the best part to somebody else.
Alterman: Do you have any additional advice for writers who are about to attempt their first ten-minute play?
Nigro: Don’t force it to be one if it doesn’t want to be. Let it be what it is. You can always write another play.
Craig Pospisil is the author of Months on End, Somewhere In Between, The Dunes, Life Is Short, and the collection Choosing Sides, all published by Dramatists Play Service. He has written over 50 ten-minute plays, including 16 short plays and musicals written for theAtrainplays. His “A train plays” include It’s Not You, Tourist Attraction, and The Best Way to Go, which are published by Playscripts in Volumes 1 and 2 of theAtrainplays. It’s Not You has been produced over 100 times around the country and the world, translated into Chinese, published in An Anthology of Contemporary American Short Plays in Beijing, and is also part of the collection Take Ten II: New Ten-Minute Plays. Tourist Attraction is collected in Best Stage Scenes 2006. Other short plays include On the Edge in Under Thirty: Plays for a New Generation, and Best Ten-Minute Plays 2005; Perchance the Best Ten-minute Plays 2006 and There’s No Here Here, which will appear in Best Ten-Minute Plays 2012. He is a six-time finalist for the Heideman Award, and won the Alan Minieri Memorial Playwriting Award for The American Dream Revisited. For more information: www.CraigPospisil.com.
Glenn Alterman: What was it like for you writing your first ten-minute play? Was it your plan to write a ten-minute play, or did it just work out that way?
Craig Pospisil: I didn’t set out to write a ten-minute play the first time I wrote one. The first one really came about because I was taking a scene writing class the summer before deciding to go to graduate school. The first couple of pieces I wrote were scenes that were imagined to be from a longer play, which didn’t exist. I didn’t find that very satisfying, because they felt incomplete to me. So for the other assignments I just started writing full stories—short plays with their own beginning, middle, and end—and I discovered I really liked the form. Something about the compact nature of them appealed to me, and I kept having ideas for new ones. I submitted several of the short plays from that class along with a full-length play of mine when I applied to the Dramatic Writing Program at New York University, where I ended up going. Eventually a couple of those first ten-minute plays wound up inspiring me and becoming part of a full-length play of mine called Somewhere In Between.
Alterman: Did you come up against any obstacles in writing your first ten-minute play? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?
Pospisil: Strangely, I think one of the obstacles of a ten-minute play is keeping the stakes for the characters high. Because these plays are so short, there’s a temptation to set up whatever the problem is for the characters and then leave it at that, have the characters argue back and forth at the same level for the whole script. That can get deadly even in a short play, and ten minutes can seem a lot longer than you’d think. Because of the time limit you really need to keep increasing the stakes, increasing the pressure on your characters all the time. By doing that you not only keep the story moving and active, but you make the characters richer and more interesting to the audience.
I have a short play called Guerilla Gorilla that’s set in a future where the theater has been made illegal. A young man and woman are trying to get tickets to an underground production of a play. She’s really fired up to see it, and he’s scared they’ll be arrested, but he’s very attracted to her so he’s going along with it the plan.
At first I have them argue about the law. She thinks it’s ridiculous; he says, “It doesn’t matter, it’s the law.” But after a little of that, the subject is done. So I thought, “Why does she really want to see this play? She’s got the hots for an actor in it.” So as the first argument is running out of steam, the young man suddenly says, “Danny’s gay, you know.” The young woman tries to say it’s not about Danny, but the guy knows it is. So the whole tone of the conflict shifts, and we learn something new about the characters. And when that part of the conflict was reaching its limit, I changed it again.
Alterman: Do you find working on ten-minute plays any different from working on one-acts or full-lengths? If so, how?
Pospisil: I tend to look at ten-minute plays as a telling a complete story, but under much different kind of pressure than a longer one-act or full-length play. Take the idea that in a full-length play you have the first five to ten minutes of the show to set up your characters, your story, and the world you’re writing about. Then adjust that for a ten-minute play, and you basically have your first page, maybe a page and a half, to do all that. You really have to set the scene and the people involved right away. I’ll often start a short play with the characters already in the middle of a conversation or a fight, and then explode that situation to an even greater level of conflict very quickly. There’s simply no room for any fat in a ten-minute play.
Alterman: What do you feel constitutes a good ten-minute play?
Pospisil: The elements that make up a good ten-minute play are the same ones that you need to write a good full-length work: characters with a strong want or need, rising stakes or complications that get in the way of that need, a good ear for dialogue, etc. For me a good short play has to have all of that . . . and do it very quickly! The opening of a ten-minute play may be the most important element to my mind. Start the play off with a real bang, and get the audience hooked and interested right away. As I said, the first page of a ten-minute play has to set up the characters, the situation, the world of the story and the style of the piece—comedy, drama, absurdist, etc. It’s key to get the audience into the story and get the play moving, so be very focused and economical in what you do in the first minute or so of your short play.
Alterman: What mistakes have you noticed writers make when working on ten-minute plays?
Pospisil: When I teach workshops on writing short plays, the thing I stress is the word “play” in the phrase “ten-minute play.” I think a lot of writers focus on the length, and that leads to skits and sketches rather than a play. I love good sketch comedy, but those are really about the situation, not the characters. A sketch is an extended joke. It can be very funny, but in the end the characters aren’t really changed. Take a Saturday Night Live skit, for example. They often have characters who return in the same situation week after week. Part of the definition of a play is that your protagonist comes up against a conflict that fundamentally changes that person. When I sit down to write I’m usually writing more about a character and how that character deals with whatever problem has come up for him or her, and how that character is changed. I think you can achieve that in a ten-minute play, and it makes them quite magical when they strive to do that.
Alterman: Do you have any additional advice for writers who are about to attempt their first ten-minute play?
Pospisil: Experiment and let your imagination run. It’s a short piece; you should try something new, maybe write in a different style than you usually do. It may shed some light on your work in general or even on how you approach writing. I’ve learned a great deal from writing ten-minute plays. They can really teach you about economy of language, and getting the most out of the limited time that you have to tell the story. I would also highly recommend giving yourself a strict time limit for writing the piece. I think short plays benefit from putting the writer under some pressure—the same way I advocate putting your characters under pressure. I think it can make you write from the gut and take some chances. I’ve been involved with a number of overnight or “time limited” theater projects, from theAtrainplays to the 24 Hour Plays, and there’s really something about only having two to four hours to write something and people who are expecting pages from you at the end of that time. It can make you dig down and go to places in yourself where you may not want to go. But the pressure of that deadline can push you to do that, and come up with something surprising and very good. I have a short play called It’s Not You that I wrote in less than two hours while riding a New York subway, and going through the breakup of a relationship. It’s probably not what I would’ve written if I’d had more time to think about it, but it’s been published in several anthologies, produced over a hundred times and around the world, so I think it’s better for the rawness of it.
Mark Harvey Levine has had hundreds of productions of his ten-minute plays from New York to Sydney to London. Evenings of his short plays have been produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Cabfare for the Common Man) as well as in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Indianapolis, Columbus, and other cities.
He has won the Alan Minieri Award, Best Play, and Audience Favorite from New York’s 15-Minute Play Festival, and two Best Play honors from the Chester Horn Play Festival (New York, NY). He has twice won Minnesota’s Chameleon Theatre Circle’s New Play Festival, the Lakeshore Play Festival, and the People’s Choice Award at the Annual Play Slam in Ashland, OR. Other awards include the Claire Donaldson Award at the 8 in 48 Festival in Sioux Falls, SD; the Audience Award at the New Works Winter Festival at Acme Theatre in Maynard, MA; as well as many others. More information at www.MarkHarveyLevine.com.
Glenn Alterman: What was it like for you writing your first ten-minute play? Was it your plan to write a ten-minute play, or did it just work out that way?
Mark Harvey Levine: I was lucky and had a very easy time writing my first play. I owe that to getting involved with a theater company that had a writing group. They specialized in ten-minute plays, so that’s what I started to write. I was of course nervous about bringing my work in, but the group was incredibly supportive and helpful. When I brought in my work I got very insightful and nonjudgmental critiques. I highly recommend every playwright, whether beginner or not, find a good writing group to join. I don’t know if I would have continued writing if I hadn’t found such a nurturing environment.
Alterman: Did you come up against any obstacles in writing your first ten-minute play? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?
Levine: At first, I didn’t know what my play was truly about. I had a plot, but no theme. Things happened, but there was no reason for this play to exist, no reason to put it in front of an audience yet. My writing group helped me think about the “why” of the play. A lot of times playwrights—myself included—will have the theme of the play, but not the plot. I had the opposite problem, and it turned out to be a fun problem to solve. I just put my characters in the room and got them talking. Once I did that, I found what I wanted my play to be about. The best way to solve most problems in a play, I’ve found, is to just keep writing. Eventually your characters will find the solution, and you can throw everything else out.
Alterman: Do you find working on ten-minute plays any different from working on one-acts or full-lengths? If so, how?
Levine: I love working on ten-minute plays because you can hold the whole thing in your head at once. Full-lengths can turn into a morass for me. There are so many directions you can go. With a ten-minute play, you’ve got a little machine and it all has to work. Also, I like to overwrite and then cut back. It’s easier to write a 15- or 20-minute play and cut it down to ten minutes then to write a four-hour extravaganza and cut it down to a decent full-length.
Alterman: What do you feel constitutes a good ten-minute play?
Levine: All the things that make a good play of any size have to be there—a beginning, middle, and end (although not necessarily in that order), interesting characters, a compelling story. But in addition, with a ten-minute play you have to be ridiculously concise. There is no room for any fat. I think that’s the beauty of the format—it forces you to be ruthless with your writing. You have to cut everything but what is absolutely necessary—no matter how much you love it. It’s a good skill to acquire, one that will help you with writing anything.
Alterman: What mistakes have you noticed writers make when working on ten-minute plays?
Levine: I have noticed that a lot of beginning writers will be burning with an idea for a play. Often it will be something autobiographical. But they haven’t mastered the form yet, and it is hard to get the same emotion out of the audience that they’re feeling about their idea—especially in ten minutes. They end up with a play that is very meaningful to them and incomprehensible to everyone else. I would advise them to put that idea aside—not throw it away, just save it. And work on just writing a good ten-minute play. Try to write about brand-new characters in a brand-new situation. Then, once they’ve got a few ten-minute plays under their belt, they can go back to that idea they care so much about and, I think, serve it better.
Alterman: Do you have any additional advice for writers who are about to attempt their first ten-minute play?
Levine: As I said before, I highly recommend joining a writers’ group. But one of the things I wanted to mention was that the group I happened to join had one very interesting and enlightening rule. No writer was allowed to read his or her own work. Not even the stage directions. Many of the writers in the group were also actors, and they would read your work to you. It is extremely helpful, and occasionally mortifying, to hear your own words read back to you by good actors. You can see where you’ve gone on too long—and most everyone goes on too long in a first draft. You can hear which lines get an unexpected laugh, and which lines lie there like a dead tuna. But mostly you can hear how little you need, sometimes, to get your point across. So that is my biggest recommendation. Somehow, somewhere, find actors to read your play to you. And this is equally important: develop the ability to really listen to your own play. Don’t be so in love with it that you can’t hear where it’s dragging or falling flat. Try to hear it as a brand-new audience member.
Arlene Hutton is a three-time winner of the Samuel French Short Play Festival and a six-time Heideman Award finalist. Her first one-act, I Dream Before I Take the Stand, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is published by Playscripts and appears in several anthologies. She is best known for The Nibroc Trilogy, which includes Last Train to Nibroc (Drama League nomination for Best Play), See Rock City (In the Spirit of America Award), and Gulf View Drive (LA Weekly Theater Award nomination and Ovation Award nomination), all published by Dramatists Play Service.
An alumna of New Dramatists, Hutton is a member of the Dramatists Guild and Ensemble Studio Theatre. Her plays have been presented Off and Off-Off-Broadway, regionally, in London, and around the world.
Glenn Alterman: What was it like for you writing your first ten-minute play?
Arlene Hutton: I was an actor and director first and began writing short plays to create roles for myself and my friends. My first plays were short and came out in a rush, partly because for several years I had been performing competitive improv, which was a natural progression to playwriting.
Alterman: Was it your plan to write a ten-minute play, or did it just work out that way?
Hutton: Ten minutes seems to be just the amount of time needed to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Although I didn’t set out to write ten-minute plays, most of my short works fall into that time frame. If a play comes in at twelve minutes it can usually be cut to ten and is all the better for the edits.
Alterman: Did you come up against any obstacles in writing your first ten-minute play? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?
Hutton: Well, I’d like to say there were many obstacles and I heroically rose to the occasion and fought my inner demons and overcame my fears, winning many battles; but to be honest, writing, performing, and producing short plays has taken me on the best journeys of my life and I’m happiest when I’m working on one, either writing or in the rehearsal room making the final changes.
Oddly enough, my earlier plays were easier to write, coming out fully formed, starting with an idea or a character and writing a first draft in one or two sittings. I even dreamed one play and wrote it immediately upon waking up. The challenges came later; acquired skill and knowledge led to judgment and self-consciousness. To overcome that I try to write the first draft as quickly as possible and do revisions after hearing actors read and respond to the work. I do a lot more rewriting now.
The biggest obstacle as a new playwright was getting produced and I solved that by presenting my short plays myself, first at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and then at the first two years of the New York Fringe Festival. Self-producing jump started my career.
Some of America’s best playwrights wrote short plays early in their careers—Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder.
Alterman: Do you find working on ten-minute plays any different from working on one-acts or full-lengths? If so, how?
Hutton: Ten-minute plays are instant gratification! A full-length play may not only take years to research and write, but can get stuck in readings and development for a long time before being produced. Theater companies often invite or commission ten-minute plays that are to be fully staged only a month or two later, and that’s lots of fun, to go so quickly from page to performance.
For several years I was privileged to be a writer for the Atrainplays, a 24-hour format where plays written while riding public transportation are presented off-book in front of an audience the very next day. Those were great events and the speed of creation was part of the experience.
I like to think of full-length plays as a series of one-acts, and I write each scene for a longer play as if it were basically a ten-minute play.
Alterman: What do you feel constitutes a good ten-minute play?
Hutton: It is about one thing, one moment in time, one issue, one conflict, a perfect miniature. The play starts in the middle of the conflict, joining a conversation already in progress. Like good improv, everything mentioned in the beginning gets reincorporated by the end. Something changes and the ending should be surprising but inevitable.
Alterman: What mistakes have you noticed writers make when working on ten-minute plays?
Hutton:
• The script doesn’t have page numbers.
• The play is a sketch, or an idea, rather than a play.
• The play is actually a 12- or 15-minute play wearing the costume of a smaller font and masquerading as a shorter work.
• The play has multiple scenes. Sometimes that can work, but in general it’s best to have the play take place in real time.
• The play takes too long getting to the point. The first page or two of the first draft are usually about the playwright getting to know the characters.
• The story doesn’t answer the Passover question: why is this day different?
• Too much of the dialogue is spoken subtext; actors can bring so much to the piece through behavior.
• The play is an argument instead of a conflict.
• The characters are only talking instead of doing.
• The play has a promising beginning and a disappointing ending.
• The play ends too cleverly, with an unjustified surprise or twist that has no setup.
• The play is really a bigger story crammed into ten pages.
• The script has technical challenges that make it impossible to produce in an evening of other one-act plays.
• The play hasn’t had enough revisions. An eight-page play can go through eight drafts, each one fine-tuning the conflict, language, and characters. There is no margin for error in a ten-minute play. The key to a good ten-minute play is rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
Alterman: Do you have any additional advice for writers who are about to attempt their first ten-minute play?
Hutton: Read lots of plays. Go see evenings of one-act plays. Attend the Samuel French Short Play Festival. Deadlines are good; get together with other writers and create an event for yourselves. Have fun writing plays for specific actors. Write the first draft as quickly as you can, and then see what happens when you cut the first two pages.
Alex Broun is one of the world’s most performed ten-minute playwrights. Since he began writing ten-minute plays in the late 1990s he has had nearly 100 different ten-minute plays produced in over 800 productions. His most popular ten-minute play, 10,000 Cigarettes, has been produced over 150 times. To date his work has been performed in no fewer than 26 countries and translated into three languages. His Web site, www.alexbroun.com, where you can download and perform many of his plays free of charge, is one of the most popular websites in the world for ten-minute plays and has recorded over 10 million hits.
Glenn Alterman: What was it like for you writing your first ten-minute play? Was it your plan to write a ten-minute play, or did it just work out that way?
Alex Broun: I wrote my first ten-minute play without actually knowing I was writing a ten-minute play. I was living in South Africa in the late 1990s and I became interested in writing a suite of short plays all set on New Year’s Eve, with each play set in a different country. Many of my most popular ten-minute plays, like The First Fireworks and Saturday Night Newtown, Sunday Morning Enmore were written as a part of that project. But even then I loved the economy of stage time and compressing the action of the play into a very short time frame.
Alterman: Did you come up against any obstacles in writing your first ten-minute play? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?
Broun: The writing of my first ten-minute plays came surprisingly easy to me. The situations, characters, and even dialogue seemed to spring fully formed into my mind. It was just a matter of putting what was in my head on paper.
Alterman: Do you find working on ten-minute plays any different from working on one-acts or full-lengths? If so, how?
Broun: The wonderful thing about writing a ten-minute play is that you can write a first draft in a burst of a few hours. A full-length play may take months or years to write, and people with a busy schedule don’t often find the time. But you can write a ten-minute play in an afternoon or an evening. In a ten-minute play you can also explore an interesting situation or set of characters that may not hold for a full-length play. It is incredibly difficult to write a play that sustains an audience’s attention for a full night of theater, but I think it’s achievable for everybody to write a good ten-minute play. People used to say everyone has a novel in them. I’m not sure that’s the case, but I do think everyone has a good ten-minute play inside them. It’s just a matter of letting it come out on to the paper.
Alterman: What do you feel constitutes a good ten-minute play?
Broun: The same thing that makes a good long play: interesting characters, good dialogue, and an absorbing situation or story. The trick is knowing how big a story to tell or situation to explore in your play. If you choose too slight a story or situation, the play will come off like a skit; and if you choose too large a story or situation, it will come off underdone. You need to choose a story or situation that you can satisfactorily explore or tell in a ten-minute framework.
Alterman: What mistakes have you noticed writers make when working on ten-minute plays?
Broun: The most common mistake I find is that writers write short films rather than short plays. We are so bombarded by TV, film, and screen images in the modern world that it’s really hard to think in stage. Try to visualize your play happening on stage, rather than film.
Think about what you can write that will be interesting for actors to act, directors to direct, and an audience to watch. Our job as playwrights is to make the doing as interesting as possible for the people watching. Other mistakes are clumsy dialogue or too much exposition in the dialogue. Ask yourself, would your characters really say that?
Also often writers have interesting situations or starting points, but then they don’t explore them. To write a good ten-minute play you have to have a good idea, but you also have to execute it well. So many ten-minute plays start with a good idea but the writer doesn’t execute it well.
Alterman: Do you have any additional advice you have for writers who are about to attempt their first ten-minute play?
Broun: Turn off the inner critic and just start writing. You don’t know what you’ll come up with unless you try. And remember, very few scripts come out perfect the first time. You can go back and revise your play later on, but you need to get something down on paper first. That first draft will be the raw material that you use to shape your play, the mound of clay from which the finished sculpture will emerge. So just write it!
Rich Orloff is a prolific author of short plays (mostly comedies), which have had over 800 productions on six continents (and a staged reading in Antarctica). The plays have been published in The Art of the One-Act, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, three editions of the annual Best Ten-Minute Plays series, and five editions of the annual Best American Short Plays. Playscripts has published 60 of his short plays in eight volumes. He’s also written a dozen award-winning, full-length comedies. For more information, see www.richorloff.com.
Glenn Alterman: What was it like for you writing your first ten-minute play? Was it your plan to write a ten-minute play, or did it just work out that way?
Rich Orloff: I wrote my first pair of short plays in the early 1980s, shortly after I joined a playwriting workshop in Los Angeles run by the wonderfully nurturing playwright Oliver Hailey. This was when the ten-minute play form was just beginning to get attention, and the workshop had just gotten acclaim for 24 Hours, a production of 24 short plays (in two parts), each one set during a different hour of the day.
I was a novice playwright then, eager to write plays but overwhelmed by the challenge. As I watched that production, I remembered conversations between my mom and my grandmother, which developed into a quiet, slice-of-life comedy called Gram Folds the Laundry. Meanwhile, Oliver was planning a new production of plays, each set during a different month of the year. I wasn’t sure if Oliver would like my play, but I didn’t know what else to write. A friend jokingly suggested I write a play with lots of attractive women in it. From that remark, I got the idea for Four Extremely Attractive Women Sitting Around Fantasizing About Rich Orloff.
Ever since then, I’ve loved the form and its possibilities, either for capturing a moment in time, as in Gram, or getting a crazy notion and running with it, as in Four Women.
Alterman: Did you come up against any obstacles in writing your first ten-minute play? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?
Orloff: As with writing plays of any length, both plays went through several drafts of shaping and toning. I moved moments around, so that the action in the plays would continue to build. I cut moments I liked but which proved to be extraneous. Ten-minute plays don’t allow for any fat.
Alterman: Do you find working on ten-minute plays any different from working on one-acts or full-lengths? If so, how?
Orloff: The biggest difference is that I get to type “THE END” months earlier than I do for a full-length. Writing a play of any length takes commitment, and I’m never sure how long that commitment will take. It can feel great creating a draft of a short play relatively quickly and having something to look at.
Alterman: What do you feel constitutes a good ten-minute play?
Orloff: The best short plays usually start with a situation the audience can grasp quickly (even if the situation turns out to be different from what is initially assumed), engages the audience in its journey, and has a surprising twist near the end. The surprise can be moving or comedic, but it shouldn’t just be about plot. It should reflect on the theme and story that have built to that moment.
Alterman: What mistakes have you noticed writers make working on ten-minute plays?
Orloff: The first mistake is probably the most obvious: Just as a short story is different from a novel, a short play is different from a full-length. The story should fit the length, instead of someone cramming a story into ten minutes just to create a ten-minute play. Death of a Salesman is not a good idea for a ten-minute play. A short play should feel like a fully developed piece and not a synopsis for a longer play.
A common mistake in comedies: There’s a difference between a play (which has characters and an arc, regardless of length) and a sketch (where the main goal is to be funny). I’ve written both, and many of my comedies are a blend of the two. I usually search for an arc to my story, even in something that seems like a sketch. I always try to remember which form I’m working in, and I make different decisions based on what mix of play and sketch I’m writing. Sometimes I watch a short comedy, and I think, “The playwright hasn’t decided what form this is.” All plays create worlds, and all worlds have rules. Know the world of your play.
Alterman: Do you have any additional advice for writers who are about to attempt their first ten-minute play?
Orloff: First and foremost, have fun! Why not?
Beyond that, my main advice to a writer about to write his or her first short play is to write at least four or five. You’ll learn along the way, and you’ll discover what works and doesn’t work for you. One of the pleasures in writing a short play is that I get to work in different genres and explore different ideas. My collection Couples includes a light comedy (Matterhorn), a topical satire (Oh Happy Day), a Pinteresque piece (Lion Tamer), a poetic monologue (Invisible Woman), a drama inspired by the works of Edward Hopper (Afternoon Sun), an irreverent comedy about a usually serious subject (Right Sensation), a drama inspired by a true story I heard (Class Dismissed), and a play where my main goal was to let my bile out (Heart of Fire). Eight different worlds and moods. Writing these plays stretched me, and I’ve used what I’ve learned when I write my full-lengths.
A few basic bits of advice:
• Hear the play aloud. I inevitably learn things about my plays by hearing them that I’d never learn just by reading them. Key things I listen for include when a play drags or when a sentence is difficult for an actor to say.
• When you’ve revised the play, hear the play aloud again. You’ll still learn things.
• Get feedback. You don’t have to agree with it, and you shouldn’t always agree with it. But if several people have problems with something, listen to them. They may be wrong with their diagnosis, but there’s probably something behind what they say.
• Have fun! Agony just gets in the way.
• Learn what the most conducive creative environment is for you. I write on a chair or a couch, not at my desk. (Too much pressure!) I write my rough drafts on “used” paper (otherwise headed for the recycling heap). I tried writing a play a couple of years ago on lined paper. It didn’t work as well. It might for you, but not for me. Everyone develops their own technique.
• Finally, have fun! The audience hopes to have fun, whether it’s to be amused or moved or even devastated by what they see on stage. You’re entitled to have fun, too.