Script a five minute play
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With a short play, you simply don’t have time to employ a lot of fancy effects, and because short plays tend to be performed in smaller spaces, you probably won’t have access to the technical setup to achieve them anyway. Remember: short plays are all about substance and not flash. If you get stuck trying to figure out what they need, try thinking about what it is your character fears the most. Whatever your character needs, they should need it now. If you were writing an Oscar-like character in a short play, you might play around with Oscar’s messiness and see what kind of dramatic tension you can create out of it.ĭramatic characters should be driven by an urgent, pressing need, and this is especially true in a short play. One of Oscar’s notorious traits is that he’s a bit of a slob. For example, take full-length character Oscar Madison from Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Comedy is all about exaggeration and surprise, so how can you exaggerate your character’s quirky trait? Or perhaps your character behaves in surprising ways.
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This is especially helpful if you’re writing a comedy. I like to pick a couple of defining attributes or characteristics that I know I can get a lot of mileage out of. But there are still plenty of ways to make your characters interesting. There just isn’t enough time to really flesh them out, so don’t worry about crafting a Hamlet or a Blanche DuBois. It’s All About CharacterĪs you might have guessed, characters in a short play tend to be more one-dimensional than those in a full-length. But in a short play, that’s at least halfway through the play! So, you have to start your play much deeper into the story so you can get to the dramatic “meat” quickly. In a full-length play, your inciting incident might happen around page nine or ten. It also means you need to arrive at your inciting incident and reach the climax much sooner. You have a limited amount of time to convey information about your characters and the story, so you have to cherry-pick the most important information the audience needs to know and then find creative ways to incorporate it into your script as early as you can. In a full-length play, you have plenty of time to weave in information about the characters and their backstories. So, what’s all that mean for your short play? In a nutshell, short play structure follows the same pattern as a full-length play, it’s just much more condensed. The denouement is the resolution, where the story is wrapped up and a new sense of balance is established in the characters’ worlds. And when that stuff really hits the fan, we call that the climax. We call that the inciting incident, and it’s the inciting incident that makes the dramatic stuff in the play happen. But then something happens to disrupt the balance. Everything in the characters’ world is normal (whatever that normal is for the characters). Most plays (at least those that follow traditional play structure) begin with a sense of balance. Great! Now what? It’ll be helpful to understand basic play structure first. So, you’re ready to dive in and start writing. A good way to gauge the running time of your play is to assume that every page will take about one minute of stage time. There’s no hard and fast rule about how long a short play should be, but if you plan to submit your work to play festivals or contests, there will most likely be time restrictions or a page length minimum/maximum requirement. If your play is running more than thirty minutes, it probably falls into the one-act category.
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A short play can really be anything from one minute to about twenty minutes long, although many tend to fall in the ten-minute range. This is one of those questions that has lots of different answers. Let’s take a look at a few things you’ll want to consider as you begin to tackle your short play. In the past, short plays were written off (pun intended) as a “weaker” or “easier” genre, but the short play has become increasingly recognized and respected as a legitimate dramaturgical form. If you’re interested in dabbling in playwriting but aren’t sure how to get started, a short play might be a great way in.