I have noticed a lot of
opportunities for ten-minute plays. This amazes me.
Who
produces ten-minute plays? Who wants them? Who reads
them? What is the purpose of a ten-minute play? Are
requests for ten-minute plays a joke of some sort?
I can't believe this is serious.
Please give me your take
on them. I can't believe anyone would write or want
to see or have any use
for a ten-minute
play.
—Dumbfounded in Duluth
Dear Dumbfounded,
Have you
stumbled upon the right institutional dramaturg here.
Actors Theatre produces ten-minute plays (at
least fifteen a year, between a dozen with the early-career
actors in our Apprentice program and 3-4 in the Humana
Festival of New American Plays). With our co-administrators,
City Theatre of Miami (who produce probably three
times as many as we do over the course of a year)
we read 1,300 entries to the National Ten-Minute
Play Contest. We want them, we read them, we produce
them.
So, why? It’s a great question, and I
can answer for my institution. We began the National
Ten-Minute
Play Contest in 1989 at the same time we changed the
submission requirements for the Humana Festival of
New American Plays. At the time, we were receiving
some 2,000 full-length submissions, far more than we
could reasonably read during our reading cycle. So
the powers that were (Jon Jory and Michael Bigelow
Dixon) tightened our submission guidelines (see www.actorstheatre.org/humana_submission.htm for details on our current policy) and began the contest—which
has a $1,000 prize—to make sure we had a way
for playwrights we don’t know to send full pieces
our way. This has been tremendously useful to Actors
Theatre in a couple ways:
•
It has successfully introduced us to hundreds of writers
whose work we go on to produce, in ten-minute or full-length
form (the first piece we produced of Jordan Harrison’s,
who has had two full-length plays produced here,
was his ten-minute play Fit for
Feet; one of the scenes
of Jennifer Haley’s Neighborhood
3: Requisition of Doom, which was in our most recent Humana Festival,
was a finalist for the 2006 National Ten-Minute Play
Festival).
• We have short, interesting plays for our young acting
company to work on as a part of their season-long
training with us.
•
We’ve published nine volumes of ten-minute plays,
getting (not always) meager royalties to playwrights,
short plays onto the stages of colleges and introducing
almost twenty years worth of undergrads and others
to Actors Theatre’s new work.
•
We have a great way to train our interns on reading
plays—there’s nothing like reading a
couple hundred ten-page plays to learn a lot about
what works
on stage, what might be less successful, and your
own prejudices and taste, which are essential in
making
sure that scripts of all lengths are given a chance
to stand on their own merits.
•
And also, they’re fun—good ten-minute plays
aren’t all funny, they aren’t all any given
tone. In a festival, they’re a great way to showcase
a variety of tones and ambitions in a short time (this
year we’ve got a goofy comedy about break ups,
bread and mimes; a haunting drama about the 2006
war in Lebanon; a thoughtful comedy about how lives
are
remembered; and a mad-cap comedy about two people
with sock puppets on their hands).
That said, of course ten-minute
plays aren’t
for everyone, and as a writer, you know what lights
your imagination, what kind of limitations are exciting
and which are uninteresting. Poetry isn’t for
everyone. Short stories aren’t for everyone.
There’s a limit to what a writer can do in ten
minutes of stage time, and speaking as someone who
has read thousands of ten-minute plays, not everything
people think is stage-worthy is actually interesting.
Plenty of ten-minute plays I read are sketches, not
plays; have punchlines instead of intriguing resolutions;
are didactic or pretentious or outright boring. But
at their best, a ten-minute play can be a glimpse of
something vast, a slam-dunk insight into the ways of
a family, the foibles of dating, the transcendence
of time in the briefest of encounters.
So. I promise
we’re serious about wanting ten-minute
plays. And that I won’t take any playwright less
seriously for not being interested in writing one.
Best,
Adrien
Dear
Duluth,
Courtesy of Adrien-Alice, you’ve just heard
from the outstanding
venue for the ten-minute play. Portland Center Stage, where I work, may
be more
representative of theaters in general in that we do not have production
opportunities for short plays except for local writers. And even that’s
a special case—we have a vibrant playwriting group here, aptly called
PlayGroup, and we’ve assembled group shows out of short pieces three
times now. These events are always very popular, and I recommend them to
any writer’s
group as a unifying and galvanizing artistic activity.
But anyway. There
are venues out there for short plays. At first it may seem like it takes
more work to unearth them, but it doesn’t, really. If
you’ve already taken care to ensure you’re getting every
playwriting newsletter out there, you’ll come across these venues
as a matter of course. To mention just one exceptional publication, the
Austin Script
Works
newsletter, edited by Christina J. Moore, is a treasure trove of intriguing
submission opportunities.
So this begs the question of why you would want
to write a ten-minute playlet. First of all, the sheer exercise uses
a different set of creative
muscles.
Just as the compression of a short story differs from the profound
character development possible in a novel, in a short piece you can control
audience
reception more precisely—and spin totally different narratives—than
you can with a full-length play.
And practically speaking, a short piece
can be a great entrée for
you into a large sphere of awareness of your work. At PCS we get
thousands of script queries a year, and we try to be disciplined
about requesting
only the relative few we believe could really have a life here. Occasionally,
though, a writer will send a ten-minute play as a form of calling
card. It’s
not a formal submission, since the playwright knows we can’t
produce it, but it’s a quick way to get some sense of his or
her creative facility.
I’m speaking strictly for myself here—I
don’t know that
all literary departments appreciate the short play in this way, so
don’t
embark upon a scattershot mailing. But at least for me, a good ten-minute
piece can be a handy introduction to a writer as well as a promising
prelude of full-lengths to come.
— Mead
I
read with great interest and respect Adrien-Alice’s passionate recounting
of the role ten-minute plays have in the creative and institutional life
of Actors Theatre of Louisville. And having attended the Humana Festival
numerous times, I can say that I have vivid memories of a couple of wonderfully
theatrical, well-structured, funny and/or moving ten-minute plays. And yet.
I find it revelatory of the place that ten-minute plays have in the broader
landscape of playwriting in America that many of the reasons Adrien-Alice
gave for the instigation and support of ten-minute plays grew out of the
institutional needs of ATL—too many full-length submissions to read,
a way to train interns to read scripts, a way of generating work for young
actors—and not because it was a form that playwrights were actually
writing in.
And I guess that’s what makes me queasy
about the explosion of ten-minute play “opportunities”—that
they are the creation of well-meaning people at institutions who truly do
love playwrights and
are desperate to
give opportunities and resources to artists but that they are little more
than an institutional construct. I don’t really buy that they are
a form on par with short stories and poetry. If they were, if playwrights
really
found them to be a meaningful and inspiring vessel for their thoughts and
emotions, then wouldn’t we have artists who stuck with the form,
created a body of work of ten-minute plays and became the Wallace Stevens
or Flannery
O’Conner of the ten-minute dramatic form? Now, goodness knows, some
of our greatest writers have chosen to write plays in form and length shorter
than a traditional two- or three-act play—Albee and Churchill and
Wellman and Shepard—but the length and shape of those plays came
organically from the writers—not from some imposed contest-like limit.
It feels to me like the ten-minute play is more on par with the standard
way we audition
actors—16 bars and a three-minute monologue and if we like you we’ll
let you show us what you can really do. Having sat through even more auditions
than I have ten-minute plays, I get that this is an efficient way to expedite
what can be an overwhelming process—whether it’s seeing 100
actors for one role or reading 2,000 submissions for 6-10 slots in a season
or festival,
but, for my money, neither the three-minute audition nor the ten-minute
play are anything more than cursory introductions to the real thing.
Now,
aside from serving as an introduction or audition to a theatre that you
hope will then commission or produce your full-length plays, is there
any creative reason to embark on writing a ten-minute play and having
it produced? Probably. I think any kind of writing is better that not writing
at all. It may generate the spark of an idea that will lead you to something
larger. You might meet actors or a director that you love. Any opportunity
to create something theatrical and to engage in the process of collaborating
with people has worth, I think, no matter what the circumstances or the
limitations of the form. But there are a lot of little projects out there
that you can
become involved in—writing ten-minute plays for contests, or plays
to accompany museum exhibitions, or plays to be done in cars—and
as an artist I think you have to judge for yourself whether those kinds
of opportunities
fuel your creativity and inspire you to think differently about the possibilities
of live performance or become a kind of busywork that keeps you from settling
in and finding your true voice and your own organic form and process. I’ve
seen it happen both ways.
— Elissa |
