Introduction to Playwriting

Intended Student Outcomes, or, What This Course Is For: To complete this course, students will demonstrate their ability to:

- build a plot;

- create characters;

- understand what the words “action” and “motivation” mean;

- understand what plays are for, in terms of “theme” and “message”;

- exploit the limitations of live theatre and use them expressively.

In other words, “Introduction to Playwriting” is designed to introduce you to playwriting. So, since I have yet to find a better way to learn to write plays than by writing plays, each of you is going to write one: a first draft of a 15- to 30-minute-long one-act, on a topic of your choice (subject to some restrictions), under the guidance of the rest of the class, our T.A., and myself. The Play is due a week after the final class.

The students in this class will be divided into groups, called “labs”, of five or six students each. (In the first of our weekly videos, I mistakenly say “ten” students; this is incorrect.) Every student is to write five to ten pages of new material per week, and dis-tribute it on line to the other members of the student’s lab, our T.A., and myself. This ma-terial must contain both some dialogue and some notes, each week.

The material can be submitted at any time during the week, from just after mid-night on Monday morning to midnight on the following Sunday. This term, however, be-gins on Thursday, Sept. 6, so our first week is a 10-day “week,” running from just after midnight on Thursday morning, Sept. 6, to midnight on Sunday, Sept. 16. I will take advantage of that long first week by asking you to submit your first week’s material by midnight on that Sunday, Sept. 16.

Each student is also expected to read his or her lab-mates’ submissions, and write comments on the submissions; the comments, too, will be distributed to the other lab members. My T.A. and I will also read all of the submitted material and comments, and make our own contributions. The comments should not take the form of value judgments on the quality of your lab-mates’ work, but rather the form of suggestions on where to take the work next. (Praise and encouragement, however, are always helpful.)

The official name of this course is “Playwriting and Dramaturgy I”. “Drama-turgy” means reviewing, editing and helping with another person’s script. We all form inevitably warped impressions in our minds of our lab-mates’ work, and send them sug-gestions based on those inaccurate images. The playwright’s job is to sift among those suggestions and choose what works best for the play. Don’t by shy about taking an active part in the analysis and discussion of your lab-mates’ work. It helps them, of course: even feedback that wildly misunderstands the play can be helpful, suggestions that may seem silly are valued in this course, and the “dumb” idea often opens the door to a useful idea. But also, giving them your feedback both motivates them to help you when it’s your turn, and familiarizes you with the workshop process.

There are also four specific Assignments through the term, two of which are versions of a specific kind of exercise called a “Seven-Eleven”. I will describe each Assignmentin more detail in its own handout. Each Assignment is due by midnight on Sunday at the end of the week after it is assigned. There is one exception: Assignment 3 is due on Week 7, which, this term, is a shortened week to allow for our two-day midterm break (Oct. 25 & 26). Therefore your deadline for that assignment is extended to the following midnight, Monday night, Oct. 29. (Your deadline that week for the regular, un-graded weekly pages will still be Sunday, Oct. 28.)

            Finally, one more feature: we are going to use the video conferencing program “Zoom” to have a live, real-time group discussion among the members of your lab, with all our seven or eight faces on screen together (including myself, and, I hope, our T.A.), once during the term for each lab. These are yet to be scheduled. That discussion will be an informal conversation about how each of you are doing with your play, including sug-gestions from the rest of the lab for each individual student – pretty much the same sort of work we’ll be doing in written form during the rest of the term, but on this occasion, orally, and with faces to attach to the names.

A BRIEF SUMMATION of the Activities in the Course: Each week, there will appear on the website, under “Modules,” a video lecture on principles of playwriting, written by, directed by, and starring, me. There will also appear a written transcript of the text of each video. You are required either to watch these videos or to read their transcripts. You are expected to write five to ten pages of their play each week, and submit them to the other members of their Lab and to me and my T.A. (The pages to be submitted are not listed in the schedule below; they are due every week.) You will have four written Assignments. And on one occasion during the term for each Lab, as yet unscheduled, we will have a video conference and actually talk to each other in real time.