Alterman - Writing the ten-minute play a book for playwrights and actors who want to write plays

Copyright 2013 by Glenn Alterman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2013 by Limelight Editions

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Grateful Acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint these plays.

On the Edge, by Craig Pospisil. Copyright 2005 by Craig Allan Pospisil. On the Edge was produced by the Vital Theater Company (Stephen Sunderlin, artistic director) in New York City as part of Vital Signs VIII on October 30, 2003. For permission to produce this play, contact Dramatists Play Service, 440 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016, , 212-683-8960.

The Popcorn Sonata, by Jenny Lyn Bader. Used by permission of the author. For production rights, contact the playwrights representative, Jack Tantleff, Paradigm, 360 Park Avenue South, 16th Floor, New York, NY, 10010, .

The Pain in the Poetry, by Glenn Alterman. Used by permission of the author. For production rights, contact Playscripts, Inc. 450 Seventh Avenue, Suite 809, New York, NY, 10036, .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBNs: 978-0-8791-0879-3 (ePub); 978-0-8791-0880-9 (Mobi)

www.limelighteditions.com

To the actors who have asked me over the years, How do you become a playwright?

Contents

To all the actors that have performed in my ten-minute plays all over the world, and the directors who directed them, thank you.

To all the theater companies that produced my ten-minute plays in their ten-minute play festivals, thank you.

Id like to personally thank Francine Tory for her tremendous help in putting this book together.

Thank you to all the playwrights, publishers, and producers who gave up their time and allowed me to interview them for this book. Your contribution is appreciated.

Id also like to thank John Cerullo, Marybeth Keating, and all the folks at Limelight Editions for your help in the writing of this book.

Chapter 1

Ive written this book for playwrights (of all levels) who want to learn how to master the art of writing a ten-minute play. This book can be a valuable add-on to the knowledge you already have about writing plays. Writing a ten-minute play is more than just condensing a story. The form and demands are very specific, and even success as a playwright of full-length plays doesnt necessarily mean you can successfully write ten-minute plays. Theyre similarbut different.

This book is also written for actors who have never written a play. I was, and still am, an actor. As youll discover in my bio, I more or less fell into playwriting. It all began with writing my first ten-minute play. In this book I guide actors through the process of learning how to write a ten-minute play, beginning with the skills, knowledge, and experience you already have as an actor. Actors may discover, as I did, that its really not that far a stretch from being an actor to writing plays. The ten-minute play is one of the best ways to learn about playwriting.

And finally, this book is for those people who have never written a play, but always wanted to. The ten-minute play is a great way to start. Ive included basic information on playwriting that should be helpful to you.

Over the years I have taken several playwriting classes and joined several playwriting groups. One thing that Ive learned is that the craft of writing plays, whether its a ten-minute play or a full-length, can be approached from many points of view. It is not an exact science. What Ive attempted to do in this book is to distill much of the information Ive learned over the years about playwriting from my personal experiences, from playwriting classes, from the books Ive read on playwriting, from discussions with successful ten-minute playwrights, and from producers of ten-minute play festivals.

My goal was to get as many points of view on this subject as possible. Youll notice that in some of the interviews there are similar responses to the interview questions, while in others there are different ones. Ill let you, the reader, judge which answers are the most helpful to you.

When I was a young actor I studied with many of the great acting teachers in New York, from Stella Adler to Mira Rostova, Terry Schreiber, Michael Howard, Wynn Handman, Larry Moss, and on and on. I loved studying and learning about the craft of acting. I learned different things from each of the teachers. Similarly, I want this book to show you the many approaches there are to writing the ten-minute play (or any play).

About forty years ago I was a working actor. I performed in plays, in theater, and on TV. About thirty years ago I became a writer: first a monologue writer, then a book writer, and then a playwright.

Like many actors, I was always looking for new monologues for auditions. It was a tiresome process. Each monologue that Id find seemed to have something wrong with it, something that eliminated it from my being able to use it for auditions. It was a very frustrating situation. I was constantly monologue-hunting when I could have been better spending my time looking for acting work.

One day, on a whimwell, actually out of total frustrationI decided to try to write my own monologue. Considering that I had no background in creative writing, I knew it was going to be a challenge. After all those years of monologue hunting, I certainly knew what I wanted. The monologue that I was going to write would have a beginning, middle, and end; a conflict of some kind; and a character that interested me, one I could identify with. But, most importantly, it had to have a good yarn, an engaging story.

It was trial and error for quite a while. But one thing I gradually began to realize was that I could use my acting skills to help me write monologues. Some of the same skills that Id used as an actor to create characters in plays, I also could use to create characters in monologues. After a few very long, trying weeks I completed my first monologue. I felt a tremendous sense of achievement.

I was studying acting at that time with Wynn Handman in New York. When I brought my new monologue to class one night and nervously performed it, it went over very well. Everyone wanted to know where I had found this great new monologue. And so it began: I started writing monologues for the other actors in the class. This went on for months. At each class someone would be performing one of my monologues. The more I wrote, the more I realized I was on to something. I started to develop more efficient ways of working. I learned more from my mistakes than from my successes.

At the end of that first year I had completed over a hundred and twenty-five monologues (not to mention the dozens of discarded ones). I was now what I considered officially a monologue writer. My monologues became very popular around the New York theater scene, and eventually my first book of original monologues, Street Talk: Character Monologues for Actors, was published by Smith & Kraus. The book was quite successful. Without making a long story longer, many books of original monologues followed, and then many theater-related books. Somehow I had gone from being a monologue writer to being a book writer.