How to Write Different Types of Stage Plays
There are two basic types of theatrical plays: comedies and tragedies. Within these two broad categories come many sub-categories, like farce, satire, problem plays and dozens of others. If you learn the basic requirements for playwriting, you can tackle any type of stage writing you want. In the original Greek plays, from which our theatrical tradition comes, comedies end in marriage and tragedies end in death. Today, plays do not follow such rigid guidelines, but the essential aspects of theater remain the same.
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Instructions
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Playwriting 101
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Choose a genre. You must decide what kind of play you want to write before you do anything else. The type of play you decide on will determine your narrative structure.
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Decide on the number of acts. Plays can have any number of acts, but most typically there are one, two, or three acts. The length of the play will be determined by the number of acts it has. Once you have decided on a number of acts, you will know how much room you have in your script with which to tell your story. Stage plays can run anywhere from ten minutes to more than two hours. Once you know roughly how long your play will be, you can focus on writing within your framework. Like poetry, stage plays are rigidly structured, but once you master the form, there is great freedom to experiment.
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Create a cast of characters. Keep it compact. Avoid writing so many people into each scene that the audience will be confused. Remember that your very first goal is to communicate a story, and too many characters will muddle a story. Less than seven is a good rule of thumb.
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Give the characters goals. Every character needs to have a goal at every moment of the play---in every scene, each character's lines must be focused on achieving an objective. This constant striving towards goals is what creates the driving energy of theater.
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Create obstacles. All the characters, in addition to needing goals, need to have obstacles at all times (until the very end). The failure of characters to achieve their goals is what creates suspense onstage. In comedies, this suspense is often funny. In a typical romantic comedy play, two characters may be onstage talking, but neither is properly communicating, and as the conversation progresses the characters become more and more tangled up in their misunderstanding. In a tragedy, on the other hand, two characters may be onstage talking, but refusing to listen to one another, which eventually leads to the death or misery of the characters.
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Tips & Warnings
1. Practice often, and you will learn to write better plays.
2. Read classic plays to gain a more thorough sense of the genres.
The theater business is very difficult to break into and equally difficult to make a living at. Be sure to spend lots of time developing your craft before attempting to sell your plays.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Stage Curtains image by Darragh Tobin from Fotolia.com
