Formatting Basics for Play Production

Series Summary

“You need three things in the theater - the play, the actors and the audience.” This quote is undeniably true. In order to make a good production, you do not have to have the expensive props, the professional actors, or the grand performance space. While this may give an extra edge to a production, the most important elements in theater is the effort that is put into it. All you really need is a dedicated cast, a creative set, and a eager audience. Theater is the cornerstone for appreciation of the arts. When a group of people bond together in the task of creating something with great enthusiasm, the true spirit of theater is manifested.

In this expert video series, learn about how to produce a play. Steve Caverno shows you how to produce your own play. Get tips on playwrights, script writing, finding actors and developing characters. Get started today with these easy instructional videos from the experts at ExpertVillage.

Video Transcript

"STEVE CAVERNO: Steve Caverno, on behalf of Expert Village, here today to talk to you about formatting and play production. We're going to talk about some formatting basics. What is format? Format is the way the words are laid out on the page. So, on a given page, you're going to have dialogue. You're going to have set description. You'll have action. You're going to have sound queues. And you'll have directions such as blackouts. And there's certain ways to make these more appealing to the eyes. Typically, in a dramatist's script, you'll have the words laid out to where it's all laid out on one page. Whereas, what we're doing is a beginning and then we're going to have some white space there. So, we'll have some description. And so in this way, in dramatist's scripts, you're really trying to economize, you know. You got these scripts that maybe on the baseline. You don't want actors who are reading this rehearsal to have to carry this huge script around with them, so you economize it. Now, if you're sending this to a literary manager, you want them to be able to make notes. You want them to be able to read the act easily. And also, this is good because it gives you an approximation for how long the page is, usually about a minute a page, if you go this way. So, this gives you a more formatted look of things, where this is more about economizing the space on the page. These are some of the ways that format functions in a playwriting process."