How to Construct Title Page for Plays

Video Transcript

"STEVE CAVERNO: Steve Caverno, on behalf of Expert Village, here today to talk to you about formatting and play production. The first thing we're going to talk about, as far as formatting goes, is your title page. This is an important element of the format process. What we have here is a title page for a play. This is basically going to introduce the reader to what your play is titled, who you are, and your contact information. This is just basically--you're not going to want to have a big scene with dragons fighting on here in a colorful font that says "Dragon Wars". I mean, that's going to be for the marketing process later. Really, you're just trying to get the information and be professional about it when you're sending this off to a literary manager. So, at first, you'll have your title underlined, there we have, "How I Learned to Write a Play". I have a play on the words of how to learn to drive. And then, right here, we have a play in one act or two acts, you can whatever length of play you have, or you could say a serial comedy or a comedy in one or two acts. You can kinda leave that up to whatever you wanted, however you want to define your play. Then, you'll have your name, Arthur Author, right here. And then further down the page, you'll have your contact information. There is no good sending your script off if they don't know how to get in touch with you if they love it and think it's going to be the next major play that will be produced in the country. So, you want to have your name, address, a phone number they can reach you at, and an email address that they can send you emails at. And also over here, you want to have the copyright number, a Writer's Guild of America number or a Library of Congress copyright. We're going to copyright a little later, but right now, these are some of the things you want to have on your title page. Also, if your play is based on another work, you can put that right under the Author, right there, based on a play. If you're writing a musical, you might have one person writing the words, another person writing the music. So, you can put "Book by Tom" and "Music by Sally", and then have that on there. In that way, you'll differentiate between who has ownership of this material in the play. But this is basically how you outline and layout a title page script."