Intermission Hook in the Plot

Video Transcript

"STEVE CAVERNO: Hi, I'm Steve Caverno on behalf of Expert Village. And today, I'll be talking to you about developing your plot. Now, we're going to talk about the intermission hook. If you're working with a full length play, you're going to have an intermission, a time when the audience gets to catch their breath and go out and use the bathroom. You know what I mean? It's going to be an hour and you might have a drink in the lobby before so--you want to give the audience a second to catch their breath. And so, this is an opportunity where you can do that. In Romeo and Juliet--it's actually a five-act play. In Shakespeare's time, it was staged in five acts. In the modern day, it's usually divided into two acts. And when you're doing that, when you're looking at a play and trying to decide when to divide that, Romeo and Juliet is a good example. We'll look at the play. You might have your story laid out but you might not have made an act division. So, you want to look at a place that has a good hook, a place where it has a question. "Oh, no. What's going to happen now?" One of those questions. So, during the course of the play, a lot of things happen. But one thing happens that really drives the play into the last act; it takes the options off the table. So, once there were a dozen options that could happen and then that's narrowed down to only a few. In Romeo and Juliet, this is where Romeo is banished. Romeo has just killed Tybalt to avenge his friend Mercutio's death at the hands of Tybalt. And the Prince comes on stage and says, "Romeo, thou art banished it." And Romeo is banished from Verona where his one true love lives. And so, this--at this moment, this propels Juliet to take all of the actions, to fake her death and this propels Romeo to get the poison and this propels all the action into the end of the play. So, if you end on this note, people are going to say, if they haven't seen Romeo and Juliet before, they're going to say, "Oh, my God. What's going to happen? Now, he's been banished." It's one of those moments like, if you're watching TV or something, when they cut to commercial and you're like, "Oh, my god. Oh, my God. Okay, I gotta grab a Coke and get back here. I gotta make sure I'm back here for the next week." Sometimes, if they end the show and they end it on such a cliffhanger, it is described as a cliffhanger. You're at this cliff and then they just leave you hanging off the side of it and you're waiting for what's going to happen next. That's how you build dramatic tension and that's how you build an item that's going to direct--to bring the play into a barreling role towards the end."