The One Act Play: Scene One

From your character bank please select two characters you would like to develop and use in a one-act play.

Most beginning playwrights start with short one-act plays. Usually these plays are anything between 15-minutes to about an hour long. In this way, the one-act is similar to a short story (not a short-short or sudden fiction) but has time to develop characters, perhaps in more than one scene, but usually consolidates time, setting, and number of characters. It generally deals with a single important action or incident in a character's life that is developed and examined through the play (as opposed to longer full length plays that have subplots). These plays are usually continuous in time, taking about the same amount of real time as the play takes to act. Theater companies usually produce more than one one-act at a time.

Some tips:
--Keep a single set (and try to keep the unity of time)
--Limit the number of characters (remember that small roles can be doubled, but this is not realistic so use it sparingly)
--Keeping your set and prop requirements simple is the key to being produced as an unknown playwright. Keep that in mind as you write.
--Remember your actors; make sure the part you are writing for them is interesting enough and compelling enough (this goes for the director as well).

Write a scene between 2-characters. Your scene should be at least 3 pages.