The Historical 10-Minute Play, One Act, or Full Length Project

Charles Busch often sets his plays in a variety of historical settings. While most of these are the 20th century, because of the distance from our own time period, these settings can be useful to create satire, parody, or burlesque. Click on these vocabulary words ("burlesque" particularly,) to learn about the word and term. Know these for the upcoming test.

Our next playwright (August Wilson) will also use historical periods for his plays.

Please begin the writing activity below:

Writing Activity:

Brainstorm historical settings that you find interesting.
From your list select the one (or few--yes, you can combine time periods as you need to) that you feel has the most creativity, the most relevance to our society today, or the one that most intrigues you.

Spend some time examining the internet for information about your historical period. Do this relatively quickly, but take notes and begin thinking of potential plots or significant events that happened at that place and time or people who lived during that time period. Use your notes and brainstorming to PLAN your story a bit before you just right in and write, then get stuck and bother your neighbor. Fill out the notesheet for participation credit. Hand in at the end of class.

After your brainstorming period, decide on a few characters. Write brief descriptions of who these people might be. Start with the most interesting major character and work your way from there. Don't worry about incidental or minor characters yet.

Marking period 3 Project:
Decide on the scope of your play. If you think you have enough material for a one act (equivalent to two ten-minute plays), then decide to write a one-act play. If you feel you have two separate ideas OR you feel the idea you have for your play is smaller in scope, choose to write two ten-minute plays. Each play will count as your marking period grade. Finally, for those of you who would like an "A" for this marking period (some restrictions apply), you may choose to write a FULL LENGTH play. This is like two one-act plays, 4 10-minute plays, (or around 40 pages or more). By the way, yes, you can opt to write 2 one-act plays or 4 10-minute plays instead of one FULL LENGTH play.