Playwriting I is a 10-week workshop, which includes lectures, exercises, and the critiquing of student projects. It’s for beginners or anyone who wants to brush up on the fundamentals. Farther down, you can view a syllabus for this course.
The lights in the theater dim, and a play begins. Nothing beats the intensity of actors sharing the same air as the audience. The laughs and gasps and tears happen live, on the spot. And a play can be staged anywhere, from an empty space surrounded by folding chairs to a plush Broadway house.
A play will not soar in performance unless it’s great on the page. Here you’ll learn how to write for the stage and how to market your work.
Whether you seek to write one-acts or full-lengths or musicals, we’ll show you how to write plays that draw the big applause.
This course gives you a firm grounding in the basics of playwriting craft and gets you writing a short play (or two) or a full-length play. Course components:
- Lectures
- Writing exercises
- Workshopping of student projects (each student presenting work two times)
Online classes
- Week 1
- Introduction to Playwriting: Theatre today. Types of plays. Getting ideas. Finding your own way. A play is a blueprint for a production.
- Week 2
- Character: The cast—protagonist, antagonist, the others. Creating characters. Finding dimension. Showing actions. Objectives.
- Week 3
- Structure/Plot: Finding the spine of the story. The drive of characters. Mapping out the events. Beginning/middle/end. Turning points and climax.
- Week 4
- Theatricality: Approaches to theatricality—naturalism, realism, poetic realism, pure theatre, surreal theatre. Dealing with acting, directing, and design elements.
- Week 5
- Dialogue: Dialogue’s illusion of reality. Compression. Characterization through dialogue. Subtext. Exposition. Heightened language.
- Week 6
- Scene: Scene defined. Amount and length of scenes. French scenes. Beats. Scene structure. Scene subtext. Stage directions.
- Week 7
- Setting/Pacing: Establishing time and place. How much time and space to cover. Shifting place. Shifting time. Slowing down and speeding up.
- Week 8
- Theme: Thoughts on theme. Do you pick your theme or does it pick you? Using theme to stay on track.
- Week 9
- Revision: Stages of revision. Readings. Adjusting in performance. What to watch for.
- Week 10
- Production: Preparing your work. Selling your plays. Representation. Finding a home. Putting on your plays.
Note: Content may vary among individual classes.
About
- The Online classes bring students from all over the globe to Gotham—New York City’s most famous writing school.
- The Online classes happen asynchronously—not in “real time.” You can participate in class any time, day or night, but the classes advance week-by-week, and certain things should be accomplished within that week-long session.
- You can take an Online writing class from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. The majority of our Online students are located in the U.S. but we also draw students from practically every country in the world.
- Tech support will be available.
- Aside from the convenience of time and location, you have a record of everything that transpires in class, which you can print out and keep for future reference. (The material is text and image, not video.)
