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P L A Y W R I TING:
Build That Play!


Forest D. Feighner

FOREWORD

Can playwriting be taught? The skilled storyteller weaves together intrigue, suspense, and discovery with clear and imaginative language. Audiences find interest in well-developed characters, astonishing events, new locations, and stimulating times. The storyteller charms the audience throughout the entire action. Stories without end or purpose get boring and turn people away from the art. As crafts capable of holding an audience spellbound, drama and theatre can be taught.

This text is intended for the beginning playwright.

Playwriting is a craft as well as a form of artistic expression. Within the technical skills of any craft, there are fundamental artistic principles, such as unity, harmony, and balance. Artistic perspective fits within the framework of theory put into practice. In fact, aesthetic value is a part of the theory.
Perceiving order out of chaos and creating balance out of inequity are integral parts of the beauty of drama. Developing the dramatic imagination in creating engaging visions of mankind's place in the universe is a high calling. Drama engages in, answers, and then asks again for a new generation the fundamental questions: Who am I? What is the purpose of life? Where are we? Whom do you seek? What is the nature of creation? Why are we here? These questions should not be reserved only for scientific inquiry. Drama can provide enlightenment while giving truthful reflection of the times. By bringing wisdom, drama becomes radiantly entertaining.
Playwriting provides entertainment. Every night in theatres from Broadway houses to San Francisco studios, in community theatres, high school auditoriums, and college performance centers across the country, professionals and amateurs are creating drama. Visions of faraway places, romantic encounters, adventure, intrigue, familiar faces, and imaginative beings tantalize the observer's imagination and make one ponder their meaning. Watching fights, dances, acrobatics, and all manner of human movement strikes us as interesting, especially when given a dramatic purpose. The skillful playwright uses cultural perplexity as fuel for entertainment.
These WebPages will focus on the one-act play of about thirty minutes. The exercises in these WebPages have been classroom and production proven. Plays written in my playwriting class have been produced as part of Dramatic Activities of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and entered as participating productions in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival.
My students have used each of the WebPages's Tasks as a step in the process of writing the one-act play. Completion of one Task leads to the next and by the end of a fifteen-week semester, students complete the crafting of a thirty-minute one-act play.

•  Schedule of Tasks.
•  Requirements for Play.
•  Table of Contents
•   Playwright's Resources and References can be found at http://www.erie.net/%7Efeighner/theatre.html

Back to Playwriting

Schedule of Tasks | Requirements for Play | Table of Contents

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Copyright c 1999 Forest Delano Feighner, EUP.
designed by Forest Dean Feighner, 1999
for Playwriting: Build that Play!