Two Short Plays: My Boston Theatre Marathon entries

My playwriting discussion group has a guy who hates the 10 minute play.  Actually, to be fair, he hates that the predominance of the 10 minute play tempts playwrights to try and cram 15-20 minutes worth of story into 10 minutes for the sake of getting them entered into contests.

I'm someone who loves the form of the 10 minute play.  I tend to write towards constructing moments rather than resolving plots or exploring all aspects of an idea, and 10 minutes seems to be a good length in which to build the machinery that will unveil the perfect moment.  That's not to say that I don't write longer pieces (I'll get to those eventually on this blog), but the short play has been in many ways some of the most rewarding things I've written.



In Boston, the main event for short plays is the Boston Theatre Marathon, an annual event run by the Boston Playwrights Theatre every spring in which 45 original 10 minute plays by local playwrights are produced in one day.  Right now hundreds of fellow playwrights in the area are waiting for the word as to whether their play will be chosen or whether they'll get the very polite rejection letter.  From noon to 10pm plays are presented non-stop, produced by 45 different local companies.  I had my first play produced in the BTM in 2002, and since then I've had four other plays that have made the cut.  Pretty much, I'm batting .500 which isn't bad.

I'll blog about the five that have been produced later, as well as the ones that have not been chosen, but this blog post is about my two entries for the 2011 BTM.

Advance Screening

I've found out that I tend to write about different media a lot.  I've written multiple plays about people who make movies, screenplays about people who are doing podcasting, a novel about the comic book industry.  It's something that I keep returning to.  Advance Screening is about people who critique movies, the old guard newspaper critic and the new school movie blogger, their relationship to the movies and the culture and what they expect from it. 

The Cubicle Story

The second entry is kind of an absurd take on office working.  When you work in a cubicle, you have walls which give you the illusion of privacy.  It'd be easy for someone to stick their head over the wall like a puppet.  In this play, I imagine that the coworkers who are annoyingly talking a little too loudly on the phone are actually puppets, and play variations on the put upon worker and the noisy neighbors. I've never seen a puppet play in the BTM before, so this might be a first.

Do I think either of these will be chosen for the BTM?  I really don't know.  The festival has gotten more popular every year, and with that the competition has gotten harder.  Each of the plays could probably use one more pass to tighten things up.  The Cubicle Story's ending in particular needs revisiting.  I'm reasonably hopeful but won't be surprised by either outcome.  But if these don't make the grade, there's always next year.