Wednesday, December 31, 2008

9 Assumptions about Writing Plays

To end the year 2008, I'm posting an in-class assignment I gave myself and my UArts students. In response to Jose Rivera's "36 Assumptions about Writing Plays", each of us came up with nine of our own. I offer mine (and would love to know yours):

1. The play must be impossible to exist in any other form.

2. The play must make us all experience pain in some kind of satisfying, delightful, intense and memorable way.

3. It should have an elephant in it.

4. People who see it should revisit the play in their dreams.

5. If it creates anything less than a riot (internally or externally) the play is a failure.

6. Every play should risk everything.

7. It should be written free of embarrassment, but instead, a proclaiming of everything the writer is ashamed of loving deeply.

8. It is not a play if there is no death or birth.

9. The form of the play follows the content, which obeys the characters-- a chambered nautilus, ever expansive, working itself from the inside out.



ROMERO