So I’m in an Intro to Theatre course and I’ve got an assignment due in about 2 hours. I haven’t been procrastinating, I just cannot think of a single good idea. So I turn to the Teeming Millions for help.
I have to write the first five minutes of a play, to be expanded on later. It’s set in a bar, some whole in the wall, basically. A nighborhood watering hole. The play must include two - three characters, both male and female. There is no change of scene, stay in the main barroom. Must contain action, in the sense that they can’t just sit arround gossiping. The characters must have very different personalities. The professor should be able to tell them apart just from their speaking patterns. There must be some form of conflist. And of course, it has to last about 5 minutes.
So any ideas? I’m absolutely stuck. Everything I think of is cliched. She won’t accept anything that isn’t original.
Your first character is a bartender named Harold. He’s a big beefy man in his mid 20s with a penchant for calling everybody “Pal”. He loves to shoot the breeze and is generally a fun guy to hang out with. But tonight he’s in a foul mood because his girl dumped him earlier today. Which is probably a good thing because she was a tramp anyway, but the problem is that she dumped him for one of his regular patrons who’ll show up any minute named…
…Lisa. To top it off, she left him for a lesbian. And a hot one too, one who he’d had his eye on for some time, but backed away once he’d found out.
Harold is keeping busy by straightening up the bar. He keeps playing around with table arrangements, and his gaze keeps going over to the door, even though he clearly doesn’t want to look.
Lisa. Lisa is an easy-going, Jamaican immigrant that doesn’t speak the language so well. These language problems are one reason that Lisa doesn’t know that Harold was ever dating her current girlfriend, and why she has no idea that she’s got a penchant for trampishness. So when Lisa arrives at the bar, she’s feeling great. She announces to the bar that the first round is on her because she’s just "met a be-oo-tiful woo-man who go by dah name of . . .