I’m toying with the idea of tossing my hat in the ring for a local fringe festival lottery (to potentially get a play produced). For those of you unfamiliar with fringe festivals, in essence they get together a bunch of playwrites and provide venues, tech-crew & promotion for a one or two week run. The public can see the plays for relitively little money. Much More Info Here
So while I have a passion for theatre, I have little to no experience as a playwrite. I’m curious as to what sort of time comitment would be involved in just the writing aspect of a 1-hour script. How many pages of content might that be? I’m sooo over my head on this project but it really sounds worth a try.
I dunno much about stage plays, but screenplays in proper format average about one page per minute. So if you were writing a movie or TV show you’d be looking at roughly 60 pages.
Are there terms for the two styles of playwriting:
a) The kind where stage directions, descriptions, actions etc. are written explicitly inbetween dialogue as such. (Most screenplays, Hamlet, etc.)
b) The kind that a presented as a very dialogue-heavy piece of prose or poetry - as in, the stage directions and character descriptions are built into descriptions of actions and setting that are done in the same tone and form as the dialogue, but ar e not directly performed. (Can’t think of any off the top of my head by Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot come pretty close)
Of course there are things that are somewhere in between, most things are, in fact, but some tend to lean heavily one way or another. So, any terms?
Joey P: What about the Sopranos? I think those episodes are 60 minutes. I should google for a couple old plays that are on the Gutenburg project and see how long they are.