Hi playwrights! This week, as we make our way through the intermediate workshop exercises in The Playwright’s Handbook, we’re going to be writing a few more scenes. First things first. We’ll need to have some characters on hand to cast in our scenes.
Day 8 – Create a Stock Company: Create six characters to use in the Intermediate exercises. Three of the characters should be based on people you observe in the present, and three of the characters should be based on people you knew in the past. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).
At this point, your character descriptions don’t have to be very long. Give us your character’s name, age, the very basics of what he or she looks like, and a line or two about his or her personality, history, or relationship to one or more of the other characters. Finally, think of one way this character will stick out. Is it the way she’s dressed? Is it something odd that he keeps doing? Does this character demand to be the center of attention? Does she have an unusual speech pattern or nervous habit? Try to think of something that will provoke a reaction from some of your other characters.
And don’t try too hard to figure out how the characters know each other or what their roles will be in the scenes you will write. Maybe a couple of them know each other already, but it’s also just fine if they a bunch of random people whose paths are about to collide.
[updated]
ALICEA
Maria Luisa Alicea Garcia de la Renta (“please, baby, you gotta just call me Alicea”), 50, is the owner of De La Renta’s, a strip mall hair salon in a middle-class Midwestern town. A former prosecutor and the state’s first Latina lieutenant governor, seven years ago Alicea suffered a closed-head injury while snowmobiling with her boyfriend and spent six months in a medically induced coma. In moments of great lucidity, when no one would suspect that she has cognitive problems, Alicea has built a small but thriving business to supplement her disability payments. In bad moments, her staff covers for her or, in some cases, takes advantage of her short-term memory loss. Alicea’s boyfriend Patrick, consumed by guilt over his role in the accident, now dotes on her.
JACK
Jack Kling, 36, is a beauty-school dropout who traded sexual favors with a closeted county official to obtain his license to work as a hair stylist. He specializes in “set and sprays” for blue-haired old ladies, who find him irresistibly charming. He flirts with them shamelessly, as only an obviously gay man can. Jack is partial to cutoff denim shorts, Havainas, and designer white tank tops, which he wears with Hermes neckerchiefs the old ladies bring him back from London, Paris, and Naples (Florida). Jack recently moved into an impeccably preserved Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home that his celebrity architect boyfriend purchased for them, on the occasion of their one-year anniversary. Architecture students touring the home from the nearby university are often thrilled to find Jack, dressed in boxer briefs and a lavender chenille robe, chain smoking and sipping espresso from a chaise lounge in the home’s interior courtyard.
PHIL
Philip K. Roundtree, 59, is the founding partner of Roundtree & Associates, a boutique law firm representing start-up companies in patent and trademark litigation. Tall and doughy, partial to brown suits and wide-striped ties, and vain with his hair, Roundtree receives a weekly “man”icure that is little more than a blunt cut and buff, but makes him feel quite European. Having just sent his only child Madeline off to college in the South, Roundtree is rather flagrantly carrying on an extramarital affair with a 25-year-old woman he met at Starbucks.
MS. SWITCH
Linda Swiechzkowski (“Ms. Switch” to her students), 53, is an unmarried high school English teacher who tends toward the morbid, opening her class with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” and rounding out the semester with lots of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. Tall and awkwardly thin, she wears high-waisted pleated slacks and sweater sets in cheerful pastel colors, with low chunky heels. Her hair is short and spikey, and her bony wrists and ankles protrude from her clothing as if she inherited the wardrobe of some slightly plumper, slightly shorter English teacher who came before her.
ARIEL
Ariel Jones, 17, is the only bi-racial student at the large high school in her still-yes-still-segregated Midwestern town. Arial can and does pass for any ethnicity she chooses to claim, an attribute she hopes to put to good use one day as a Saturday Night Live cast member, just like her hero, Maya Rudolf. Off to college in the fall, she’s making money this summer as a “bookings specialist” at De La Renta’s. Ambivalent about her appearance, Ariel lets the stylists experiment on her in their off hours. Her glossy brown hair currently looks like it was dipped in ice-blue Kool-Aid and her long, no-chip nails are jet black with silver tips. She wears purple lipstick in a pout like a geisha. Most days, Ariel is taken for some young Puerto Rican relation of Alicea’s, a supposition she rarely bothers to correct.
LOTTIE
Charlotte (“Lottie”) Benson, 67, has a precision-cut bob with straight-edge bangs that just brush her eyebrows. The look requires frequent touch-ups and Lottie often brings her five-year-old granddaughter, Ada-Sophia, who she is responsible for two days a week, to the salon with her. Fancying herself a writer, Lottie carries an old spiral-bound notebook with her everywhere she goes, jotting down snatches of other people’s conversations. She has a habit of speaking to Ada-Sophia as if she were a small baby or deaf (or both), constantly describing what is happening around them in a sing-song voice, as if the child possesses no powers of observation of her own.
ADA-SOPHIA
Ada-Sophia Benson (ADD-a, not AY-da), 5 ¾, is smarter and more observant than anyone gives her credit for. Often tormented by her older sister when adults are not around, she has cultivated a quiet strength that will serve her well in life. Ada-Sophia appears to ignore her grandmother completely but will one day write a bestselling memoir in which Lottie figures quite prominently (and unflatteringly).