Hi playwrights! Today challenge is all about using your scene’s setting to reflect or be a metaphor for the conflict between your characters.
Day 11 – Let the Setting Drive the Scene: Using four characters from your stock company, write a 10-minute scene that uses setting as a subtle reflection of the conflict. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).
So what does this mean? The author’s of The Playwright’s Handbook give the following examples:
- A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen: Nora has two choices. She can stay in her comfortable home, where her husband treats her like a child and a possession, or she can leave, an option symbolized by a prominent window showing the outside world.
- Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill: the sun gives way to fog to show increased isolation
- Painting Churches, by Tina Howe: the slow moving of furniture from a house marks the end of a family’s life together
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams: fireworks and thunder herald confrontation
So play with your scene descriptions and stage directions and try to subtly (whatever you do, don’t have one of your characters notice it) play up the confrontation.
Happy writing!