Playwriting Workshop – Day 15 – Disrupted Rituals

Okay guys, I want to squeeze one more exercise into the second week of our playwriting workshop. If you think back to plays you have read or seen performed, you will notice that many of them center on a disrupted ritual. What is a ritual? The authors of The Playwright’s Handbook define it as “any detailed method of procedure faithfully or regularly followed.” A ritual can be personal (how someone gets dressed, makes their morning coffee, packs or unpacks a bag), social (a weekly card game or happy hour, a monthly book club meeting), family (Thanksgiving dinner, summer vacation at the lake), or religious (Christmas mass, a Seder dinner).

Day 15: Disrupted Rituals: Using at least four characters from your stock company, create a 15-minute scene that centers on a disrupted ritual. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

Borrow liberally from your own life, adapting a real-life ritual to your character’s uses. Ask yourself the following:

  • What are the steps involved in the ritual? How does it begin and end?
  • Do the steps ever vary?
  • When in the process is the ritual interrupted?
  • What causes the disruption? A person? Event? The weather?
  • Does the interruption create conflict? Is the interruption much more significant to one character than to another?
  • Do your characters try to salvage the ritual or do they abandon it? How do they each react?