Hey there playwrights, you probably know what’s next. You need to give your characters a place to play, to go about their business, to confront one another.
Day 24 – Describe the settings for your scenes. How will they inform or reflect on the central conflict of your play? How will your characters interact with them? Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).
Ask yourself the following:
- Is it day or night?
- What season?
- Indoors or outdoors?
- Are there sounds that evoke the scene? Birds chirping or the whistle of a lifeguard at the pool, the sounds of children playing?
- What objects are there that your characters can interact with? An overstuffed sofa for one of them to flop down onto? A stool to tilt back in? Is one character anxiously wiping or dusting something or straightening a messy room?
- Is the room a mess? Does something sit there broken or out of place? Do some of the characters care about this but others don’t seem to notice?
Think back to Days 1, 3, 11 of this workshop, where we learned how to establish a setting, get our characters interacting with it, and use the setting to subtly reflect the conflict that is at the heart of the play.
Happy scene-setting!