MAY
13

Playwriting Projects for the Drama Classroom

By Brian D. Taylor, Project Editor, Pioneer Drama Service 

Brian D. Taylor is the project editor for Pioneer Drama Service, a published playwright and a former drama teacher.  Working with K-12, college and community theatre groups, he has a wide theatrical background with experience in directing, acting and technical theatre. 

Writing skills are vital to student achievement on many levels, from classroom success to higher test scores.  It’s no surprise then that writing skills are woven into the national standards for all subjects.  Moreover, many school administrators are calling for writing to be taught in every classroom, including “non-core” classes such as music, art, and drama.

What?  Writing in EVERY class?!  Before you resist and protest, consider the perfect opportunity we drama educators have to embrace this challenge in a very unique, creative way:  playwriting.

The bonus of having students write their own plays is that it not only enhances writing skills in new ways, but it also reinforces so many other areas of the drama curriculum.  From understanding character to blocking to costuming, from details of a setting to a character’s subtext, students will work hands on with these varying facets of drama in a whole new way.

Of course, you can’t just expect kids to create a play without any structure or guidelines.  When the options are limitless, it can be very difficult to decide which direction to go.  So it’s essential to give students a framework in which to work when assigning a playwriting project.  There are also several ways to limit the aspects of playwriting they need to work on for their first attempt.

It’s about time

The first part of that framework should be to define both how long they have to write it (due date) and how long a play they should write (running time).  Going too short or too long on either factor can spoil the assignment before you even begin.  For most classroom writing projects with inexperienced playwrights, I recommend no less than two minutes nor more than ten for a running time goal.  (A broad range like this emphasizes creativity more than adherence to a rigid structure.)  In terms of due date, be cautious about assigning this as a long term project unless you are willing to revisit your students’ progress on a regular basis and your students are excellent independent workers.  As a short-term project, I suggest giving them at least three days, but no more than a week.  The finer details will have to consider the real world needs of your classroom time and your students’ experience level.

Write promptly

The next part of the framework is the prompt.  A fruitful prompt is key to giving students a direction from the very start, because, again, if you just set kids loose to write whatever they like, many of them will have a very tough time getting started at all.  Though it does limit creativity in some ways, a prompt helps speed students through the two most difficult parts of writing that even professional writers (including myself) struggle with:  (1) the question of what to write, and (2) simply taking that first step of getting started.

A typical writing prompt might look like those from popular improvisation games.  That is, you can give students any combination of characters, profession, prop, setting, theme, emotion, or situation.  Or, you might give them a line of dialogue to include somewhere in the play.  Another method is to prompt them with a painting or a photograph.  These sorts of prompts are simple to implement and achieve the goal of getting new writers over the difficult hurdles of starting.

A different sort of prompt

Another fun prompt that helps narrow the number of dramatic aspects your students have to deal with also happens to be one of the most popular writing projects in my classroom:  play a scene from a movie...  but without the sound.  Challenge the students to write new dialogue for the actors in the scene they are watching.  It can be from a popular movie or an oldie that they’ve never seen before, but this sort of writing project will really stimulate your students’ attention to the details of setting already provided as well as the physicality, expression of mood, and subtext of the actors/characters.

Another playwriting prompt

You also might try encouraging your students to adapt a poem, song, fairy tale, or short story into a stage play.  It’s important to work from a short piece, particularly if you are working with new writers and want to keep this a short-term project.

My middle school drama class loved our Radio Drama week, when we studied radio drama and playwriting together.  In groups, students would adapt a fairy tale into a radio drama script that included sound effects.  At week’s end, we would huddle around a microphone and record a vocal performance of the dialogue they had written.  Over the weekend, I would edit the recordings and drop in the sound effects they had asked for.  On the following Monday, we would all enjoy their final recorded performances.

I’m a particular fan of the movie-dubbing project or adapting a short work into a play because they limited the scope of the needs of the script.  With the movie-dubbing project, students can focus specifically on writing realistic dialogue, having already been given the setting and the characters.  With the radio play adaptations, students concentrate on scripted dialogue, voice, and sound, since the setting, characters, and plot are already defined for them.

Writing to develop drama skills

Feel free to modify any of the suggested prompts or create your own to focus students on specific dramatic skills in their writing.  If you want to stress movement and use of space, try having your students write a scene that is all or mostly pantomimed.  Expository writing is a great way to practice creating stage directions.  Pair up your students and have one write a pantomimed scene and another act it out according to the stage directions.  Was the actor able to interpret the writer’s stage directions correctly?

There’s no limit to how you can emphasize different aspects of your drama curriculum.  If you want to focus students’ attention on costume detail and historical accuracy, try having them write a short period piece.  For a focus on understanding emotions, you might work on writing scenes that can be played in contrasting emotions such as love and hate, or joy and despair, or hope and fear.

The educational benefits of creative writing are endless, as are the ways to enhance your students’ dramatic skills in the process.  So don’t be afraid to embrace the challenge of writing in your drama curriculum.  You’ll be amazed how fun — and constructive — it is!