Tag Archives: 28 Plays Later

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Wo(Man)Hood

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28 Plays Later – Challenge #13

Please write a play to be performed to 14-18 year olds.

Use your phone to record as many people as possible talking about an incident in their lives, after which things were changed.
OR Ask them to talk about their own experiences in the light of a subject that you are interested in.
Write a monologue play attributing as many as possible of those memories to one person.

 

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WO(MAN)HOOD

Excerpt:

KELLY

At the beginning of my last semester of my senior year of high school, I finally broke. I would go to school in a dress and something would shift in the middle of the day – I’d see my reflection in the glass window of a classroom door – and think I’m in the wrong clothes. I’m not supposed to have breasts. But then there were other days when I would go to school with no makeup, in a t-shirt that was baggy enough to hide my breasts, and in jeans I’d stolen from my brother, and I’d feel really good, until I’d catch some other guy staring at my chest.

I was confused. I felt alone, isolated, broken. I couldn’t function.

I asked for help, and it came in the form of Prozac.

I was worried, at first. I’d heard anti-depressants can stifle your creativity, but while that may be true for some people, it wasn’t true for me.

To read the entire play, click the link below.

2018-13 – Wo-man-hood

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Theories of Everything

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28 Plays Later – Challenge #12
Let’s do a time restriction exercise

Decide how much time you want to write today… Get your timer out and programme into it half of the time you set for today… Start writing about anything. Once the timer beeps – stop writing. Take a short break and then set your timer again for the second half, in which you are to edit the play, make sure it has an extraordinary ending, get the formatting right, Etc.

 

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THEORIES OF EVERYTHING

 

Excerpt:

SAMANTHA:             Speaking of scary… I have this theory…

ERIK:                          (interested) Okay, lay it on me.

SAMANTHA:             Most stories would be interesting if we saw them from the villain’s point of view.

ERIK:                          (skeptical) The villain?

SAMANTHA:             Yes. Heroes are pretty much interchangeable. Villains – dark characters in general – are more complex.

ERIK:                          (hands SAMANTHA her latte) Interesting. I’ll have to watch something with a good villain in it and see if you’re right.

SAMANTHA:             (laughing) Do that. (She picks up the plate and carries her drink and snack to a table, where she gets comfortable with her laptop.

To read the entire play, click the link below:

2018-12 – Theories of Everything

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Nautilus (a memory in three short scenes)

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28 Plays Later – Challenge #11

Numbers are so friggin’ awesome, and you can do so much with them – from basic arithmetic to some intense hardcore calculus.
‘But how does that lend itself to a play?’, I hear you ask (I really must do something about all your voices in my head!)

‘Well,’ I respond back to the negative numbers.
What about a dialogue that is structured as a Fibonacci sequence (1 word, 1 word, 2 words, 3 words, 5 words, 8 words, etc…)?

(There were a lot more suggestions, but they’re not relevant to my play).

Notes: I used the Fibonacci sequence for the dialogue structure, but I went up and then back down. As well, the golden ratio (Phi) is referenced, somewhat tangentially. Also, since this piece is pretty short, I haven’t uploaded a PDF, just provided the text.

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NAUTILUS

(a memory in three short scenes)

By

Melissa A. Bartell

Continue reading →

Photo by Jon Toney on Unsplash

Gingham Style

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28 Plays Later – Challenge #10
Write a jukebox musical using K-pop tunes.

 

In truth, I hesitated about sharing this one. It’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever written in my entire life. I don’t mean “it’s a bad play by someone who isn’t a playwright.” I mean “Oh, god, who puked this up?”

But…

I committed to documenting everything I wrote for the #28playslater challenge, and that means sharing that sometimes you’re just not into a project so you kind of phone it in.

 

 

Photo by Jon Toney on Unsplash

GINGHAM STYLE

(an appallingly bad musical)

 

Excerpt:

Scene 1

We’re on the prairie. More Little House on the Prairie than Oklahoma. The set is minimalistic. The frame of a house and barn. A horse is tethered outside, and there’s a haystack downstage center.

ANNIE and her sister MARTHA are using pitchforks to move hay from the stack into a wheelbarrow, when CHARLIE enters on his horse (hobby horse).

CHARLIE: Whoa, there girl. (comes to a stop.) Annie, is that you? Are you seriously moving hay?

ANNIE: Horses and cows gotta eat, Charlie, and my Pa is off working on the railroad. He says they’ve made the first cut, and a train will be able to make it through by Christmas!

CHARLIE: Must be fun, working on the railroad instead of stuck on the farm. (shakes his head) Y’all need any help? I’m on my way home from town, but…

MARTHA (popping her head off): Annie, Ma’s gonna have your hide if we don’t get the animals their hay before dark. And you know you aren’t supposed to be talking to boys.

ANNIE (embarrassed): I’m – We’re – Thanks for your offer Charlie, but I think we’d best finish our chores on our own.

CHARLIE (getting it): Ah, yeah. I got – I got chores waiting for me at home, and my Pa’s there with his belt if I don’t finish. I’ll  – uh – see you at church on Sunday?

ANNIE: Yeah. I mean… yes, I’ll – we’ll see you then.

(CHARLIE takes off again on his hobby horse, and MARTHA and ANNIE finish filling the barrow. MARTHA wheels the thing toward the barn, but ANNIE lingers, falling back against the hay, and dreaming. )

ANNIE pulls off her bonnet and tugs her skirt off, revealing a shorter gingham skirt underneath. Think the gingham and muslin version of a school uniform breaks into song, with backup dancers dressed in ‘hot’ versions of prairie garb supporting her.)

To read the entire, appalling thing, click the link below:

2018-10 – Gingham Style

gray whale baja sur

Whale Wishes

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28 Plays Later – Challenge #9

Today we’re going dark. But I leave it to you to decide what sort of darkness is right for you.

You can either go into the dark deep blue sea for a bit of animal research (Blue Whale, the animal)

Or you can go into the dark side of humanity.  (Blue Whale, the “game.” You really don’t want to know.)

 

gray whale baja sur

 

WHALE WISHES

 

Excerpt:

TINA (V/O): Female blue whales give birth about once every three years, after being pregnant for a year. Whale calves nurse for the first year of their lives, during which they can gain up to 240 pounds a day. The average calf is around 24 feet long and weighs 3 tons. They can live up to 90 years.

FRANK: Tina would love this place.

JOANNE: Would have. Loved. She would have loved this place. (teary). Our daughter is gone, and we’re sitting here in paradise about to go whale watching without her.

FRANK: No, we’re going whale watching for her.

JOANNE: You didn’t ask him about the ashes.

FRANK: I’ll ask him when we’re out on the water. I’m sure we can work something out.

JOANNE (calmer): I want to go down to the water… walk with me?

FRANK: Yes, dear.

To read the entire play, click the link below:

2018-09 – Whale Wishes

Win or Luge

Win or Luge

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28 Plays Later
Challenge #8
Let’s be all sporty.

Find your inspiration from a sportical event, or from the culture of sportiality or from observing sportition.
Don’t sport with people’s feelings though, but do feel free to sport at sportspeople who sport their sports-gear.

 

Win or Luge

 

WIN OR LUGE

 

Excerpt:

ANNOUNCER (V/O): Now making his second run on this, the first day of the luge event here at the Olympic Sliding Center is Alejandro ‘Sasha’ Nowatovski. His time on his first run was an extremely competitive 0.81.09 seconds, but as you know, in single-slide luge, each competitor takes four runs and we total the times of all four.

There is a single beep and then SASHA primes his run. Pushing back and forward.

There are three beeps and he pushes off.

The lights begin to dim as soon as he’s offstage. There’s the sound of a crash, and a scream, and then a crowd screaming.

ANNOUNCER (V/O) (alarmed):  Nowatovski has lost control of his sled. He’s jumped the track. Medics are on scene… We’re returning you to studio…

Blackout

 

To read the entire play, follow the link below:

2018-08 Win or Luge

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Scenes from a Marriage

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28 Plays Later – Challenge #7

OK, so we focus way too much and worry about writing good stuff… how about writing some shite?
Like, proper total crap. (not literally! You know who you are!)
Not as easy as it sounds.
Just have no filters.
Let yourselves go

I didn’t like the “write shite” part of this challenge, but I really responded to the “let yourself go” part. Every year, I do 100 Days of Notecards, where I write a scene or sentence or snippet of dialogue on a 3×5 post-it and stick it on my fridge. To create this play, I pulled a bunch of those notecards (8 I think?) off the fridge and tried to put them in some semblance of order, but without any real connection.

 

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Scenes from a Marriage

 

Excerpt

PROLOGUE

TIME:  24 years ago

PLACE:  MOM’s kitchen.

LIGHTS UP on WOMAN and MOM at the dining room table. They’re each drinking coffee, and sharing a single slice of cheesecake.

MOM (concerned): You’re moving in with him?

WOMAN (confident): Yes.

MOM: You’ve only known him for five minutes. You know nothing about him.

WOMAN: Actually, it’s been six months.

MOM: Still…

WOMAN (ticking things off on her fingers): I know he likes strawberry-rhubarb pie and singing when he mows the lawn, and wearing socks during sex.

MOM gives WOMAN a gushy-mom look.

BLACKOUT

To read the entire play, click here:

2018-07 – Scenes From a Marriage

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An Exercise in Futility

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28 Plays Later – Challenge # 6
#stillnotequal

Today (February 5th) is in celebration of the 100th year anniversary of Women first being given the vote in the UK. However, we’re also going to acknowledge that women didn’t actually get equal voting rights to men until 1928, so today’s prompt is: ‘Still Not Equal.’

And to reflect modern times, I’d love you to write it in the style of a farce, if you like (or whatever you conceive to be farce in these days)!

Notes: This isn’t a farce. It’s just a bit of frustration that’s probably a shitty first draft of something else. I wasn’t really feeling this prompt. I’m sharing it anyway, because I’m enjoying documenting the process, including the parts of it that didn’t work, because they’re honing my writing voice.

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An Exercise in Futility

 

Excerpt:

MARCI (pointing to a calendar tacked to the side of the cubical): Oh, that’s not extreme. We can still do a normal renewal within a year. If it was really extreme, we’d have to start from scratch. (Types into a computer). So, what I need from you is the renewal application, your current ID card – it is just ID? – and your social security card.

KAREN: Well, I did the application online (hands it over), and of course I have my old ID (hands that over, too) but I managed to lose my social security card somewhere inside my house, but your website said I could bring my W-2, so I did that, and…

MARCI: That’s fine. We just need to verify your social security number. (She spends several seconds typing into her computer.) You don’t drive?

KAREN: No, like I said, it’s just ID. I have… I have issues with depth perception, and tracking moving obj –

MARCI (cutting her off): Oh, that’s fine, I’m just confirming. You don’t have to do an eye-test since this is just ID.

KAREN: Well, yes, I knew that.

Click the link below to read the entire play.

2018-06 – An Exercise in Futility

Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash

All About the Onions

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28 Plays Later – Challenge #5

Use the following first line:

Take off the girdle, Gertl, and tell me everything about Onun’s onions,

or else little Dicklberg here will get it with this!

 

Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash

All About the Onions

Excerpt:

GERTL

(snarky)

Aww, Shanle, I didn’t know you cared.

SHANLE joins GERTL on her side of the hull, and uses his wrench to remove a couple of lug nuts – basically, they take something that looks like a wheel out of the hatch in the side of their ship. Colored wires snake from it’s reverse side.

SHANLE

I think I see the problem. (beat) No. I’m wrong. All I see is mass of horpifed wiring.

GERTL

(explaining patiently)

The onions became disconnected from the paving stone drive at the fourth intersection, and when contact was lost the latent energy caused a spark. If we restore the contact and secure the connection between the paving stone and the onions and then ground it with the nerf ball, we should be good to go.

SHANLE

(impressed)

How… how did you know all that? I thought Onun was the only one who truly understood how the onions functioned.

Click the link below to read the entire play.

2018-05 – All About the Onions

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

Legacy

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28 Plays Later – Challenge #4

Adapt an existing work (poem, song, story, etc.) for the stage

 

 

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on UnsplashInspiration:

Sonnet #2, William Shakespeare

When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Excerpt:

BETTY

You should set a date and marry your doctor. You’ve got a pretty enough face now, and shiny young person’s hair, but it won’t last. Forty, fifty years from now you’ll be gray and wrinkled like me, and you won’t fill out that sweater so nicely.

I mean, look and me… I got no heinie and my tchotchkes hang almost to my navel. Trust me, a pretty face can’t last forever, and your doctor will give you lots of pretty babies.

ANNA

Well, we’re really not planning on children any time soon. My career is just taking off – I’m an architect – and I don’t want to be like my own mother, constantly having to balance work and home. I want to make my mark first, and then we’ll have a family.

BETTY

An architect? So, what when you’re old and saggy you’ll have some office building that you can point to and call yours? Mark me, young woman, you’ll look in the mirror some day and all you’ll see is your own eyes staring back at you, mocking your dead skin and fading hair. Children… children are the only real legacy there is.

To read the entire piece, click the link below.

2018-04 – Legacy