Starting in November 2018, I began experimenting with a cool way to write a play.

I was working at Manhattan Rep taking tickets and running the board for our short play events, in addition to directing our play production program plays. My days were long, but so much fun, for I was creating lots of theatre, and just loving it.

Sometimes, when I was running a short play event, early in the week (or sometimes the night before,) I would find out that one of the plays participating had to pull out due to illness, or due to some other off stage “drama,” and we would be left with one less show for that week’s short play event.

So as opposed to presenting a SHORTER evening of short plays, I made the choice to have a series of one man short play IDEAS ready to go, that I could improv, to see if the story idea worked and to see if the play worked in front of a live audience. I would film these plays from the back of the theatre so I could take notes on my performance later.

My thought was this: I would figure out the BEATS of the play in advance, commit the beats of the play to memory, and then I would improv the play for the first time in front of a live audience. What a wild and exciting way to create a short play, and to be honest, it was a little scary too. But we love “scary” in the theatre, for there really is no down side. If you mess up, you mess up, and you learn from it. And there is nothing better to bring out your best than a live audience!

I decide to make these monologue plays like little TWILIGHT ZONE episodes. This way, when I created 6 to 10 of them, depending upon length, I could turn them into a full length play in homage to The Twilight Zone.

Here is one of my favorite short plays I created called MAGIC.

This performance was a little slow to get to the “Problem that needs to be solved” but once there, it was really fun in a cool Twilight Zone type of way.

So how can you use this idea to write in a new way?

Well, you could do the same thing I did, but leave out the live audience.

Work out the beats of the play, then video it, or record it, as you act out those beats and tell the story, and then you can look at it, or listen to it, and see what works, and then edit and shape the story from there.

I dare you. You might be surprised.

By choosing to act and improv your story idea, you just might channel in something you didn’t know you knew.

This is another one of my “Twilight” real time plays done at Manhattan Rep, based on my Dog Roma. This is fun!