One Act Plays

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > STRUCTURE > LENGTH > ACTS > ONE-ACTS >

'With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, Oh, God, two more hours of this.'

-- David Ives

More than a few Literary Managers will see a play running about an hour as falling in a limbo between a one-act and a full-length play: it's too short to feel like a full evening for an audience and too long to be easily produced as part of a bill of multiple one-acts.

But there's a way around this if short plays seem like your thing . . .

You can take David Ives' approach and write a series of what this business calls Related One-acts. These are often made up of 5 or 6 short one-acts about 15 to 20 pages long or as few as 2 of these about 45 pages each. Individual length is not critical. You just need enough total pages to run for the minimum 90 minutes required for a full-length play. Usually, there's a balance in the length of these sets -- you won't often see a set made up of something like a 60-pager followed by three 10-minute plays.

A set of Related One-acts is presented under a single Title. It's held together by some vaguely or obviously unifying force:

• Similar or related Themes

• The same characters -- or at least one central character -- throughout

• Similar or related subjects