After two weeks of staged readings, the Pittsburgh New Works Festival begins its 19th year on September 10. The festival runs four weeks, Thursday through Sunday. Each week three new one-act plays are produced by different local theatre companies from Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. The plays are chosen from submissions by playwrights throughout the country. Of the first set of plays, two are by Californians and one comes from Florida. A complete schedule is available on the festival website.
These kinds of one-act play festivals have become a prominent feature of theatre seasons all over the country. There are those, like the Humana Festival in Louisville and the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, that provide venues for the work of some of the most important playwrights working today as well as offering an opportunity for lesser lights. Then there are those festivals more open to the work of aspiring dramatists: the Gallery Players in Brooklyn, Pulse Ensemble in Manhattan. There are festivals for playwrights from specific areas of the country, for specific genders, for a variety of lengths (ten minutes, under 30 minutes). There was, would you believe it, a one-minute play festival sponsored by Brooklyn College in the US and the University of Leeds in England. Even a cursory examination of the Dramatist’s Sourcebook will list a slew of opportunities for playwrights with one-acts of almost any length to peddle.
In an environment where theatre audiences are often hard to come by, the one-act play is often seen as an effective way to attract customers. More often than not, theatre audiences, especially off-off-Broadway and far-far-off-Broadway (Pittsburgh for example), are made up of friends and relatives of those directly involved in the production on view. The advantage of an evening of one-acts is that there are usually a lot of people involved in the production. A typical program of three longer one-acts may involve three sets of actors, three different directors, three different stage managers, not to mention designers, costumers, backstage help, etc., and all these people have friends and relatives. Think about the possibilities of five or so ten-minute plays.
Article comments
1 - R.P.M.
Reminds me a bit of Project Greenlight, that Matt Damon, Ben Affleck thing where they gave a screenwriter a chance to write a movie and they documented the whole thing on HBO. It is a shame how often the Big Screen gets so much more press than other formats, esp. theater, when in reality a movie is often less entertaining than a live play.
2 - Nick
I love short plays. One-Acts are awesome, which tend to traditionally be anywhere from 15 minutes to a half hour to an hour.
But I'm growing to love the short-short play even more -- those 5 minute or 10 minutes experiments. They're like the shortstory of the theatrical world.