How I came to love Gary Garrison in Ten Minutes

So can I enthrall you in a world of intrigue, love, loss, conflict, and high stakes in just ten minutes?  Well, a group of us writers, actors, directors, and designers found out how very difficult that is over this past weekend.  And we had the most wonderful teacher and guide to help us understand and grapple with the challenge... Gary Garrison.

On the cusp of the Source Festival, a group of fearless theatre artists, including myself (Anne, your intrepid blogger) joined Gary Garrison for a two-day intensive class exploring one of the most popular forms of theater today... the TEN-MINUTE PLAY.

But the truth is, as Gary pointed out at the onset of the class, there are very few ten-minute plays out there.  What do you mean, you gasp.  Haven't I sat through evening after evening of little plays, with people shouting, laughing, fighting, crawling around, clowning, revealing deep secrets?

NO! Gary will insist.  What you've seen are skits, character sketches, and scenes... but NOT ten-minute plays.

SO WHAT ON EARTH IS A TEN-MINUTE PLAY?  Just that... a play like any other that involved interesting, complex, surprising characters in a high-stakes conflict.  It is a play like any other that resolves in some manner and leaves you feeling complete.  As Gary puts it, a good ten-minute play "is a gorgeous, intense story that dissolves and is gone." 

You have all the elements of any good play... but you have to set up the characters, the dilemma, the stakes, the complications, the climax... very, very, VERY quickly.  In fact, if the audience doesn't understand the basic conflict of the characters in the first page, then you as a writer have failed.

Certainly not as easy to make such a thing as you might think.  But Gary provided a road map for success, one that's helpful in formulating any well-made play.  Here are a few gems from our  wickedly funny, pointedly honest, and endlessly thoughtful teacher:

• Don't be afraid to write complex and surprising characters in a ten-minute play.  Human nature is infinitely complex, surprising, and fascinating.  There's no reason not to explore that in a ten-minute play.

• Drop your characters in the center of the conflict.  You don't have time to build up the tension in ten minutes.  You and your audience need to be there on the first page.

• Make sure the needs are clear and the stakes are high.  Each character must need something desperately... or wouldn't they just walk off the stage?

• Keep it simple.  You can't explore the whole of geopolitics in ten minutes.  There's nothing wrong with picking a simple, keenly dramatic conflict between characters.

• Be theatrical.  You're in the theater!  Make your play an immediate, visceral, imaginative experience.   A character can float to the moon.  Godzilla can enter a coffee shop.  It's all possible.

So how does Gary know so much about this, you may ask?  Well, he's an accomplished playwright himself and has been teaching playwriting for more than 20 years at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.  What's more, he's written the definitive book on ten-minute plays - Perfect 10: Writing and Producing the 10-Minute Play.

So Gary has given us a charge:  Make a true and compelling ten-minute play.  Each student started one as part of the class.  Now we are off to revise and remake with Gary's help and guidance.  Stay tuned to see what we all come up with!

That's the beloved Gary Garrison above, giving us all the lowdown on the ten-minute play.  Just between you and me, it took me less than ten minutes to fall for Gary.