Open Wardrobes

You'd think it'd be easy: write a play that is no more than 10 minutes long. After all, you don't need an elaborate, complex idea, you can't spend forever delving into every aspect of each character, you can't do anything too difficult with the staging (who's going to spend 10 minutes setting up the stage for a 10-minute play?), and you can write one in an evening. But despite all this I am having a terrible case of writer's block trying to come up with a new 10-minute play (I've only written one, here). Lakeshore Players does a 10-minute play festival each year and the deadline to submit plays is November 5th, and I am struggling to come up with something new for it (I already submitted my one 10-minute play in a previous year). I have a couple of ideas, but nothing has quite come together.


Part of the difficulty with this form, I think, is getting past the play just being a 10-minute joke or nothing beyond an interesting concept. Making it a complete story is the challenge. There's no time for anything superfluous, nothing but the bare essentials of who the characters are and what's happening. Now if I just had a dynamite idea...

On a related note I was an actor in Lakeshore's festival this past June which was a lot of fun - I was in a play called The Guests at Table 11, a perfect example of what a 10-minute play should be.