The average play these days runs about seventy to eighty minutes. I saw a show this week, Crossing the Divide by Shock Therapy Productions, and it clocked in at just 60 minutes. The old two-act with interval malarkey is fading fast (except maybe big musical productions). “A Night at the Theatre” is no longer the grand social outing it once was as far as contemporary theatre goers are concerned. Audiences want to arrive, experience the story, and then bugger off home to contemplate the aftermath.
Shorter plays suit producers too. The shorter the play, the fewer the rehearsal weeks. Fewer hours for technical crew. Shorter venue hire. Theatre survives on the sweet smell of an oily rag. If a producer can rehearse for three weeks instead of four, the saving can run into tens of thousands of dollars, even for a small to mid-sized company.
For the playwright, that means you have just over an hour to make the story land and to shape a script a company can afford to stage. Sobering. So is the cast size. Nothing munts a theatre budget faster than adding another actor. Right now, a three-week rehearsal and a two-week season means at least AU$6,250 per actor. That is before super, and before you factor in travel, accommodation, or per diems for anyone coming from out of town. Multiply that by four or five actors and you can see the pressure. Cutting one role can shift the numbers in a really good way.
New writers need to understand this. If you want to write a twelve-hander with a sprawling set and a two-hour run time, go for it. But if you want the best chance of production, length and cast size matters.
“But my play is epic,” you say. “I need twelve characters.”
Think.
Crossing the Divide is epic. It spans two time periods more than two hundred years apart. It covers a historic expedition and a classroom of High School students on a history excursion. Oh, and there’s a band playing live music. I counted at least a dozen characters on stage plus musicans.
Truly epic.
And yet. It was written for three actors. Who also happen to play musical instruments.
How? Doubling. Mad doubling.
For sixty minutes the three actors reshuffled characters at speed. Each played at least four roles and at least two instruments. They slipped in and out of identities within a handful of lines. Part of the pleasure was watching the mechanics. A hat, a jacket, a shift in posture, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and suddenly we were elsewhere.
I enjoyed the show. It was sharp and often funny. The doubling was mostly deft. At times it faltered, and I began to wonder whether every character was necessary. Doubling is a craft. The writer has to structure it cleanly. The director has to stage it with precision. Designers have to support clarity. Actors have to switch like their life depends on it. It may begin as an economic choice, but it becomes a theatrical one.
The question is simple. How many bodies does this story truly need in order to be told?
If it needs twelve characters, and you’re keen for it to be produced, then you must engineer the doubling with care so that it only needs three or four actors. If it needs only four actors and four characters, then write for four and be done. Do not multiply roles for spectacle alone. Every single character must NEED to be there for a compelling reason and it must be that, without them, the story falls apart.
This is where Crossing the Divide stumbled slightly for me. Clarity. There were moments when the switches came so fast that my brain lagged behind. The ambition was impressive. The theatrics were lively. Yet the story blurred. And if there is one thing a play cannot afford (especially a play told in sixty frantic minutes), it is confusion about who is standing in front of us and why.
And to be honest, there were at least three charcters, if not five who were not needed. At all. They were switching for switching sake. And that caused more structural problems than what it was worth.
Don’t get me wrong, this is one great play. Very necessary and on point. Clever and beautifully acted. It’s nominated for four awards in the upcoming Matilda Awards. And it should win at least one because stories like this are frighteningly rare and should be encouraged.
Let me just say that with your own rewrite you need to make sure that every character is needed to tell the story. If they are perfunctory, if they are human punchlines, if they don’t serve the premise, or are there just there to populate the set, please god, cut them.
Photos by Christian Buehner on Unsplash
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.