Playwriting with Your Students By Gwydion Suilebhan

These tips will help you use playwriting to help students understand and relate to a variety of curricula.

Writing a short play can help students understand the human drama behind major historical events, or even express the gravitational forces between the planets in a creative and insightful way. Here are some tips about the basics that will help you support your students' efforts:

• Different playwrights start their plays in different ways.

  Some create a really compelling character, either in their heads or on paper, then put that character into an interesting situation. Others start with a dramatic situation, like an argument or a betrayal between two characters, then figure out what kind of characters they'd like to put into that situation. Still others start with one great line of dialogue they really have to use, then figure out who needs to say it and when it should be said. There's no "right" way to start a play—whatever works for your students is fine.

• Some students are overwhelmed by having to write a whole script.

  Why not start with a monologue—a single dramatic speech for a single character, usually charged with emotion and inner conflict? Once a student has finished writing this piece, ask him or her to write a speech in which a second character responds to the monologue. Now you have a dialogue between two characters. The student should be able to continue from there on his or her own, line by line.

• Remind your students that the essence of drama is conflict.

  Without conflict, a play isn't really a play. Each character should be striving to achieve a different goal—and those goals should be opposed to one another. For instance, in a science play about the forces that control Earth's orbit around the Sun, "Mr. Gravity" could be struggling to pull the two stellar bodies together while "Mrs. Centrifugal Force" tries to drive them apart.

• Remind your students to think in terms of having a single protagonist (or hero) and one or more antagonists (villains).

  Having multiple protagonists usually makes a play too complex, while having just one hero gives an audience one character to focus on—and root for. A play may have other characters, but the hero and villain are key characters.

• Remind your students that key characters need to be believable, and unique.

  To make a character believable, give him or her ordinary traits—a shy smile, a constant craving for pizza, a fear of heights—instead of unrealistic qualities like super-human strength or a genius IQ. To make a character unique, give him or her one or two unusual traits, like a severe speech impediment or a quest to climb a mountain.

• Throw grammar out the window until the playwriting exercise is over.

  One of the hardest things for students to master about playwriting is creating realistic dialogue. Students often write dialogue that consists of complete sentences, but people rarely talk in complete sentences! Ask them to spend a few minutes each day outside of class really listening to how people speak. No two people have the same speech patterns, and no two characters should talk the same way either.

• Give them a chance to hear their plays read aloud.

  Students often have trouble revising plays once they are written—they don't know how to make their plays clearer and easier for an audience to capture, or more dramatic in some way. There's nothing like listening to your dialogue and seeing your characters come alive to determine whether the elements of your play are coming together—and there's nothing like an impromptu play reading to keep a classroom lively and energized.

If you use these suggestions, your students will have no trouble using playwriting to demonstrate their knowledge of whatever subject you teach, or express their ideas about a topic in a "right-brained" way. Most importantly, you'll support students who learn in less traditional ways—if they struggle with rote memorization, they might just love playwriting. Give it a shot.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gwydion Suilebhan is a playwright, poet, and journalist who taught writing and literature at the middle school and college levels for seven years. His publications include Inner Harbor: Ten Poems, the Foreword to The Complete Idiot's Guide to Grammar and Style, and more than 75 articles on education, writing, and cuisine.