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Whether you are a writer needing a jumpstart, or a teacher searching for fun playwriting activities for your
students, we hope the following suggestions will be helpful.
Set up a basic improvisation with paired students "rehearsing" a "play" based on a given
conflict. Some suggestions follow, but feel free to come up with your own! Better yet, explain
the idea of "conflict" (see the link for Elements of a Play) and let students generate their
own original conflicts to explore. Encourage students to think of characters not only as people, but
as speaking animals, objects, even as ideas personified. Examples:
- one child needs to convince another that his stuffed bear really speaks
- a loose tooth doesn't want to fall out and is being pushed out by the new, "adult" tooth
- Little Red Riding Hood has to convince the wolf (she gets the trick) not to eat her
After the class sees each "play", guide students to articulate what "worked" theatrically. Help
students to recognize that inventive dialogue is crucial to character, that we come to know the characters
through not only what they say, but also through how they express themselves.
Read a well-known story or myth to students and instruct them to write/act-out a play using a "what if" prompt
to stimulate the imagination.
Examples:
- What if the three bears came back and wanted to adopt Goldilocks?
- What if Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility refused to come off?
- What if Max never woke up from his dream of the wild things?
Use "what if" again, asking
students to imagine their world as it could only exist in
imaginative, fictionalized terms.
Examples:
- What if the sun fell in love with the moon?
- What if the leaves refused to fall from the trees?
- What if children were the parents and the parents were the children?
These "What if" exercises provide jumping off points for discussing the crucial role that conflict (and
its resolution) plays in theater - generally speaking, the stronger the conflict, the stronger the work.
Encourage even the youngest students to dramatize their emotional lives through prompts such as:
- Can you remember a moment when you were lost and then found?
- If you were to turn that experience into a play, who would the characters be?
- What would the problem/conflict be?
- What would the resolution look like?
- How can you use dialogue to "capture" the characters?
Is there a lesson or moral or value that you would like to illustrate using theater? Let us suppose that a
seven-year-old wants to "teach" that people should respect differences. Using "what if"
(or the model of a fable), communicate to the student that the characters and setting do not have to be realistic or human.
Emphasizing the freedom of the playwright to choose the "who, what, where, and when" as well as the
"why" gives young writers the sense that there isn't a wrong way to write a play. When students
believe that they can write a play, most want to!
Start your
play today!
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