Nearly all ten-minute play festivals explicitly reject monologs. After all, the very nature of theater is unmediated conflict among characters. Those festivals insist on plays having two characters, and sometimes they tolerate a third and fourth, despite the casting complications.

Why should a stand-up comedian do this?

Maybe you successfully delivered a particular set at the only stand-up comedy club in your town, and you have no plans to take it out of town. A successful 10-minute play can be produced any number of times around the country without your having to be present.

Maybe you have a comedy set that you personally can’t deliver effectively because this is not the story of someone of your age, gender, or body type. A young woman can surely write a brilliant set whose persona is an old man, but it might take an old man to deliver on stage most effectively. Many stand up comics have routines involving or depending on their own gender, physical appearance, and ethnic identity, but why waste a good idea that doesn’t fit you personally?

Maybe you have a set about a situation that would be especially effective if delivered by two actors, rather than retold by one comedian. If your set is not observational, but instead reports a conversation, great. Audiences in comedy clubs identify with the comic who tells a story, but for an exciting and fair fight, two well-matched characters on stage is hard to beat.

Consider a quarreling couple, the roommate from hell, or a dispute with a DMV clerk. There is more tension if the second character can actually speak for and defend himself or herself. That’s the essence of plays.

Stand up routines are akin to short plays

Like a traditional play, a typical stand up comedy routine has a character and a situation, such as a first date. Spoken lines dominate both forms, and no one expects a short play to develop a character deeply.

Camino Real Playhouse likes a short play that has “a beginning that grabs your attention, a middle with some meat and character development, and an ending that makes sense.” That sounds like a good stand-up set, too.

A traditional play has a character with an objective, an uncooperative antagonist, and one or more complications or obstacles. By the end of the play the objective might or might not have been met, but the audience has enjoyed watching someone pursue a goal, which is the essence of narrative.

There are differences between sets and plays, of course, leading to differences in audience involvement. A comedian tells a story and makes observations, while a playwright lets the audience experience the story as it happens, making their own observations. Stand-up offers a single, controlling narrator to trust and to identify with, while a short play lets the audience figure out where their sympathies lie, as they would if overhearing a conversation. Both dynamics are fun.

You don’t need or have time for a complex plot, but something needs to happen to make the situation different by the end of the play. A series of funny lines can obviate the need for the forward plot progress of a traditional narrative, and still lead to the big close that comics like to exit on.

Stand-up comics have a big head start over most beginning playwrights

You already understand the importance of structure, rhythm, timing, compression, silences, the need for editing, the importance of trying material out before an audience, and the nuances of comedy.

You have already written dialog, and you have probably created several personas or characters for different material. So all that you might need to learn are a few playwriting principles, the required format for submissions, and strategies for submitting your play to theater festivals.

Getting started

Find a set that reports a conversation, one character thwarting what the other wants, or disagreeing with a belief. You have such pairings in your sets, stories of you and someone else: a child, a parent, a boss, a significant other, a date, a clerk, a doctor, a cabbie.

If all of your sets are a series of your witty observations, rather than inter-personal conflicts, no problem. If there is no potential two-character inter-personal conflict in your set, you can divide the lines between two similar characters. Maybe two friends at the bar complaining about work. This simple bifurcation requires sparkling dialog and some disagreements and character differentiation to compensate for the lack of serious conflict.

If you have a free ranging set complaining about work, you can create characters and minor conflict if one character insists that the worst part of work is the stupid boss, and the other insists that no, the worst part is annoying coworkers.

Your routine is about the hassles of dating? Let the second character riff instead on the hassles of being in a relationship, maybe drawing material from a separate set you already have. No character likes to have his or her own suffering topped in the telling, so sparks should fly.

Still no story? Sketches work, too

Most festival guidelines explicitly ask for play submissions to be traditional stories, not sketches. Those theaters want a protagonist with a personally important objective, conflict and obstacles, rising action, and then resolution, or at least closure, by the last page.

But do not despair if your routine is really a sketch: they can be accepted for some festivals, too. Sketches involve situations, not stories with character arcs. Sketches seem most readily accepted by festivals that market themselves as more of a variety show than play festival. Look for festivals set in bars or brewpubs, like Barhoppers in Charlottesville, the Cary Playwrights’ Bar Plays, or Home Brew Theater in Cincinnati.

To see which festivals do not insist on stories, read their websites’ taglines or synopses of plays that they have accepted in the past.

Consider one play selected for the 2018 Carrboro ArtsCenter festival. I have read but not seen Theater More Like Baseball, a 10-minute play by Mark Cornell. The story, before a surprise emotional reveal, is this: two people take a reluctant friend to see a play, but he rants about preferring baseball, since theaters don’t let you eat, or drink beer, or yell at the actors. The core of that play, the argument that baseball is better than theater, reads a lot like a comedy set.

Even comic routines that are a series of one-liners around a common idea can be adapted as sketches. Imagine a Rodney Dangerfield routine of jokes around his thematic complaint that he gets no respect, with the lines divided between two characters who one-up each other to be the more pitiable. And recall to mind the traditional street corner “dozens,” amusing bystanders by dueling insults.

Sketches usually have a character with a goal, but the goal is relatively unimportant. Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch is famous not because of one character’s inconsequential goal (getting a refund for a dead parrot) but because of the escalating, absurd argument: the pet store clerk insists the dead bird is merely resting. In Lucille Ball’s classic TV chocolate factory sketch, her goal (not getting fired) is merely a MacGuffin as we watch the physical comedy of her struggle with a conveyor belt.

Just start writing the dialog

And then format your first draft in the form theaters want, which is easily searched online. Once you do this, count the pages. The script portion of your play, excluding two pages of front material, should be eight or nine pages long (the usual rough estimate is that a page of dialog takes one to one and a half minutes on stage). If you can, revise to nine pages.

If doing so ruins the play, let the play be whatever length it wants to be. Some festivals take 20-minute plays, and occasionally a festival looks for two-minute plays, so let the play decide how long it wants to be. With Americans’ attention spans shrinking, short plays will always be in style. 

Help the actor understand her character

You will probably have only one opportunity to do this, since you will not be present at rehearsals or contacted by the director.

Do it by adding a tagline on the script cover page and by providing brief information in the cast of characters. A tagline on a script’s cover page has several benefits: it might motivate the script reader to want to like your play, and then to accept your play, and it might help the theater to cast the right actor and help focus the director on your thematic intention. And then a tagline can help the actors understand their characters.
 
Use your Cast of Characters opportunity

Only two of these character description options would help the actor understand her character.

          KAREN: 30s.
         

          KAREN: 30s. Won’t trust anyone, even herself.
         

          KAREN: 30s. Eager for new friends.
 
Let the actor make acting decisions

Your script should tell the actor what to say, but not how to act. Leave those decisions to the actor and director. They enjoy making creative decisions as much as playwrights do, and have some training and experience. Even ambiguous dialog is not very risky if the director and actor know the intent of your play.
 
Give each character a significant role

Never include characters who are not essential. Besides complicating casting troubles and clogging the green room during festivals, insignificant roles are likely to be turned down by actors who can act. Jeff Bushnell of North Park Vaudeville rightly says that “Each actor should have a decent sized part. No actor wants to come to a bunch of rehearsals to make a very short appearance in a short play.”

Actor Joe Perignat likes 10-minute plays in part because they “tend to have few roles, with all the roles being somewhat ‘principal.’ Typically, the actors are all on stage for the duration of the performance and therefore each has an opportunity to command the stage.”
 
Make the dialog speakable

Unless you have a clever reason to give a speaker convoluted syntax, don’t. Avoid trying to write dialect. Long lines can cause breath problems, and lead actors into hurrying.
 
Make your play nine minutes, not ten

Avoid the temptation to fully pack your ten pages. Too many lines make actors hurry, depriving the production of the very important acting that goes on during quiet moment between lines. Actors act during silences, but only if there are silences. Fewer lines also allow the director more creative latitude in timing and rhythm. Leave rapid talk and dread of silence to cable news channels.

Name your characters

Your audience might never hear the names of your characters spoken during the play, but you should name your characters anyway. It might have been cool once to name characters ONE and TWO, or WOMAN and MAN, but it isn’t cool now. Your first draft Cast of Characters might simply include BARISTA and MANAGER, but don’t send out your script before actually naming the characters (e. g. MARY, a perfectionist barista, and PAT, a harried manager).

An actor is happier if she can say at a cocktail party or at an audition, or in a later playbill bio, that “she played Mary in Starbucks Memories,” not just “the barista.” A role with a name seems more important, which might also help the actor persuade casual friends to buy tickets to the festival and your play.

The end as a matter of plot

The dramatic question is traditionally a variant of will the protagonist achieve her goal? In traditional romantic comedy and some other plays, that answer is obvious from the beginning, so the suspense is about how will the two main characters overcome obstacles, misunderstandings, and complications to get to their happy ending? In mysteries the primary question is who committed the crime?

Most plays have plenty of secondary plot questions to maintain audience interest. Most of those questions are answered one by one, and then are superseded by other suspenseful questions. In a film, we are curious about how the protagonist will enter a building despite the guard, and once that entrance has been accomplished we are curious about how the protagonist will avoid being noticed by the surveillance cameras inside.
Playwrights writing edgy, experimental, works might lead audiences to wonder what the heck is going on? But that potential confusion and annoyance can be a risk worth taking, and might actually be part of the playwright’s intended effect.
When the primary dramatic question of plot has been resolved, (perhaps with a short, sharp shocking surprise) tension and suspense deflate, the audience begins to relax, and the denouement begins.

The end as a matter of character

A character climax often occurs in the same scene as the plot climax. Most narratives have an emotional plot that parallels the event plot. Imagine a Hallmark television drama in which a mother heroically rescues her kidnapped son from a Saudi terrorist cell, an oft told story line that might be enriched if her success not only rescues the son, but atones for some maternal lapse, or proves her worth to her skeptical parents and to herself.
What David Mamet says about when a play ends

In a New York Times opinion piece, David Mamet wrote that “All drama is about lies. When the lie is exposed, the play is over.” Except for the restabilization and soft landing provided by the denouement, of course. Mamet went on to write that ordinary plays might ask what is true, but that the best plays deal instead with the lies that we cannot easily face, the lies we repress.

What David Ives says about when a play ends

At a 2010 Barnes & Noble panel in New York City, David Ives said that all plays are about self-knowledge, that when the central character achieves some self-knowledge, the play is over.
That certainly works for tragedy, whose recognition scenes are the most intense emotionally. We all enjoy seeing other people confront unpleasantries about themselves, even though we mostly avoid confronting our own.

David Ives understandably admires plays whose central characters gain self-knowledge. I would go one step further, and perhaps he would, too. I believe that while the characters in a play gain self-knowledge, however uncomfortably, the audience should gain self-knowledge, too.

Both endings are important

Like the last line in a poem, the last line of your play is what the audience will hear echoing inside their heads as the lights go down. It can help them understand your theme and give a sense of closure. The emotional end of your play, though, happened a few moments earlier.

Even though the last line of your play isn’t the emotional ending, that last line is very important.

Ives said that he had thought a lot about what David Mamet wrote in an article in The New York Times: “All drama is about lies. When the lie is exposed, the play is over.” Mamet went on to argue that ordinary plays might ask what is true, but that the best plays deal instead with the lies that we cannot easily face, the lies we repress.

Ives told his audience that he believed instead that all plays are about self-knowledge: when the central character achieves some self-knowledge, the play is over. That certainly works for tragedy, whose recognition scenes are the most intense emotionally. We all enjoy seeing other people confront unpleasantries about themselves, but of course we do not like to do that ourselves.

Mass entertainment in America makes its profit by reinforcing the lies we tell ourselves. We want films and TV shows that reassure us that we are fine as we are, as individuals and as a nation, and that everything will turn out all right in the end. We are allowed to imagine ourselves as valiant heroes and persuasive lovers, and encouraged to identify with rebels, adventurers and avengers. The bad people in popular entertainment are not like us at all. They are serial killers, the arrogant rich scheming for more, moronic street criminals and swarthy terrorists. We empathize with the always attractive and always successful forces for good. A screenwriter once wisely observed that all popular movies are about the fantasy life of the viewer.

David Ives understandably admires plays whose central characters gain self-knowledge. I would go one step further, and perhaps he would, too. I believe that while the characters in a play gain self-knowledge, however painfully, the audience should gain self-knowledge, too. I have long felt that at one point or another in the best plays, everyone in the audience says to herself or himself some variation of “Oh, hell, they are talking about me, and they aren’t saying anything nice.”

The prospect of increased self-knowledge in individuals and cultures won’t sell many tickets, but it restores to theatre one of its traditional social and personal functions. We will not often find this in television, the Hollywood blockbuster, or Broadway shows. We reward the entertainment industry for reassuring us, even with illusions, not for discomforting us with unpleasant facts. As American theaters become increasingly dependent upon ticket sales, this grim waste of opportunity will only get worse.