Can you really write a play that lasts a minute? The one minute play offers a unique challenge to actors, directors and writers: how do you create a whole world, where actors have room to perform and where audiences have a true experience all in 60 seconds? One Minute Plays: A Practical Guide to Tiny Theatre demystifies the super-short-form play, demonstrating that this rich, accessible format offers great energy and variety not only to audiences but to everyone involved in its creation and performance. This handbook includes: An anthology of 200 one-minute plays selected from the annual Gone in 60 Seconds festival. A toolbox of exercises, methodologies and techniques for educators, practitioners and workshop leaders at all levels. Tips and advice on the demands of storytelling, inclusivity and creative challenges. Detailed practical information about creating your own minute festival, including play selection, running order, staging and marketing. Drawing on a wealth of experience, Steve Ansell and Rose Burnett Bonczek present an invaluable guide for anyone intrigued by the art of creating, producing and performing a one minute play.

Here's a guide book on how to write 45-minute one-act plays, skits, and monologues for all ages. Step-by-step strategies and sample play, monologue, and animation script offer easy-to-understand solutions for drama workshop leaders, high-school and university drama directors, teachers, students, parents, coaches, playwrights, scriptwriters, novelists, storytellers, camp counselors, actors, lifelong learning instructors, biographers, facilitators, personal historians, and senior center activity directors. Guide young people in an intergenerational experience of interviewing and writing skits, plays, and monologues based on the significant events and experiences from lives of people. Learn to write skits, plays and monologues based on historical events and personalities. What you'll get out of this book and the exercises of writing one-act plays for teenage actors and audiences of all-ages audience, are improved skills in adapting all types of social issues, current events, or life experience to 45-minute one-act plays, skits, or monologues for teenage or older adult drama workshops. How do you write plays and skits from life stories, current events, social issues, or history? Are you looking for the appropriate 45-minute, one-act play for high-school students or other teenagers, for community center drama workshops, or even for home school projects or for events and celebrations? Are you seeking one-act plays for older adults drama workshops? Use personal or biographical experiences as examples when you write your skit or play. If you want a really original play, write, revise, and adapt your own plays, skits, and monologues. Here's how to do it.

This fine selection of 20th century plays includes contributions from Robert Emmons Rogers ("The Boy Will"), Booth Tarkington ("Beauty and the Jacobin"), Ernest Dowson ("The Pierrot of the Minute"), Oliphant Down ("The Maker of Dreams"), Percy MacKaye ("Gettysburg"), A.A. Milne ("Wurzel-Flummery"), Harold Brighouse ("Maid of France"), Lady Gregory ("Spreading the News"), Jeannette Marks ("Welsh Honeymoon"), John Millington Synge ("Riders to the Sea"), Lord Dunsany ("A Night at an Inn"), Stark Young ("The Twilight Saint"), Lady Alix Egerton ("The Masque of the Two Strangers"), Maurice Maeterlinck ("The Intruder"), Josephine Preston Peabody ("Fortune and Men's Eyes"), and John Galsworthy ("The Little Man"). All of these plays may be staged free of charge in the United States (and possible in other countries--check your local copyright laws for details).

Steven Berkoff has been variously described as controversial, thrilling, electric and dynamic. A Renaissance man of the theatre, he is known equally for his writing, directing and acting. Collecting together nineteen one-act plays, this volume presents never-before-published material. Abusive, shocking and endlessly surprising, these sharply written pieces showcase Berkoff's trademark controversy, black humour and dramatic dialectics. Themes that haunt much of his work are present: his luxurious verbosity; his counterpoint of crude street-patter and elegiac proclamation; sex wars; class wars; dislocation and abandonment of love in a thankless and unyielding world. The selection of plays allows the performer and reader to experience Berkoff's fluid anarchic poetry at its most profane within the complete and pithy structure of the one-act play. Established plays such as The Biblical Tales (which enjoyed success in their 2010 run at the New End Theatre, Hampstead) stand alongside previously unpublished material, giving the range of Berkoff's work full expression, from his established thematic concerns to his new and unseen work. Perfect for student and amateur performances, this volume contains a full introduction by Geoffrey Colman, Head of Acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama.