ll right, the title is a bit severe -- not "death, death, death" perhaps, but -- something. And I say this with the complete understanding that if execution were wrought, I'd be biting the hand that feeds me: if it weren't for short-play festivals and competitions, many of my scripts would never see the lights of a stage.

But something about the short-play format does not sit right, something about both the effect on the audience and what the proliferation of the short-play theatrical experience signifies for the craft of playwriting. The following thoughts are my attempt to find that "something," and I hope they spark further discussion about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the short-play phenomenon.

And phenomenon it is.  I have not made a calculated study of it, but my guess would be that during the last 5 to 10 years more and more theatres have taken to hosting short-play performances, and usually more for economic than aesthetic reasons (though many, like the long-lived Actors' Theatre of Louisville competition, try to make the 10-minute festival a springboard for other opportunities). A night of "quickies" can be done cheaply relative to full productions of any-sized work (especially if playwrights are required to produce things themselves). It fills the theatre on nights when it would otherwise be dark, thus helping build audience and bring in extra revenue.  And if the festival generates enough "buzz," then the theatre's name is bruited about with very little, if any, advertising money being spent for the bruiting.

Doing this is understandable and acceptable: after all, theatrical economics being what they are and are not, anything that places posteriors in the seats and money in the coffers and keeps the enterprise afloat should be hallelujah'd and hosanna'd.  So, hallelujah and hosanna.

But still...but still..."something" about the short-play form and its place in the theatrical mix bothers me.  Let me take form first. (And I am aware that every reader will know a play or two or three not covered by what I am going to say, but my description will fit most of the short-plays accepted for production.)  A short-play has no room for dawdling; it must begin, middle, and end itself quickly and with the least ambiguity possible.  To do this, it must trade in readily understood signs, symbols, and emotional entanglements and deal only in the most glancing, snapshot sort of way with the struggles of human life.

In the end, this makes the short-play a conservative art form, unable to challenge the status quo because such challenges demand more room, breadth, and risk than the short-play allows. It must rely primarily on tricky or twisty plots, standard-issue psychologies and interpersonal relationships, reductive dramatic tensions, and telegraphed resolutions -- nothing which can be truly strange or irksome to the audience.  And, as with the "slam" aspect of slam poetry, the more it can rouse an audience by style (regardless of its content), the more it will be seen as "successful," though its success may be the theatrical equivalent of tasty but empty calories, with an adrenalin spike falling off quickly into a disposable memory.

In fact, I would go so far as to say (paraphrasing Howard Barker's lobbed grenade that musical theatre is the perfect art form for an authoritarian society) that the short-play is the perfect art form for a consumer culture which, in uncounted ways, cell-phones, instant-messages, and bludgeons everyone down to the shortened attention span and continual appetite necessary for a satisfactory rate of corporate profit.

All right, all right -- again, a little "strong" -- but not, I think, entirely off the mark. Our own Boston Theatre Marathon (a butt-breaking 40 plays in 10 hours) sells itself in one way by saying that if you don't like what you see, something else will pop along in 10 minutes, so there's no need to wrestle with what's happening on-stage -- the theatre equivalent of flipping the remote. I have been involved in competitions where the audiences vote on their favorite play of the evening, and almost invariably the play wins that tickles the funny bones and flatters the audience the most, especially if it can simultaneously come across as both outrageous and comfortable, cool without being radical.

But the social and economic analysis is only one part of my discomfort with the short-play.  I also feel uncomfortable with what it does to playwriting itself. To me, the short-play, no matter how skillfully done, equals finger exercises for the pianist or the quick sketches of an artist: it can be interesting as an experiment, even quite elegant and touching in its own way, but we should not mistake its preliminary nature for the full monty of a carefully shaped dramatic piece.

Because of the need for breezy cleverness and quick resolution, the short-play does not stretch the story-telling muscles, it does not require the writer to struggle with the challenge of maintaining an audience's interest over the long haul (and deeply enough, as David Ball points out in Backwards and Forwards, to keep the audience from thinking about its ever-present need to go to the bathroom).  It encourages bon mots rather than discourse, conventional pay-offs over pricking ambiguities.  It primes a vicious circle where an audience already fashioned by a technology of cortical abridgement gets only those things which maintain the abbreviated attention span and never those things which can "unabridge" the mind and elongate it.

And for young writers just starting out in the craft, the short-play ratifies their own upbringing in a techno-rapid culture, where human situations are regularly parsed into regimented segments with certain time-slices reserved for advertising. And the format does little or nothing to dare them to think and observe outside themselves, thereby reinforcing an historical narcissism already quite well primed by conglomerates and culture.

Furthermore, being trained in the short-play mentality smacks of a kind of anti-artistic utilitarianism, the dramatic equivalent of taking classes to improve one's SATs, based on the idea that if you can just master the techniques, you can get the right score, regardless if you have any real aptitude or, in the case of the short-play, anything worth saying.  (This was the sense I got from a workshop I observed on how to write a good 10-minute play: one from Column A, one from Column B, etc., and voila!, the winner at Louisville.)

In other words, an over-emphasis on, and an over-promotion of, the short form leads inevitably to short thinking, short sight, short cut -- shortcoming.

Should they be executed? Of course not. So what is the "something," then, if not death for the short-play? To see it for what it is: not a new evolution in the art of playwriting but something less, akin to exercises at the barre or cracking one's knuckles before dealing seven-card stud, and, economically, no different than discount airfares pitched to fill at half-price seats that would otherwise go empty.  Let the short-play festivals and competitions have their place, as sounding boards where emerging playwrights like myself can have a chance to hear their lines pronounced trippingly on the tongue.

But let us also keep them in their preparatory place and put the bulk of our energies into teaching ourselves and others to hit the long ball, that is, write the pieces (this said with great hope and fear) that will continue to speak (when the body can no longer speak) to audiences gathered in future dark rooms who will still be struggling together to understand, who will still be hungering for light and life and something deeper than the momentary kick and the casual aside. Like the Babe, that's where I'm pointing.

© 2001 Michael Bettencourt

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays
 produced in New York, Chicago,
Boston, and Los Angeles, among others.
  Continued thanks to his "prime mate"
and wife, Maria-Beatriz

© 2000-2001 Aviar-DKA Ltd. All rights reserved (including authors’ and individual copyrights are indicated). No part of this material may be reproduced, translated, transmitted, framed or stored in a retrieval system for public or private use without the written  permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder. For permissions, contact publishers@scene4.com.