Playwright Class

Chickasaw Nation Division of Arts and Humanities is offering a series of playwriting classes for anyone wanting to gain playwriting experience. The classes allow an opportunity for each student to complete an individual first/rough draft of a play, or the students may work as a team and collaborate on writing one play. With the team effort, there may be an opportunity for these students to become part of the core production team and take this play from conception to staged reading to theatre workshop to full production after the playwriting class ends. Students meet two hours a week and develop playwriting techniques throughout the eight weeks the classes are offered. They may use Chickasaw history as the subject matter for the play, or they may use something different.

• Week one, students learn the differences between a script written for the stage and one written for film. Play genre are discussed: comedy, tragedy, satire, absurdist, children’s and plays with music or musicals. Plots and storylines, along with setting/location and time period, are also discussed. Sample scripts are read and dissected throughout the classes.
• Week two is a continuation of week one with additional information regarding character development, protagonist and antagonist, secondary characters, from whose point of view is the story to be told and stock characters.
• Week three is a continuation of week two with additional information on act and scene breakdown, the super-objective/over-all arc, high point and low point.
• Weeks four through eight, students will be writing either the individual play or collaborate on a play.