Short scenes, rapid dialogue, constant entrances, and frequent plot twists may make a play move quickly. But movement is not momentum. A play can race across the stage and still feel strangely inert. [more]

Playwrights are often told to submit everywhere: festivals, readings, workshops, competitions, conferences, development programs. The implication is that they are all stops on the same road — a road that eventually leads to production. They aren’t. Each serves a different purpose. Confusing them can waste time, money and hope. Understanding what they actually offer lets you decide whether an opportunity is useful to the play — or merely flattering to the playwright. [mo

Eight performances a week is one of theatre's proudest traditions. It's also one of its greatest illusions. To an audience, each performance ninety minutes or double that. To the actor, it is a repeating equation that governs nearly every waking moment. Eight shows a week isn't simply a schedule. It's mathematics. The audience sees opening night. The actor lives through multiplication. [more]

The best laughter doesn't behave like dialogue. It behaves like weather. You can feel it coming before it arrives. A shift in the atmosphere. A pressure change. Someone smiles before they speak. A pause lingers a little too long. Then the room breaks open. Real laughter moves through people the way a summer storm moves across a landscape. It doesn't ask permission. It doesn't follow the script. It catches one person, then another, until an entire audience is breathi

Theatre is the only major art form that is designed to disappear. A novel remains on the shelf. A film can be streamed decades later. A painting hangs in a museum, growing more valuable with age. But a play exists only in the strange agreement between actors and audience that, for the next two hours, this imagined world is real. When the curtain falls, that world vanishes. Every production is an act of planned extinction. [more]

Dialogue becomes compelling not when characters say exactly what they mean, but when they fight against saying it. Every memorable exchange contains two scripts: the one spoken aloud and the one running silently underneath. The audience listens to both. The playwright's job is to write the hidden script without ever putting it on the page. [more]

When writers say they're "stuck," they often mean something more specific: the work has stopped surprising them. The play no longer argues, resists, or reveals anything unexpected. It has become a transcription of an outline instead of a conversation. That's what it means when a play stops talking back. [more]

Streaming and live theatre are often framed as competitors, but history suggests a different story. Every major entertainment technology — from radio to television to film — was predicted to destroy theatre. Instead, theatre adapted by emphasizing what only it could offer. Streaming is simply the latest chapter in that story. [more]

There is a strange moment after a standing ovation. The audience rises. The applause swells. Actors embrace one another backstage. Friends congratulate you in the lobby. Someone tells you they've never seen anything like it. Another says your play moved them to tears. You smile. You say thank you. And somewhere in the back of your mind a voice whispers: "The second act still drags." [more]

Most people think rewriting is about fixing mistakes. It isn't. The best rewriting is an act of excavation. The first draft buries the play, essay, or story beneath habits, assumptions, clichés, and explanations. The rewrite doesn't decorate the surface — it digs until the work that was already there is finally exposed. The distinction matters because it changes the writer's relationship to the draft. [more]