Workshops

Improvised Storytelling: Inspiration Everywhere

Teacher: Jose Gonzalez

In this workshop, you'll learn ideas and techniques from improvisational comedy & theatre to help you take inspiration from everything around you and everything within. You'll boost your power to weave stories from your personal experiences and musings to create stories for the stage or page, or both!

The Show Is In The Tell:
Writing Dialogue For The Stage

Teacher: Ashley Naftule

In this workshop, participants will learn tricks and techniques to sharpen their dialogue writing skills. Like in real life, characters in plays often don’t come right out and say what they want or express how they feel in direct terms. We’ll look at fun generative techniques for creating dialogue scenes that say a lot indirectly. We’ll do writing exercises to play with different modes of conversation, analyze the anatomy of a good joke, and focus on one of the most most important qualities that separates playwriting from other forms of fiction: leaving plenty of empty space in the text for other artists (actors, directors, designers, even the audience themselves) to fill in the blanks. We’ll also examine how this dialogue writing approach can be used to enhance non-fiction and memoir writing, and take a look at how it also applies to writing stage directions and action scenes.

Writing: Close Reading

Teacher: Kendall Pack

One of the best ways to improve our work is to investigate pieces that we love and find the things that make them so effective. For this course, we will look at a selection of written work and use the skill of close reading to fill our Writer's Toolbox for a more strategic approach to the drafting process. This is especially helpful when trying to solve problems in our dialogue, scene construction, action, and character development. Please make sure you read the writing packet in advance so that we can have a shared library to work from for our discussion. Bring specific concerns about your own writing that you are seeking solutions for.

Sketch Comedy Writing

Teacher: Shawn Collins

Learn the fundamentals of writing a comedy sketch, starting with basic structure and moving on to escalation and pay-off. Learn to develop both character-driven and situationally-driven scenes.

Geometry of Storytelling:

Teacher: Kim Porter

For this last session of the Playground we will experiment with performance concepts and develop mind maps and geometric strategies that support memorization, interpretation, and meaningful connection with the audience.