shoop and short plays

I just finished participating in a short play festival in Manhattan. I've written a few 10-minute plays here and there, and I've seen a good many. The festival was fun, and it gave me a chance to work with some great actors (and great people, period) whom I hadn't seen in a while. It started me thinking about short plays in general. Not the "one-act," so much, which we generally think of as running a little longer, but in particular the 10-minute play. I realized I don't know all that much about them.

There are at least a couple of major showcases--the 10-minute festival at Louisville, and the collections that Samuel French publishes each year after productions in New York. Lately, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) has been publishing the plays from their play development workshops. It makes me wonder--are there any "classic" 10-minute plays? Any masterpieces? When we go see an evening of short-short plays, we expect unevenness. We expect a few that we like, which we praise with "cute" or "sweet" or "funny," along with some that rate as "okay," and some clunkers. So far as I know, we don't expect more than that. I wonder how great a 10-minute play can be.

I've noticed a few things. It's darn hard to pull off a serious 10-minute play. Things just have to happen too fast. If you played "Oedipus the King" in 10 minutes, it'd be funny. As for funny plays in 10-minutes, they often seem a lot like sketches. There's a difference, all right, but sometimes it can be blurry. Something else--some darn good actors get involved in these things. Actors' Equity actors, up-and-coming actors, some old, some fresh-faced, but all highly skilled. They want parts, and they want to act, and they'll go for the short play if they're not doing something else (often another short play). There must be something to the form that's appealing.

One of the first short-story collections I got through was one by John Cheever--he's not one of my all-time favorites, but I like "O Youth and Beauty," because it features a guy hurdling over furniture and meeting a pretty funny end, and "The Swimmer," where a guy swims a lot. My point is, in literature, there are acknowledged masters of the short form--the short story. Are there acknowledged masters of the 10-minute play? Would we read a collection?

At any rate, I'm going to look into this further. I might find out a few interesting things.