Mystery & Magic: Playwriting in Theory and Practice

Sarah Buck

OAI: oai:digitalcommons.ursinus.edu:theater_sum-1012

My project was created to answer the following questions: What are the indispensable nuts and bolts of playwriting? To what styles and techniques am I drawn as a playwright and why? How does the work of other playwrights inform and inspire my own creative writing? To find out the answers, I read and analyzed other playwrights' work to explore the various ways in which plays can be written. What I discovered has helped me in writing a play of my own and will influence how I write plays in the future. I have ensured that my reading list includes a variety of playwrights, including both women and people of color, writing during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My goal was to finish writing my play, which is a continuation of a project started in Fall 2020 and create an annotated bibliography of every play I've read during Summer Fellows. The annotated bibliography details what I found useful in different plays and playwriting manuals, as well as why I think certain styles or practices do or do not work for me. My work culminated in a complete rough draft of my play, an annotated bibliography of my reading, and a response paper.

theater Playwriting MAGIC Plays Arts and Humanities Theatre and Performance Studies