If two minutes is funny, why not ten?
Last fall, I posted here about having a two-minute (yes, two-minute) play, Thinking of Elephants , produced by the Minnesota Shorts Festival. It was a simple idea for what was essentially a quick skit. Taking place in a laundromat, one person’s discomfort at having the “underthings” in her basket seen by a coworker ends in a kind of “mutually assured destruction” scenario; she demands a peek at his own “unmentionables.” But even for that simple scenario, I wrote too much dialogue and had to throw out many lines to keep it to about two minutes. But after seeing the two-minute production, I wondered if the idea couldn’t sustain the 10-minute length that most short-play competitions request. The key wasn’t just to add back in my excised dialogue, but to find an emotional core to the story that would make it about more than just embarrassment. Pondering this for a while, I realized that the text of the story – feeling exposed before a coworker – could be su...