Amanda Samuelson on the Ingredients for a Play
Amanda Samuelson
Playwright Featured in Springboards
A bake-off is “a quickly written exercise on an assigned theme with assigned elements” (or ingredients) that is usually done within a small period of time. The bake-off was created by playwright Paula Vogel, and it’s how I first started writing plays.
When I arrived at university in 2015, I had never written a play before. My classmates and I had come into the program as either actors or directors, but we all had to take a mandatory playwriting class. Some weren’t too stoked about this, but for me it ended up being a blessing in disguise. I’m not sure I ever would have discovered my love for writing plays without it.
The class was unconventional, I suppose. We weren’t taught about structure, plot, character, action, or any of that fun stuff you think of when you think of a formal writing class. We were just given a few “ingredients” and a week to write a 10-paged play. And so it began. What I liked about this was that there really were no expectations. We had a week to write and then we’d come back and read everyone’s work. We got to witness all the hilarious, tragic, and wacky stories the class had created, each play so entirely and uniquely different despite all being constructed with the same criteria in mind.
Four years ago I was in my third year of university and my playwriting teacher at the time gave us the assignment to write a 2-paged scene which had to include the following “ingredients”:
1. Hunger
2. Astrology
3. A Synthetic Body Part
And so Pressure was born.
And it blows my mind that in four years I have managed to turn this 2-paged scene with this ridiculous criteria into a full-length play! But that’s what I love about “bake-off” style writing exercises. You’re forced to write about things you would have never otherwise thought of. Pressure became a story about one young woman’s experience with depression and anxiety. I’m not sure it would be what it is today if I hadn’t started with the basic foundation of those three ingredients.
Working with specific criteria feels like being given the pieces to a puzzle and then trying to fit them all together in my own unique way. Sometimes the puzzle is missing one or two or ten pieces, and when that happens I either tuck those plays in a drawer and never look at them again or continue working on them for months or years trying to figure out where those missing pieces are. And, every so often, everything comes together beautifully and in a way I had never expected. It’s easy to give up on the puzzle when I feel frustrated… but it is incredibly rewarding when I finally solve it.
I’m not entirely sure if I have yet solved the puzzle that is Pressure. But I am so grateful to Workshop West for providing me with opportunities (like Springboards and playwriting circles) to keep piecing it together.
