TOOLS: A Workshop Series for Playwrights Exploring Theatricality
- Fees are on a sliding scale from $30-$50
- Register here! Capacity limited to 15 pax, first-come-first-served.
Overview
Tools is a workshop series by our visiting resident playwright Sean Dunnington for playwrights curious about theatricality - the unique magic of theatre that invites audiences to “believe” what they see on stage is true-to-life, even while knowing it's not real (to an extent). Each session dives into a specific element of this conceptual spell, blending discussion, hands-on activities, performance, and experimentation.
These workshops are suitable for playwrights/writers who are engaged with/thinking about craft at a serious level.
Join us for the five workshops in this series:
This workshop will explore what stage directions can do beyond blocking and lighting cues. How can they become indispensable to the play? Can they describe things that never appear? Should they be interpreted as literal, tonal, or something else entirely? Can they dare be ignored? Through examples and practice, we’ll test how much stage directions can shape a play.
Documentation
The workshop began with Sean and the participants discussing different definitions for key terms that would be explored during the process, such as 'theatricality' and 'stage directions'. Participants shared about the ways they applied theatricality and stage directions in plays they had previously written.
To better understand the impact stage directions have on a play, participants read excerpts from two plays - Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' NEIGHBORS - which featured affective stage directions. Participants discussed how the stage directions could impact the way the play was read and staged.
The participants tried their hand at writing affective stage directions for four short lines of dialogue provided by Sean. Through this open-ended exercise, they observed how one another approached stage directions in very different ways, and how different stage directions changed the context and interpretation of the same lines of dialogue.
We'd like to thank the participants who joined us for the first workshop in the TOOLS series, and we look forward to seeing everyone at upcoming sessions!
This workshop investigates the remapping process, where one thing stands in for another and real-world elements correspond with their stage-space equivalents. What happens when a stick becomes a gun or a house is described as an imaginary zone? We’ll examine the audience’s role in recognizing these substitutions and experiment with how to teach them to understand the play.
Documentation
Sean began the session asking participants to share the role that props serve in a play, and how to (if possible) distinguish that from the set.
Participants read an excerpt from "Cock" by Mike Bartlett and "Romeo and Juliet" by Shakespeare to investigate what seeing a prop onstage does to the play versus not seeing it. They also tried their hand at writing scenes to explore the process of remapping a prop to represent something it isn't in actuality.
Final group photo with some participants holding up the excerpt that was read or the prop they wrote about for the exercise!
This workshop explores the dichotomy between when something actually happens on stage and when something looks like it actually happens. What’s the difference between a character really eating, fighting, or swimming, versus the play tricking the audience into thinking they really did any of that? We’ll test how far we can push in both directions.
Documentation
To kick off the workshop, Sean tasked the participants to read excerpts from several plays that demonstrated the use of illusion and actuality on stage. These included Blasted by Sarah Kane, The Conduct of Life by María Irene Fornés, Isaac's Eye by Lucas Hnath, and White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour.
Participants were tasked to work in pairs to craft a scene containing some form of illusory theatrical element. The three pairs presented scenes which explored illusory props, illusory levitation, and the illusion of a performance happening at all.
After discussing illusion on stage in detail, Sean contrasted it with actuality, and shared about how both elements affect audiences in different ways. Participants were tasked to craft another scene, this time ensuring that something 'actually happened' in the scene. These included marking handwriting assignments, eating potato chips, complimenting each other, and more.
Thank you to our participants for crafting and presenting some very exciting and interesting scenes about illusion and actuality!
The boundary between the stage and the audience defines theatre’s magic. What happens when we reinforce this boundary? Or when we cross it? Can it ever actually be broken? This workshop explores the "fourth wall"—its purpose, rules, and what happens when we try to mess with it.
Documentation
The workshop started with a discussion on the fourth wall in theatre - how it is defined, built, and applied in various plays. Participants read more about the fourth wall as defined by Jeffrey M. Jones, and shared their responses.
For their first exercise, participants read the folk tale The Boy Who Cried Wolf and were tasked to imagine the way they would present it on stage, and sketch their set design. All participants shared their various set ideas with each other.
For their second exercise, participants read Melancholy Play by Sarah Ruhl and discussed the way the play breaks the fourth wall. Afterwards, they relooked at their imaginings of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and wrote short scenes which broke the fourth wall, then paired up to share with each other about the scenes they had written.
A group photo with our participants, proudly showing off their set designs and short scenes!
The shape of a play is more than its structure—it’s how time and space interact to guide the audience’s attention and understanding. In this workshop, we’ll explore scene intervals, transitions, and disjunctions, and how these elements shape the play’s rhythm and illusion.
*This workshop has been postponed to Sunday, 1st June 2025, instead of 31st May as originally publicised due to schedule changes for the workshop facilitator.
Documentation
The workshop began with a discussion on how space and time function in different plays and how that interacts with the theatricality of a play.
The participants categorised different plays from a reference list into how space and time functioned in them (open or closed).
Excerpts from different plays were read to investigate different configurations of open/closed time and/or open/closed space plays. Participants also wrote short scenes of their own to figure out how they could write transitions between scenes for a closed or open time scene.
As a fun exercise, participants took a stab at reordering the scenes in an open space, open time play, Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, and gave their explanations for why they chose to order it in a particular way.
That's a wrap for the last session of TOOLS. Thank you for joining us and participating actively!