2007: The Best Ten-Minute Plays for Two Actors

Foreword

The ten-minute play as an accepted dramatic form is a fairly recent development. Some would say that its popularity is a result of our diminished attention spans, which may be partially true; but here's how the genre came to be.
For several years, Actors Theatre of Louisville, under the leadership of Jon Jory, commissioned playwrights to write plays of short duration for performance by its apprentice company. This was a way for the theater to do something to help playwrights, but also it was a way to develop relationships with them, many of which bore fruit over the years as these writers went on to have full-length plays staged in Actors Theater's famed Humana Festival.
Over the years, Actors Theatre built up quite a library of these short plays, all of them in manuscript. An editor for the play publisher Samuel French got the idea that maybe other theaters, actors, and students might be interested in these plays if they were made available to them. He managed to swing a deal for French to publish an anthology of Actors Theatre's best short plays, which they were now calling "ten-minute plays." This anthology was so successful that French has now published six such volumes, and most of the other publishers have followed suit, including Smith and Kraus, as its annual ten-minute play anthologies will attest. Bills of ten-minute plays are now produced regularly - all over the world.
There are some who feel that the ten-minute play ought to be an opportunity for playwrights to experiment - with language, with form, with character, with subject matter. "The best" ten-minute plays are therefore the ones that departthe most from conventional drama. For the purposes of this series, here is how I define "best": that which is most useful to people who will buy this book and produce these plays. Some actors and directors prefer straightforward realism; whereas others go for more abstract, experimental plays. I don't carry a torch for any one style, so I have tried to include in this book examples of realism and, shall we say, "non-realism." I hope you will find herein more than one play that rings your bell. They all rang mine.
Most of the plays in this book are by exciting up-and-comers, such as Bara Swain, Andrew Biss, Michael Golamco, Vanessa David and John Shanahan.
Should you find a play (or plays) in this book that you want to produce, you will find information in the back on who to contact for performance rights.

After seven years of doing these books for Smith and Kraus, I have decided to step aside and have turned over the reins to my old pal Lawrence Harbison, who knows as much about the theater and its plays and playwrights as anyone I know. It has been a very rewarding and very challenging task editing these anthologies; but now it is time to hang up my red pencil. I am retiring to Myrtle Beach, there to become one of those geezers who stands around all day in a kilt, sending foursomes of awful golfers off the first tee. In my free time I won't be reading plays: I'll be taking up bungee jumping, hang gliding, and alligator wrestling. There is life beyond the theater.

D. L. Lepidus