Ten Minute Plays

In the past year, I've actually grown to quite like ten minute plays. I appreciate the talent it takes to develop a character in such a short amount of time. In a way, I think that writers have to be better in ten minute plays, because you have such a brief amount of time to capture your audience. You can't spend two acts developing a character, you have to develop him enough--i'm never going to say that the characters are fully developed--to where the audience isn't going to be hopelessly bored and disconnected from the action.
A tendency I have noticed--and whether this is a good or bad tendency I don't think is the point--is that for these plays to get really dramatic really fast. I'm not just making this judgment out of the plays we read, but in some ways I think it's easier to write a drama than it is a comedy. With a comedy, if the audience doesn't get it, all you end up with is a play that kind of lousy. However, with a drama, you get the point even if the writing/directing was lousy. You get that it's dramatic, and whereas you might not want to go see it again, you at least get in the right mood for it.
One of my favorite things about ten minute plays is their tendency to make us think about things in a new way. For example, when Eric in "dance" refers to dancing as "having enough control", that struck me as odd, because everyone has always emphasized dancing as losing control.Also, he refers to himself as not having enough control to dance. It's weird to me because one would think that Eric's concious choice of lifestyle(rebelling against established authority, for instance) is having a lot of control, isn't that the whole point? I think that made for a very interesting play
I also like the idea of creating mini-forwards int en minute plays. In bowl of soup, the idea of memory is turned on its head, because we are waiting the entire time to discover why Rob doesn't speak and what affects him so, until we find out about David. And yet, we still don't know the whole story, and it keeps us wanting to learn more.
All in all, I'm very excited about tackling the big subjects in these plays, because I think that where audience members could think a character or theme is cliche in a longer play, they won't necessarily here. I also think that these are going to be a huge challenge to get them interested right away.