Free Play Scripts For 2 Actors

[Earleen Muffley]

Inthe future, have a think about where your scripts come from, and find ways to support and respect the artists who write them. Did you use a great scene by a playwright for that audition you nailed? Consider buying some of their work online! Do you have a favourite book of monologues or scenes you swear by for auditions? Get it as a gift for an actor friend! Our best advice is to pay it forward when you can.

Performance Notes: This scene suggests a rich and complex backstory between these two characters, as well as a larger world than what exists on these few pages. Sadly, this is not the case: the story of Sally and Ryan begins and ends in this scene and does not spill into some larger story. For actors, it is your job to make this scene feel like a snippet from their larger stories and arcs. What has come before? What do you think comes next? And how does this scene represent an important turning point in their relationship?

Alexander Lee-Rekers is a Sydney-based writer, director and educator. He graduated from NIDA in 2017 with a Masters in Writing for Performance, and his career across theatre and television has seen him tackling projects as diverse as musical theatre, Shakespeare and Disney. He is the co-founder of theatre company Ratcatch (The Van De Maar Papers, The Linden Solution) and co-director of Bondi Kids Drama, a boutique drama school offering classes to young people in the Eastern Suburbs. Alexander is drawn to themes of family, ambition, failure and legacy: how human nature can flit with ease between compassion and cruelty. He also likes Celtic fiddle, mac & cheese and cats.

Thank you so much for doing this, Alexander. I need clarification concerning showreels. Am I able to hire a director to shoot one of these scenes on location, or should I only shoot it in a self-taping studio? I appreciate your time.

Hey! Thank you so much and either option is valid. Many people in the industry love self-tapes and almost prefer them, but always great to have proper footage as well. Ideally I encourage actors to have great self-tape footage AND great showreel style footage.

PLAY IT SAFE is the debut feature film from writer/director Chris Pahlow. The film stars Nicholas Kato as Jamie, a 26-year-old musician who is out of work and down on his luck. When Jamie's band breaks up, he's left with no money, no career and no girlfriend. Now he teaches piano at a soul-destroying music school. Will he take a risk and follow his dreams? Or will he surrender to his new-found unhappiness and play it safe?

As I will probably (hopefully) explain in more detail in another post, we're not working off a finished script. Instead we're using what Jack and I call a "scriptment". (Hey, if it's good enough for Jim Cameron, then why not us?) Basically it's a rough outline of the scenes, usually without proper dialogue. Instead of full dialogue, we usually write in the basics of what we want the character to say and then the actor will say it in their own words.

This scriptment forms the starting point for the workshopping process. In the workshops, the aim is not to realise a performance as close as possible to the written scene. It's actually quite the opposite! The aim is to throw around as many ideas as possible to discover what works best and what doesn't work so well. Jack and I then go through the footage, taking notes, and eventually rewrite the scene. This new version is often quite different, and it is much more specific. It's not uncommon for a new versin of a workshopped scene to be three or four times longer just because of all the specific dialogue we've added in. Here's the latest version of that same scene:

In the scene above the differences are only subtle, but, trust me, they have a big impact when viewing the scene! Many scenes have been changed far more drastically. When writing, it can be hard to conceptualise what kind of impact the physicality of a scene or the nuances of a performance can have. Often, Jack and I will be wrestling with a scene, trying to work out how we can communicate some information to the audience without making the scene boring. The workshops have been absolutely invaluable for this! There are several scenes where we have thrown out almost all of the written dialogue and replaced them with a much more physical scenario. Film is a visual medium, with human performance at the forefront. In my opinion, it's far better to take advantage of what the actors can bring to the table instead of relying on boring exposition.

I recently watched the commentary for the film Blue Valentine. In it, director Derek Cianfrance mentioned that he was "alergic to phony acting". I definitely feel the same way about bad peformances, and I also feel this way about poorly conceived narratives. Quite often, I'll be watching a film and I'll get the feeling that things don't quite add up. A character's actions just don't seem to make sense. Why on earth would they do that? What possible motivation could they have? In these circumstances, it seems as though the actors are being forced to behave in a certain way simply because the script demanded it - even if those actions make no sense whatsoever! Sometimes I wonder if such films could have benefitted from a similar workshopping process. Of course this approach may not suit all films (action films for example), but I can think of a lot of indie dramedys which could have used some workshopping. With Play It Safe, I am trying to find all this phoniness before we actually shoot the film. I'm trying to find all the moments which grate or don't ring true in the workshops so we can cut them out and replace them with something better. Why wait for the premiere to find out that a scene sucks? It's too late to change it then!

Ok, that's probably enough delirious ranting for one day. I have a lot more that I'd like to discuss about the workshopping process, but it will have to wait. For now, here's some photos from the last few workshops:

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King Henry VIII is trapped in purgatory, bound to his throne by a sinister Fool and the ghostly Women in White. Here in his gilded cage, he is forced to relive the sins he committed against his queens, mistresses and people of the court, over and over again, for an eternity.

Monologue Blogger specializes in creating original scripts for actors in need of something different. An open resource packed with thousands of monologues and scenes all extracted from our very own published plays.

Young actors often focus on line delivery rather than listening to their scene partner. These original one-page scripts are designed to help your older students learn to focus on their fellow actor and practice using natural-sounding dialogue. The scenes are self-contained (no play analysis needed), and there is plenty of room for interpretation and individual character development.

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The reality is, the film will take (on average) 6-12 weeks (or more) to film and the script will likely change constantly. While it's certainly good for an actor to be very familiar with the script so they know what's going to happen, the reality is, many actors memorize a few days' worth of script and work on it in rehearsals or in their private time... and some show up to set without it memorized at all... or reviewed... don't ask me how they survive. I think it's magic or something.

In general, actors do have good memories... and part of their training is honing this ability... but good actors know the gist of what they're saying and the words should be natural to them, not "learned by rote". Many directors want natural performances and give actors some leeway to work inside the script a bit so that it feels natural to their character.

Memory is one of those things that gets better as you use it... if you practice memorizing things, you will get better at it. It's how servers at restaurants can memorize convoluted orders and still get everything right... they have practice memorizing stuff.

In a movie, you typically don't need to learn the whole script. You just need the current scene, and that's usually just a few lines - easy to learn on the spot. Most of the practice is spent finding good ways to express yourself, I'd guess. And worst-case scenario, you just wasted a take - you can (almost) always just try again, and leave picking the best movie to the director and the cutting room :)

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