Dates: Saturday 9th & Sunday 10th November, 10am - 4pm

Location: Cromwell Rd Theatre (Red Stitch rehearsal space), 27A Cromwell Rd Sth Yarra

Cost: $300* per person for the weekend. First access, available to previous INK applicants and creatives only. 
*This price includes one ticket to see Red Stitch's upcoming production Your Name Means Dream by José Rivera.

ABOUT THE WORK SHOP
Play: Spending time doing an enjoyable or entertaining activity (Cambridge Dictionary)
Wright: A person who makes or builds things (Cambridge Dictionary)

Inspired by the concept of a playwright being someone who makes or builds through entertaining activities, Play Writing With Tom is run over four, three-hour sessions designed to remind creatives of both the fun that can be had, and discipline needed to pursue character, story and structure on the stage.

The workshops are made up of constant, focussed,time writing games, and participants will be shocked how quickly they build entire lives of characters and whole stories.

The sessions also look at the fundamentals needed in playwriting, the tools playwrights can use to express themselves on the page, the importance of finding the right structure for your play, and also, just how mind-blowing and awe-inspiring a play can be.

And although playwriting is the method being explored, it is for all creatives, freeing the mind from over-thinking, breaking through the early, daunting stages of creativity and getting the ideas out of us and recorded for remodelling.

Tom strongly believes that the best creativity comes from safe, welcoming, inclusive environments where everyone is welcome no matter their age, identity, or experience level.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

Session One:
Loosen up your writing fingers, because you’re going to be using them in this session where we interrogate the fundamentals of theatre and we begin build the lives of both a protagonist and an antagonist.

Session Two:
You thought we wrote a lot in Session One? Just wait for it...
We take a section from the antagonist’s life to be the focus of a new play, and build the pathways to, or from it, developing our play’s structure. We’re writing fast, to prompts, and not letting doubt or hesitation sneak in. This is done for the antagonist as well, letting us know them just as fully as our main character, and by the end of it all our head’s will be swirling and our fingers will be aching.

Session Three:
A needed break from the intensive writing, we will instead look at three very different but deeply inspiring plays to interrogate how the playwrights built them and the tools they use to share their vision.

Session Four:
Building from all the first three sessions, the final session becomes a writing intensive, stealing from some of the greatest living playwrights and feeding into our own emerging works. We’ll feel the rush of news ideas mixed with the confidence of having new tools to explore them. We’ll end creatively exhausted but hopefully charged and ready for whatever lays next in our creative lives.