Let’s Play

Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera’s essay, “Let’s Play: Writing for the Stage,” was selected by the Teachers & Writers Magazine editorial board as a finalist for the 2025 Bechtel Prize. The Bechtel Prize is awarded annually for an essay describing a creative writing teaching experience, project, or activity that demonstrates innovation in creative writing instruction. Learn more about the Bechtel Prize here.

In an overfull room of teenagers—some in desks, others sprawled on the floor, some here by choice, others because it fit their schedule—I ask students to share their name and a chore they either love to do or hate to do. Having grown up in this isolated desert farming community, I know they are all familiar with chores. Before school chores, after school chores, after dinner chores—it’s the way things go.

As students share, I make a list on the board: throw out trash, wash dishes, iron, vacuum, mop, fold sheets, scrub toilet, rake leaves, feed pigs, mow grass. Some students groan at others’ choices, many nod in agreement. I share that, more than 30 years ago, I wrote my college application essay about shoveling manure.

Playwriting merges writing and play, allowing students to develop their creative writing skills in an interactive and imaginative way.

I had returned to Blythe, CA, to help an English teacher friend bring drama back to our community. When we were in high school, the most memorable field trips were drama club weekends. We’d see a play, go to a museum, eat in a “fancy” restaurant, and hang out at the mall for a few hours. For some teens, these could be regular weekday activities, but not for us. And like our high school drama teacher, I’d been living and writing in Los Angeles and wanted to share my theater experience with my community. Playwriting merges writing and play, allowing students to develop their creative writing skills in an interactive and imaginative way. It’s a wonderful genre but challenging to teach. And most of the young people in our town have never been to the theater, and only some have been forced to read a play as a class assignment. 

And, speaking of unpleasant chores, many students view writing as just that. So, to engage the students in theater, I move the writing from the page to the body by starting our dramatic writing activity with a focus on a chore. A chore has built in tension (namely, how the character feels about it) and, because a chore is physical, puts the writer into the body, which is key for dramatic writing. 

After we generate our chores, I ask students to think about someone they know well and imagine them doing a chore from the list. Would they like it or hate it? Would it be easy or difficult? I ask them to imagine themselves in the body of that person. How would it feel to do that chore? This is how we create a character. 

I draw three columns on the board: 

To alleviate the pressure of writing, we start by drawing. Even a teenager not skilled in art can pick up a marker or colored pencil and scribble something. I can only draw stick people, so that is what I model. 

“This is a man in his 70s, loosely based on my dad, so don’t tell him I’m sharing all his business.” I want to show my students that people they know can and should be represented on stage. “Trimming trees was a chore my dad seemed to love, but my part was picking up the branches, which scratched my arms and legs, so I hated it.”

I give students a handout with those same three columns and invite them to draw their own character in action in the middle column. I walk around the room and ask questions to guide their creations: Was it a sunny day? Was the A/C blasting?

I pause by a student and point at her name. “I know your dad.”

She looks up and smiles at me. “I know yours, too. From church.”

I shoulda known better. My dad sings in the choir. 

Below the three-column chart, there is a list of prompts and questions inviting students to develop more details about their character:

• Age
• Occupation
• Other roles
• How does this character feel about that job?
• How do they feel about the other roles?
• Where are they from? Where do they live now?
• What makes them special?
• What flaws do they have?
• What do they want/desire? What obstacles prevent them from it?
• What do they need? Why can’t they get it?
• Why are they doing this chore? 
• Think about how doing this particular chore at this specific time is different from previous times . . .

When students have something drawn in the middle, I ask them to respond to these questions. I give them permission to not know everything and assure them that their answers can change along the way. 

Then, in the left column of the table, I ask them to imagine two possibilities: 1) What was the character doing the moment before they started the chore? and 2) Was the character thinking about some specific moment from their past while doing that action? 

I explain to students that thinking about moments when he was filled with joy help him cope with the physical demands of the chore that has been getting more difficult as he ages.

In the right column of the table, I ask them to think about: 1) What might happen next in this character’s life? and 2) What kind of future does the character imagine while doing that chore? I remind them to keep in mind their responses to the questions below the table as they imagine that future for their character.

Given the time constraints of the class, the left and right columns can be lists or sentences. 

Again, I walk around the room and make suggestions for the way they can frame the past and the future. I remind them they are inventing the world this person lives in and while it can be based in their reality, they can also make stuff up.

After creating their characters’ present, past, and future, I prepare students to write monologues. We discuss the purpose of monologues:

• express the character’s true emotions
• give them an outlet to release feelings they aren’t ready to share
• reveal a secret
• express thoughts that are difficult to articulate
• communicate with someone from a distance (like maybe they can’t hear)
• reflect on life choices,
• share feelings with a trusted pet, tree, or other inanimate object

Students ask if the character can be talking to themselves or do they have to talk to another character. I say it can be either or both. They might be addressing a specific person or group, but that person or group can’t actually hear what they are saying. “Like when you want to talk back to your parents but don’t want to get in trouble or when Coach practices his motivational speech in his office prior to the big game.”

Before they write, I select four volunteers to read four different monologues (from www.freedrama.net). After each one, I ask them to discuss the opening line: Was it intriguing? Did it set the right mood? Then we look at the middle: Did it include actions and feelings? Did it build to an interesting revelation, include a twist or a secret? Finally, I ask if the last line was what they expected, and they discuss the purpose of each monologue (see previous list).

To structure their monologues, I suggest they start with three short sentences: a beginning, middle, and end. These three sentences form the plan for their monologue, and I remind them to make sure the plan adheres to the purpose. We spend the rest of class time working on their monologues, which gives students time to practice being inside the mind of one character while practicing structure, action, and dialogue writing. 

It can be a big jump to move from one character to many, but plays demand that we get inside the heads of multiple characters. So, in the next class session, I ask them to set aside their monologue. It’s time to move from a single character to a scene. I pair up students and have them pretend that they are their character. They each introduce themselves in character, and then, together, they decide when and where the two characters might meet. 

In my example, I share the character that my sister created on our drive the night before: a single mom who had just lost her job. Sis suggested that our characters meet up at the bar on the east end of town. We agreed that the two characters knew each other prior to this interaction because the man trimming trees had been the single mom’s little league coach back in the day.

I use a think-aloud, write-aloud strategy, modeling how to have this dialogue exchange between the two characters on the page. I use M for the tree-trimming man and W for the single mom, and write out what they say as I talk it for them. After a few lines, some eager students offer suggestions. 

M: You look like you could use a beer.

W: How ‘bout a shot.

M: (orders two shots) Bad day?

W: Bad life. Me and the kids gotta move back in with my mom.

M: She’s gonna be happy. More time with them grandbabies.

W: She might be. But then she’ll complain.

M: Don’t give her reason to.

W: Been giving her reasons my whole life.

Two students who create characters based on their dads have them meet up at Ace Hardware, specifically in the lumber area. I watch as they pretend to be their dads, saying things they think dads might say, sometimes imitating their own dads’ voices as the conversation progresses. In other pairs: a son lies to his mother about vacuuming the house, friends at the grocery store complain about feeding a large family, a meet-cute between a waitress and her customer friend, and a messy drive-thru exchange.

Once the characters are talking and students have some sense of what they want to write about, I offer them dramatic structure with a short review of the elements of scene: Who, Where and When, What is going on, Why is it happening, and How does it change the characters. “This will be how your ideas are shaped into an actual play.”

Together, we read three plays from Gary Garrison’s A More Perfect 10 and mark up the scene elements on each one. They accurately (for the most part) identify the event and emotion of the scene, criticize the way some of them lack strong desire, and offer suggestions for how to make the ending better. 

I give students the option to start something new on their own or to continue working with their partner and developing the dialogue they had started into a 10-minute play.

When I walk around the room, I stop by a student who has set his play “the arena.” I know he means the roping arena at the Lester place. 

I point at his other character’s name and say, “Your uncle was riding down the gravel road by my folks’ house yesterday.”

He looks up at me with confusion.

I say, “He was there to exercise your cousin’s horses.”

The young man grins.

I tap his paper where he’d started writing dialogue. “That sounds just like him.” Growing up, I’d watched his uncle team rope, probably even handed back his rope a time or two when I’d worked the stripping chute. 

Rural life isn’t often represented on stage, and when it is, it’s often by an outsider observing the people there. I want my students not just to look at me as a visiting playwright but as someone who is part of their community. 

Rural life isn’t often represented on stage, and when it is, it’s often by an outsider observing the people there. I want my students not just to look at me as a visiting playwright but as someone who is part of their community. Even if a teacher is not a playwright or an expert in dramatic writing, your community is filled with worthy subjects for the stage, and you can share this potential with your students. This playwriting lesson provides a real collaborative opportunity as it empowers students to create characters based on the people and places they know. It is important for young people to feel seen, for their experiences to be valued on the page and on the stage. This is what I strive to do with all my teaching. 

At the end of our sessions together, students gather in the library where a few pairs/groups act out their scenes. What began as a chore became our way of writing about our community. By making their town and people they know the focus of their 10-minute plays, students learn how they are surrounded by everything they need to be writers.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.