Building a Play with Tony Hawarth

Part 1 of this six week workshop will concentrate on story-telling and dramatic structure. We will focus on writing scenes, letting the scenes accumulate until they expand piece by piece into a producable drama.  We will deal with what drives each scene forward, with how it contributes to the arc of a fully-realized play, with character needs, struggle and conflict, finding the right words, escalating emotions leading to a pivotal climax.  Workshop limited to six writers to allow reasonable time for feedback.

Howarth’s credits include a dozen one-act plays; full lengths include Thornwood, which won a Drama League grant, produced at Circle Rep and the Mint Theatre in New York City, colleges across the U.S., Amsterdam, Tanzania, made into an award-winning indie film, Slings and Arrows, revived in April at Quinsigimund Community College, Worcester, MA; Sundown (Sonora, Calif.); Glorious Roses and Dream City Twosome (off-Broadway); Billy Bubblehead, at the Axial Theatre, Pleasantville, N.Y.; in addition to the musical, Troll-Loll-La!, he has written book and lyrics for two other musicals, Dream, based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreamand Glimmer of  a Dream. He trained as an actor at the Neighborhood Playhouse and with Robert Lewis, appearing in his Equity production of Caligula.

He taught theatre for 28 years at Woodlands High School in Westchester and almost every summer directed musicals at the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth, MA.  He has run playwrighting workshops with the Mint Theatre and the Westbeth Theatre in New York City, with the Axial Theatre in Pleasantville and Arts-on-the-Lake in Kent, NY.