On the very first page

I've been slowly adding samples of a whole bunch of my short plays to this blog, and in the course of that I have had the chance of pondering what makes a good first page.

Before the play is produced, you want a good first page or the director or producer reading it will never get to the second page. So from the point of view of text, the first page of a script has to:

• be technically solid. The play has to be in a format the theater world recognizes and accepts; and of course there have to be no typos or grammatical face-plants to make the reader ask herself whether she wants to continue with this thing even one.more.page.
• cast a spell. George Bernard Shaw prefaced some of his plays with technical notes or "directions" that ran into the hundreds of words and described all sorts of stuff that the characters did or experienced before they ever got to the stage. You cannot do that these days. Even GBS could not do that were he writing in these days. You have to start with a vision (a woman tied to a chair; a man in a bathrobe in a public place; two people joined around the forehead by a long rope) to get the reader to say, "Oh?" and possibly, "Oh!"
• pose a problem. If the play starts with two people sitting on a couch, waiting for the pizza guy and bickering over the remote, and nothing beyond that happens by the bottom of the first page, I the reader will probably go on to the next play in the pile. I can get bickering at home, the potential director says, why should I have to read about it at work?
• create an opening. While producers and directors want plays that are solid and pretty sure to "work", they also want to see where they can fit it. Where can they make this their production of your play? I try to do this by providing just enough stage directions ("A Ferris wheel in an amusement park") to excite the "Oh, how would I do that?" response, without telling them how I would.

Ah, but the first page of the play also has to work its magic when it gets produced. The audience in the theater doesn't care that the script is well-formatted. The audience wants to be magic-carpeted away by the theater experience, and the script has to make that possible starting from the very first page.

So, in addition to the bullets above, the first page of the script has to:

• tune the audience's ear, so they know how to listen in this particular theater to this particular play. In a full-length musical you get an overture to tune the ear and set the tone; with a short play you get maybe three lines of dialog and MAYBE one sound effect before the audience starts to give up on listening and starts feeling around for candies wrapped in crackly cellophane..
• catch the eye. The play can start with just an actor standing in a pool of light, but that actor had better be pretty interesting to look at or do something notable very soon, or the audience will think something went wrong with the rest of the lights.
• show us the main character(s). In a longer work the main character might not even show up for a couple of scenes, to build up tension. In a short play, you don't have time for such tricks.

In Tom Stoppard's "The Real Inspector Hound", two theater critics are watching a truly awful who-dunnit. The lights come up and--nothing happens. And nothing happens. One critic says, hopefully, "It's a pause." The other says, "You can't start with a pause! If you want my opinion there's total panic back there."

If you don't have a good first page, your audience will have the latter reaction every time.

A lot of the plays listed on my Stage plays page have links to their first pages. Take a look: let me know what has you looking for page 2 and what has you running for the exits.