Name of your website?10-Minute Plays
Your name?
Walter Wykes
Your Location (city, etc)
Valley Village, CA 91607
Please give us a short summary of your website?
10-minute-plays.com is a database of drama scripts by contemporary playwrights. Every script is posted in its entirety and can be read online or downloaded and printed as a pdf file. Contact information is posted for each author so that they can be contacted for permission to produce the plays.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
On one of my other websites, http://www.theatrehistory.com, I had created a small drama archive and found that there was a huge demand for it, so I decided to create a website that was devoted entirely to short plays.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
http://www.theatrehistory.com was my first website. It's been very successful and is considered the leading resource for theatre history research online.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
The website contains only 10-minute plays, so the title was a no-brainer. Those are the keywords users will be searching for if they're interested in my site--thus the title.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
There are quite a few websites online that make the first few pages of their scripts available online, but they make you pay if you want to read the whole thing. At 10-minute-plays.com, EVERY script is posted in its entirety. You can read the whole script to decide if it's a play you want to produce. If it is, you just contact the playwright for permission.
How many plays have been produced as a result of being listed on your website?
After our first year online, 10-Minute Plays has generated several hundred productions all over the world. As a result of being listed on our website, playwrights have had productions in many countries including the United States, Great Britain, Australia, China, Iraq, India, New Zealand, Mexico, and Canada.
How do you make money from your website?
At the moment our website is a free service that we offer to invited professional playwrights only. In the future, we may open submissions to others and charge a small submission fee to cover our reading time, or we may incorporate some advertising into the website.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I wouldn't change anything about the site itself, but I would love to put more money into promoting it.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes. Once we list the plays, there really isn't that much for us to do. Most of the inquiries go directly to the playwrights who have to negotiate royalties, etc...
Will you be opening submissions to other aspiring playwrights soon?
Probably. We've had a lot of requests to do that.
What else does your site offer?
We also post acting scenes for students to use in class projects and monologues for actors to use at auditions. It's not necessary to obtain author permission as long as these are only used for those purposes. However, if either acting scenes are monologues are presented in front of a public audience, permission must be obtained from the playwright.
Did you write any of the plays on 10-minute-plays.com?
Yes, I have several plays posted on the site, and they've gotten quite a few productions. Probably the most popular of my plays so far is Family 2.0, which deals with a character who is searching for some sort of meaning in his life. It tells the story of a guy who is so bored with his routine that he just can't take it anymore. He's bored with everything--his home, his wife, his kids ... but there's this other home that he passes every day on his way to work which he has always admired. So he decides to show up on the doorstep of this other home and convince the family he finds there to accept him as their new husband/father. Of course, they already have a husband father, so there are complications. It's very absurd.
And this play has received a lot of productions?
Oh, yeah. It's produced all over the place. College kids love it.
What are the most-produced plays on your website?
Family 2.0 is one of them, along with another of my plays entitled Borrowed Parts. Other popular plays on the site are The Wedding Story by Julianne Homokay, 10,000 Cigarettes by Alex Broun, and Traces of Memory by Ann Wuehler.
What are your long term plans for the site?
Well, I'd love for it to grow to the point that it could challenge the traditional play publishers in number of productions received. That may seem like a long shot, but I can see dynamics shifting. More and more potential producers are going to the Internet looking for plays. It could happen.
What is your website address?
10-Minute Plays
