What is a Bake-Off?

A bake-off is a quickly written exercise on an assigned theme with assigned elements that folks do within a 48 hour period of time. It is a reaction to plays and works of art that are responding to another writer or artist, preferably centuries apart; the bake-off continues this conversation.  Usually, bake-offs have a group participating: when the 48 hour time period is up, the group gathers and reads the bake-offs. I usually offer a play and articles or films on the bake-off topic online. Participants are free to add their own research to the group: music, art, graphics, comic books, films, essays, etc.!

For example, with military veterans at the Wilma, we did a Bake-Off on Joan of Arc.  Everyone in the workshop wrote with the following ingredients:

• A girl in a field.

• A visitation.

• Convincing higher authority.

• A philosophical defense of cross dressing.

• Extra-credit: a match.

We had a wonderful cabaret/bake-off and presented the scenes in a marathon cold reading, cast on the spot. Bake-offs can be songs, poems, dada, puppetry….anything. Most bake-offs will be from 5 pages to Nilo Cruz’ DANCING ON MY KNEES first draft…130 pages?  It is still the record in the 48 hour period. Create a reading marathon of the bake-offs; a communal event very different from the isolation of writing.  To this end, we read aloud all variations on the Dybbuk Bake-off, The Faust Bake-off, The Hitchcock Bake-off, with food, coffee and wine to accompany the reading.  Hopefully we break bread together (or other baked items—an actual bake-off); and hopefully other plays will emerge from the conversation during the bake-off.

There are no critiques. Bake-Offs are to theatre what sketching is to oil paintings...please just enjoy each other. Applaud after every bake-off.

And note recruit other friends to write with you. Find space to gather if there is not a theatre available. Living rooms are great.

(Oh yes. And if a full length play emerges as often happens, Paula Vogel gets ten percent--I say that to each workshop and I am still waiting for the checks to arrive...Or you can give the ten percent to a theatre near you!)

Happy bake-off!

The Covid Bake-off

Part 1. Read La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler, if you have time. 

We will steal the plot construction that Schnitzler uses: the pattern plot, or repetitive form (Event A, Event B, Event C, Event A, Event B, Event C), which is the sequencing form of the virus itself replicating. Back in the 20th century when I taught this play I told my writers that the plot form of La Ronde tells us with terrifying accuracy how sexual disease is transmitted.

But Schnitzler also uses a hybrid plot form: the play itself makes a circle, i.e. the circle plot where the end is the beginning.

Rule #1. You must begin and end in 48 hours.  Please get in virtual contact with 5-9 other friends who will write their bake-offs in the same shared 48 hours, and then share their bake-offs.

Rule #2. You may not rewrite.  After the bake-off you have all the time in the world to turn it into a full length or one act play.

Ingredients:
A fishmonger in a market place in Wuhong
A couple running a cafe in Tehran
An opera singer in Milan
A sick immigrant working in the kitchen of Mar A Lago
A writer in solitude in (wherever you are writing this bake off)
a discarded face mask
cotton swabs
and
a soliloquy from a pangolin
The fishmonger’s granddaughter plays in the marketplace in Wuhong as her mother reopens the family food stall.

Artwork by Simon Winheld