separating acts

Does the action ever shift? Try pinpointing when it does and transition to the next act there.

I think the act break has to be written in the play not just a place to close the curtain. For sure, you don't want to slow the pace. That will just lose the audiences interest.

More and more plays are being written without intermissions - tough on audiences - but it keeps the plot moving. Jeffrey Hatcher's recent play "Murderers" runs an hour and forty five minutes without a break.

Read some of the great thrillers: Wait Until Dark or Death Trap. The intermission comes at a high tension point so the audience is left hanging and anxious to get pack to see the second act.

As to the number of acts, Shakespeare wrote in five acts, from the late 19th to the mid 20th century, three acts was the norm. Today two acts is standard. As I see it, there are two reasons for an act break: To give the audience a break (The Iceman Cometh runs 4 1/2 hours) or the structure of the play requires it.

In a three act play, the first act introduces the characters and sets up the dramatic theme of the play. The second act follows the protagonist as he/she tries to overcome the obstacles set up by the first act. The second act ends as the protagonist accomplishes (or fails to accomplish) their goals. The third act is the denouement which shows the new world based on the their success or lack thereof accomplishing their goals.

Some plays leave the play climax until early in the third act but I think that technically it is at the end of the second act.

I very seldom direct three act plays. In my experience, today's audiences do not like a first act full of exposition - remember all the plays that open with the loyal butler on the phone explaining what the play is about and who all the major characters are. Today, people want the exposition carefully woven into the fabric of the play; throughout the play not all at once at the beginning.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Doug

There's a difference between the traditional three-act structure advocated in screenwriting handbooks and what the act break is in a play. Most plays, whether they have act-breaks or not, follow some version of the three-act structure, which does indeed have a setup, development of theme, and resolution. However, this doesn't mean that that's where the act-break goes.

First: A play with two act breaks (literally, 15-minute breaks in the action) is an extremely difficult sell. I hesitate to use the word impossible; it's just short of impossible. As a playwright starting out, don't do it.

Here's how I think of it - your break in the action must leave an audience member wanting more. They need to go out, go the bathroom, go get a drink, and wonder "what's going to happen next?" Some successful act breaks turn on a huge plot development - or the entrance of an unexpected character. Tennessee Williams, in a Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, has an act break in the middle of a scene. But it's a powerful scene, and we all want to know what's going to happen (of course he had 3 acts, but that's immaterial to what I'm saying)

Don't have something wrap up right before you break - you want to explode what you've done previously and be ready to turn the action in a new, exciting way. In short, leave a hanging question.

In screenwriting parlance, your act break should happen somewhere in the middle of "act two" (which is - the set-up is all over, we're halfway into the middle of the development of the story, and something new and different is being added to the mix.)