About the Script Writing Score

The Script Writing Score (SWS) is a new form of contemporary playwriting created by Danny Rocco and developed with director Shannon Fillion at Brontosaurus Haircut Productions. SWS is both the tool and the process by which Rocco makes theater more immediate and timely. SWS questions “dramatic habits” that are standing in the way of our best work. Our company investigates these questions both in content and form. 

SWS both inverts the page from vertical to horizontal and plays with punctuation to capture the nuance of an actor’s voice, and unite the entire creative team of a play – actors, director, designers, playwright and stage managers – in critically timing an imagined world.

Rocco started developing SWS in his last year of graduate study at Columbia University. Experimentation came from a need for a more manageable and practical way of rehearsing and writing for large ensembles. The core of research sprang from Rocco’s play Orchestra. Rocco and Fillion wanted the audience to be carried away by the play, both in content and form: for the characters to dip in and out of song, and for the entire play to feel like a piece of music. But to do that, Rocco had to critically time the overlapping acrobatics of the characters. Standard Play Format (or “vertical format”) wouldn’t allow for that precision; it encouraged a “taking turns talking” rhythm that slowed rehearsal and stunted the writing of the play. Searching for a new structure, Rocco developed the Script Writing Score, which has become the focus and force behind his creative work ever since.

You read SWS from left to right. Rather than use pages, Rocco uses measures. Measures flow one after the other. In a measure, all elements involved in a moment are represented equally. These “staff lines” read horizontally across each measure. For the actor, your staff line tells you what to say and when to say it. For the director, a measure paints a portrait of what and when characters are speaking, and how dialogue could relate to the other elements on stage, like light and space. Unlike music, there is no meter or time signature dictating how long a measure needs to be in stage time. SWS only illustrates what and when stage elements happen relative to each other, leaving it up to the director and the ensemble to orchestrate pacing.

Rocco’s goal with this form is to provide a specific illustration of a play’s shape, specific instructions on how the elements of a play interact with each other, and therefore a higher level of communication and discovery for the whole creative team.