Playwrighting: It keeps you up at night

This doesn't happen to me very often, but there are times when I'm writing where I am unable to sleep because I can't stop trying to figure out some piece of the puzzle I'm trying to solve.  A lot of writing is about solving puzzles, at least for me.  Here's this complex set of circumstances, characters, relationships, desires, places and things, and I want to find an elegant solution, something that accounts for the variables and provides a way forward.  It's a little like mathematics, only the goal is to solve each problem in a new way, and achieve a different outcome.

Anyway, last night I finally got to bed and I was staring at the ceiling thinking about the last moment of the full-length play I just finished writing.  It's a haunted house play, and I'm hoping to appeal to high school drama departments with it. Here's the funny thing about high school drama departments - they have the one thing that very few other theatres have, which is a large number of participants. Sure, there are thousands of actors who would like to be involved in larger, professional productions, but those theatres can't afford to produce plays with 20 actors in them.  Or even 12.  Or 8. Most of the time, the criteria for new plays to be considered by most theatres is 6 or fewer actors, with the emphasis on fewer.

For playwrights, this just means adjusting how and what you write to appeal to the market - so there are a lot more plays being written that have casts of 2, 3, or 4 people.

This doesn't work super well for high schools, which generally have anywhere between 15 and 50 kids who want to participate in some way in a production.  So large ensemble cast plays appeal greatly to them.  Older plays tend to have less of what we would call adult content, so those appeal as well.  

So my goal right now is to see if I can write great plays within these parameters:

• Ensemble cast with between 15 - 25 distinct parts
• More than half of the characters are female
• PG rated in terms of swearing, sex, and violence
• Most of the major characters are high school aged
• Not too serious

So I've just finished my first attempt:  "The Haunting of Blairmont House," which has 19 distinct characters.  There are 6 'main' characters - 4 girls and 2 guys that tell each other ghost stories about the Blairmont House and then decide to break in and spend the night.  The other 13 roles are members of a ghost chorus that plays various bit parts in the ghost stories, haunts the house, and as a chorus, makes low-level moaning sounds.

Once I get it into a little bit tidier format and order, I have a couple of people that I can send it to who are looking for high school plays for their schools, and see what they think.  Keeping my fingers crossed.