Class Description

Instructor: Matthew Paul Olmos (Playwright) Semester: Fall 2025 10-Week Session Learn how to create compelling dialogue for the stage! This class will give you specific tools with which to craft your dialogue so that it illuminates character, enhances dramatic progression, and engages your audiences in a more active way. Through class exercises, we’ll explore the challenges of writing dialogue such as overwriting, repetition, rhythm, and subtext. This course will provide an extensive dialogue development toolbox from which to draw upon for the duration of your playwriting career. You will be able to apply the exercises from this course to any play that you write, enabling you to know and understand your dialogue more fully. Week 1: Overview Tools of Dialogue, Basic Playwriting Principles Week 2: Use of Questions in relation to Exposition Week 3: Use of Environment Week 4: Use of Relationships in relation to Exposition Week 5: Subtext/Exposition Week 6: Subtext more in depth Week 7: Effectively using On-The-Nose Week 8: Wrapping Up Exposition Week 9: Rhythm in Dialogue Week 10: The Subconscious & Revision Matthew Paul Olmos is a Mexican-American playwright who focuses on the creation of space for marginalized, underrepresented communities and gives them heightened poetic language and theatricality. While his work is always personal, it is aimed at reaching across socio-political boundaries, showing the ridiculous of how separate we are, and illuminating hope for future generations. He is a three-time Sundance Institute Fellowship/Residency recipient, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival Commissioned Playwright, Center Theatre Group LA Workshop playwright, Drama League nominee, inaugural Dramatists Guild Catalyst Fellow, Geffen Playhouse Writers Room playwright, New Dramatists alum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival Black Swan Lab playwright, Playwrights’ Center Core Writer, inaugural Primary Stages Creative Development Grantee, Princess Grace Awardee in Playwriting, two-time Ojai Playwrights Conference playwright, and a Repertorio Español Miranda Family Nuestra Voces Playwriting Awardee.