Side Characters

Oh, side characters. The people who make us laugh and cry. The people who are played by actors who put extra effort in to be remembered by the audience. They may not be as skilled or important as the main characters, but they still help your play get high ratings. Side characters fall into four categories: Comedy relief, plot essential, required, line soakers.

1. Comedy Relief
If you have a serious play, there will be parts in the middle where your audience will be starving for some quick laughs. Usually your main characters are too serious to be funny or are in too serious of situations to be funny. This is where your side characters come in. You can easily throw together someone to filter your jokes through to the audience. Be warned though. Comedy relief side characters are the easiest ones to screw up with. If they are too annoying, the audience will hate every second they are on stage. Unlike the mains, they COULD have been cut. That will reflect poorly on you, the writer.

2.Plot Essential
These are the characters that the plot incorporates, but doesn't show up enough to be a main. An example would be the King Richard at the end of Robin Hood from the Disney movie. He is important to the plot and necessary, but he only shows up at the end. This is true for any character who dies usually too. They would have been mains, but they got killed. Typically, audiences don't gripe about plot essential characters and how they could be cut. Just avoid giving them roles that would realistically be other peoples. A king doesn't have ten messengers for the same exact recipient usually, for example.

3.Required
So maybe you wrote yourself into a little hole. Your characters go to a restaurant for a few scenes of the musical. You need to make a waiter or waitress. There aren't very many ways around this. Your character is an adolescent whose parents should realistically show up at some point even if they don't necessarily affect the plot. These are similar to "Plot Essential", however they are more realistic due to the characters existing in a "real world" instead of because the plot needs them. Audience members should never think these characters should be cut.

4.Line Soakers
This is the hardest category of side characters to justify and the ones that you need to be careful with, or you WILL have problems. Line soakers can be the characters you stick around because you don't want your two mains talking to each other for the entire play. Line soakers can also be groups of characters who collectively have too many lines. If they were all one character, they would be end up being a main character and for some reason you have opposition to this. For example, in The Ballad of Theylus Mignon, Axle, Bolt, and Girder could conceivably have been one character. However, as one character, they would have too many lines. They also have a better group dynamic than if they were one single character. Line soakers can sometimes be hard to justify, but if you do them right you should be fine.

Now, what are some mistakes people make with their side characters? Not only am I saying this next part from the view of a writer, but also an actor and an audience member. Here are some things to keep in mind when creating side characters:

Firstly, make a spider web of all your characters and their hypothetical connections to each other in the plot. If they are going to encounter other characters, connect them. Anything like that. Now look at your spider web. Do you have any characters that only are connected to one or two characters? Ask yourself why these characters aren't connected to anyone else. If they are imaginary, in hiding, any of those things, that's fine. It makes sense. Otherwise, build some more connections or cut them. If your play is running long or boring, these will be the first people your audience will have a problem with.

Secondly, do you have any characters that should show up more? When I was in Mr. Hobb's Vacation, I played whatever the chick's name is boyfriend Sam. Now, I only showed up in the first scene. However, the chick was in every scene, the family was always talking about Sam being around, and there was no real reason for him to be absent. That was poor writing on that playwright's part. People were confused and multiple people asked me what happened to him. Make sure you give all of your characters the stage time they require.

Thirdly, if you are going to have someone show up for one scene, give them a bunch of lines in that scene. There is nothing worse than the person who is not only insignificant enough that they don't show up in the rest of the play, but aren't even prominent in the scene they are in. That's just a glorified chorus member. Don't make some poor sap happy by giving their character a name, without the satisfaction that comes with named parts. This goes for you Beauty and the Beast, who named all of their chorus members, which severely distorted who was actually important and who wasn't.

Go through your play. Decide which category your side character fits in and make sure that they dont' violate any rules. This should bring you closer to a more perfect product.