Welcome to Educator’s Toolkit! This growing collection is designed to support high school drama educators with practical resources and inspiring insights. While many posts focus on staging productions from our catalog—offering guidance on directing, casting, and creative problem-solving—we also feature broader articles that champion the role of creativity in the classroom.

Through contributions from experienced educators like Rosemary Pearl Moore, you’ll find ideas for nurturing innovation, building student confidence, and enriching the overall arts experience.

This content is intended for educational purposes to enhance your experience with our plays and related materials. Please use it within these guidelines and refrain from distributing or reproducing it for other uses. For any questions, contact us at info@gitelmangoodpublishers.com.

On Making a Playwriting Playlist

The first thing I do as a playwright is make a playlist on Spotify. You might be thinking, but Pearl what about an outline, or characters? My friends…make a playlist first and that’s what I did for A Shore of Abundance, and many of my other plays.

I have many reasons why you should make a playlist before you write. 

1. If you want to know what tone and theme for your script then making a playlist will help you understand your play more. 
2. If you have trouble focusing when you write—music may help you. I know some people who can’t listen to anything when they work, which I totally understand. However, I have to have something playing in my ears, and I also don’t want to be scrolling on my phone to find the perfect song, so that’s why I have a playlist that I tune into. 
3. If you make a playlist you can arrange it to how you want the outline to be. Hearing that change in your music might be the inspiration you need to make it to the climax of your stories.
4. It’s a great way for your directors, actors, and production team to get to know your work. If they have access to a playlist they know the style, tone, and theme you are going for as well. There could be days when you aren’t in the room with the director or actors, but if they are able to find your playlist then they will have a deeper meaning than they did before with your script. Also, if you have a general playlist for your play I have found that actors will make a playlist that represents their character based on your playlist. 
5. It’s a great way to visualize your script. I use music to visualize movements, beats, and tonal shifts in a script. Visualizing a play can be hard for anyone to do.
6. You created the house music for your script already. ;)
7. Once you have a general playlist for your script you can go further by making ones for all the characters in your script. One of the advantages of this is that you are writing a monologue for one of your characters, but you need to put yourself in their shoes. A playlist does wonders for you to write that monologue. 
8. Playlists aren’t a new thing to the world of theatre. To me, they are becoming more popular to see. Just recently I went and saw John Proctor is the Villain and they even had a QR code to their house music. And currently it sits at 2,670 people saving that playlist to their Spotify accounts. Music is a wonderful way to connect with others.

If you are an educator this is a great way for your students to visualize or even understand the story that they are reading. I have found that many of my students have a hard time visualizing what is onstage when we are reading a play. However, I have found that music is important to this generation of students that I have now. I mean think about how popular concerts are nowadays? Think about how much they use music or sounds on TikToks? They use it all the time. They crave music, because that is their way of creativity. You’d be surprised by how engaged they are to create a playlist for a character in the play or create the house music for the play. 

So, please try it out sometime! Also, check out Shore of Abundance and its playlist here. If you make a playlist please share it in the comments below, and if it happens to be a play by an author you love, share it with them too. Because, trust me, as a playwright myself I love it (plus I love a good music recommendation).