The Student Theatre

And here I begin my final blog for this class. It feels weird… I feel like I’ve learned a lot this semester, even if it’s that writing may just not be my forte… oh well. You’ve got to try it to know you hate it. Anyway, this post is about the student written theatre I have seen. Over the course of the semester I have seen several student written plays, including Echo, IMF, and as of about an hour ago, Star Wars in 60 Minutes. Before I started this class I never really appreciated what it takes to write a play. This class has done two things for me when I see student written theatre: my mind is constantly in a critical mode, making note of things I wish were clearer or the things that I liked, and it has made me really appreciate the wide variety of things you can write a play about. All of the student written plays I have seen this semester have been written by my friends and its been very cool seeing how creative and talented they are.

What have I learned from seeing these productions? Well not much more than what we’ve talked about in class already, but I will give it a shot. I guess I’ll start at the beginning. Echo was an extremely interesting play. I thought it was a very interesting insight into the mind of someone who has experienced being in a war. I personally, do not have anyone close to me who has fought in a war that I know well. However, I really did want more military characters out of both Matthew’s character as well as Josh’s. My best friend from middle school’s father is a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. Special Forces. Basically he is a big shot. Now this man is the most intense person I have ever met in my life. I think it may be how liberal I am, and how I could never picture anybody I love and know well fighting in the army, let alone myself… but I guess I just had a hard time believing that those characters would be so gung-ho about going to war. I think Echo was a great start to what could be a really powerful play… many of the characters need work. However, I thought the women in the play were very well written, especially Meredith’s character (Matthew’s wife). I thought the costumes were great, and the acting was very well done. I just wanted a little more from Matt’s Character.

IMF was definitely a collection of three extremely different plays. I really liked all of them, and I think they worked very well as a set. My favorite was definitely Megan Noyce’s one. It really rang true to my family and their history. Also I thought it was extremely well written and well acted. This play really reminded me of how hard it is to make sure that you are writing your dialogue the way people talk. I think Megan has a really rare talent for making her characters sound extremely natural.

Star Wars in 60 Minutes is brilliant. That is all to be said.

From this class, I think the most important thing I’ve learned is that the script of a play is just a building block. It needs to be a solid base, or the rest of the production will be shit. But like I said it is just a building block. The casting of your actors is so incredibly important. Actors that understand great comedic and dramatic timing, knowing when to pause and how to say things, how to move, etc is so important to portraying your dialogue the way you want it as a playwright. Sets and costumes are just as important. I guess my point here is you can’t have one aspect of theatre without the other. But you need to start out with a good script, because if you don’t…well then…good luck with that one.

The Seattle Rep

The Seattle Rep: Fences and Glenn Gary Glenn Ross

Fences was the other play I both read and saw performed throughout the course of this semester. It is interesting to me how many things I picked up on when seeing it on stage that I didn’t pick up on when I read it and visa versa. However, I almost wish I hadn’t read it when I went to see it. I was so impressed by the production at the Seattle Rep, but I also wished I didn’t know what was coming next. I thought that the actors did a really good job of taking August Wilson’s words and making them their own. Fences is definitely an extremely well written play. I was not impressed by Cory however. I thought that his character was a very weak portrayal of the character that Wilson wrote. I am however confused by his performance, because in the last scene when he comes out in his army uniform, I was all of a sudden extremely impressed by his acting and his character. This, of course is huge transformation from the last time we’ve seen him just in the way the character is written, but I was more confused with this actor’s transformation because he went from me not liking his performance at all, to absolutely loving it.

Fences is another one of those plays that takes place in a single setting, which allows for a lot of character development. I thought that the set was absolutely incredible and really worked for the large space of the Seattle Rep. I also thought the lighting designer did an absolutely amazing job determining what time of day it was. Because I have already blogged about this show I don’t want to be repetitive.

I also saw Glenn Gary Glenn Ross at the Seattle Rep this semester. This play was very confusing for me because I had a very, very hard time keeping all of the characters straight. The thing that saved the plot for me was that before the play started you saw someone working in the undestroyed office. Then when the first act ended, which takes place in a Chinese restaurant, you were familiar with the setting of the office when it appears the second act and its been destroyed. The first act is a set of conversations and monologues in the Chinese restaurant, and because you are not familiar with the characters, I had a very hard time knowing who was who, what the relationship each of the characters had to each other. I think that is definitely an error on the playwright’s part, not on that of the actors.

I also had an issue that most of the humor from this play comes from profanity. Now I really don’t have any issue using profanity in plays. However I do think that if its your only means of humor, it gets really old after a while. I thought that this play was very clever in its plot points but maybe it wasn’t written in the best way. The monologues are very hard to follow, because you go into their conversations without knowing anything about any of the characters. I had a very hard time understanding a lot of the business lingo that they use as well. Being a theatre major and all, I have not been expected to learn what those terms mean, and it made understanding what they do, what kind of office they run and the transactions that take place all mean. However, in the second act many of these were explained to me just because of the way that they were acting towards each other and the events that occurred. This vocabulary barrier was really what kept me from wholly enjoying this show.

STF

I am sitting here trying to pick which plays to blog about for the plays I’ve seen this semester. I’ve seen at least ten different productions in theatres ranging from Rauch to the Seattle Rep. I believe it is going to be hard for me to establish new things in these blogs that I haven’t already stated in my other blogs, from what I learned about play writing. Also it is hard for me to choose which plays to write about, because all have been so different.

STF
I guess I will begin talking about STF, because I am most familiar with the process having stage managed one of the shows. Bug by Tracy Letts, is one of the most well written plays I have ever worked on. There are so many lines through out the show that I can clearly identify as character development or plot development etc. It is also one of the cleverest plots I have ever worked with. Not only does it take two strangers, throw them together and create and extremely dark and nail-biting story, but it also ties in an incredible amount of historical evidence making the fictional story of the play even more believable. Peter is a Gulf war veteran who believes that he has been chosen by the government as a petri dish for their experiments for finding the ultimate weapon – putting bugs in someone’s body. Letts uses historical evidence that connects peter with the Oklahoma City bombings, and events in history that make Peters story extremely believable.
Working on this script really showed me how important historical context is within a play. When writing a play for a certain era, it is important to know how your characters would act, talk, and what events they would have been aware of at the time. What a country is going through at any given time is strongly reflected within the people of that country. The feelings toward the government, other people and what is going on in the country have an influence on people’s actions in their daily lives, even if it’s just not caring at all.
Bug takes place in one tiny, grungy hotel room the entire play. Which really makes it a character play. I found it so interesting how much you find out about both Peter and Agnes through out the wholes play. Agnes’ vulnerability is what leads her to believe Peter when he begins hallucinating the bugs. Peter’s kindness and gentle nature in the beginning is what persuades Agnes that he is actually an okay guy. The play itself is so incredibly cleverly written, that it never feels like it is just dragging on, where instead the audience is drawn into the scene at every moment.
Letts does screw you over though for one of the scene changes in the show. The transition from act 2, scene 2 to act 2, scene 3 is extremely difficult. The entire hotel room is to be covered in tin foil during this scene change. Now there are two options in a production for this: you either have to take a second intermission or you just have a long scene change. In our production, we made it into a light show, and between the flashing lights and music the audience is able to watch the transformation happening. It ended up working really well; our stagehands even got an ovation from it a couple of the shows.
When I first read bug, I was confused on how all of the pieces fit together, but after 5 months of working with the script and really understanding all of the different aspects of the show, seeing characters come to life, it really made me appreciate how well written that script really is.

I know I am biased, but I didn’t enjoy the other STF shows as much as I liked my own. (well of course), but I thought Bug had the strongest script in general before the acting took place. Looking at the other shows it became very apparent to me how important it is to pick actors for your plays that actually fit the parts. I don’t want to give any examples here, because I don’t want to offend any one, but I felt that a few of the actor choices in the other shows were not great for the actors themselves. I guess in the STF sense, it is important to pick shows that fit your actors very well. I thought because of this some of the really interesting aspects of the other shows were not portrayed as well because of weaknesses in the actors. Script wise – not pertaining to the people who were involved with them at all – I thought Terra Nova was long and drawn out. I think it is hard to make such a sad, depressing story work on stage. The long monologues lost me a bit, but I thought that the actors did a very good job performing them considering what they were given. I thought The Secret in the wings was a very sporadic script and I had a hard time following it all the time and understanding what was going on… and more importantly WHY it was going on. I don’t think the author of Secret gave us enough information about scenes that actually took place outside of the book, but that was just me. I thought Shape of things was an extremely hard script to perform and just came off awkward instead of effective. This may have been acting, or just may be the way the script is written. Overall I think its important to make sure that you are giving enough information to your audience without dragging your play on.

Amadeus: When To Be "Done"

It seems unrealistic to me that someone would spend 20 years... (That’s how long I’ve been alive) editing something. I believe I would get sick of something if I were to spend that much time on it. I think after a certain amount of time, one is only micro editing, and changing a word here or there may or may not make any difference to those other than the author who are reading it. The question you have to ask yourself is how much of a difference is this actually making?? Yes, changing scenes or adding and removing entire plot points does make a difference.

On the other hand, one must edit productions for the means it is being produced. When a playwright first comes out with a play, the play will be reworked several times over just in the rehearsal process… dialogue will be changed, things that don’t make sense to a viewer will be clarified. These are things that have been drilled into our head the whole semester. It is not surprising to me that Peter Shaffer states that the movie was very different from the play of Amadeus. Movies are different from plays, because you can show so much more on the screen than you can on the stage. And yes its expected that the Broadway script would be slightly different from the other scripts, because you have a higher budget, a bigger production and the means to show things on stage that you wouldn’t be able to on a smaller stage. All of his edits seem completely verified in the means that he makes changes for what he wants to depict at a various time.

Over time, an author may want to bring out different symbolic meaning and thematic points in his or her work. At times, the playwright may want to bring out the more comedic side of their work, or the dramatic, or may add in elements of melodrama to emphasize the struggles his characters experience or whatever. He or she will find what works and what does not. Shaffer talks about adding the element of the recurring dream for Mozart. Because of this dream, it allowed him to expand “the guilt he almost surely must have felt heavily after the death of the father he had regarded all his life” and also “the whole notion of Salieri offering himself as a substitute father” This may or may not have been extremely important to the plot as a whole, but it help give depth do Mozart’s character throughout the story.

A playwright is going to be influenced by different people in different times of their lives. As Amadeus is a continually “unfinished” project, it is not surprising to me that Peter Shaffer has changed things as he is going along. When a play moves from theatre to theatre, from the stage to the screen and then back off the screen to the stage, even the playwright will have different interpretations of what is going on. Not every production is going to be the same, not ever stage direction is going to be followed exactly. As far as I am concerned, plays are things we can always learn from, because no matter how many times you read, edit, perform and design for the same show, you are going to discover something new within ever time you work with it.

The Funny Ten Minutes

I found the comical ten minute plays I just read to be quite different from the dramatic ones. For the most part, I found that these characters are much less dynamic than those in the dramatic ones. Yes, they do have relationships that are established, but for the most part the scenes are between characters that do not have detailed or well known previous relationship. In "Aimee" she does not know the two inspectors and we don't really learn about the relationship of the two inspectors to much. I think this is an element of writing comedy. The audience does not need to know the back story as much for it to be funny, where in a drama, i know that in order for me to connect to a character i need to be able to connect emotionally to that character.

I liked how quickly this selection of plays went. I think it comedy, there are usually less dramatic pauses and things over all. I read each of these in five minutes or less, just because they were easy to follow and light on the mind. I thought "Philadelphia" was really silly. But a great parody on what it is like there. My family is from Philly and it is funny to see it made fun of in this way. This of course is obviously not realistic, however, still comical.

I thought "Anything for you" was the most well written character wise. I like comedy that is brought out of something a little more serious. In general, it makes it a little more "adult" i guess you could say. I liked that the author developed the characters a bit, so it wasn't just a funny sketch about two people in restaurant. Its funnier when the punchline comes in because you know how strange a situation that would be between two best friends.

Plays that make us cry usually make us laugh at one point or another, where in comedy plays just make us laugh. There is absolutely nothing wrong with straight comedy of course, but usually drama is more dynamic. I really liked "Duet" because the characters were all so simple. I loved that you could hear the animals voices, knowing that they are completely unheard by the humans. However, i was a little confused by the end of the show. The bear's monologue i felt was only there to put in place a message from the author. I felt that it didn't really fit the play that well, which kind of drew me out at the end because otherwise i really liked this one.

The Ten Minuters

For the most part, I really liked all of these short plays. Its interesting to see that you can establish a short one act like that, that tells you so much about the characters. Each of the plays told so much back story and had a discussion about something that was in the present. I think that these types of plays are going to be much easier to write than coming up with the plot for a whole play. However, i think a challenge of writing these plays might be making sure that all of your lines have a purpose. There is so little space to establish your back story and the plot and any humor or emotion that the writer wants portrayed into the play.

I really liked how powerful some of the emotions were through out these plays. I absolutely loved "The Man Who Couldn't Dance." When Eric goes to the crib and picks up Elizabeth, then begins to cry and tells Gail how he feels about her being married and such, was extremely heart wrenching. This was also a really interesting turning point in the plot. Up until this point the reader really doesn't know the relationship between Gail and Eric. We know that they have some history because they obviously know each other and know how to piss each other off. I liked the authors technique of telling us so much about their relationship, just in how they relate to each other and other small things they know about each other. But then the author drops the bomb of how they really know each other. I also liked that the author left it up in the open of what really happened between the two of them, why they broke up, and why they didn't end up together. The author creates an interesting dynamic of what is shown to us, what is told to us and what is left up to us to imagine in our heads.

Personally I did not really like "The Roads that Lead Here". I thought that the dialogue was repetitive and all of the exclamation points were really annoying. I liked that as a reader i really did not know what was going on or what their project was, but i thought all the guessing got repetitive and annoying. I think in a staged version of this play it would be very hard to keep that type of humor new throughout the run of the scene. I liked that you didn't know who the Eminent was for the majority of the play, but overall i thought this play was a little confusing and just not very funny. However, at the end i really liked the message that was portrayed with appreciating the natural America, no matter how much the human race screws it up. I did think the blowing up of the cars was pretty random. I think that when writing something like this, it will be hard to develop the characters enough in a short time to a point where they bring across what you want them to.

I thought "Bowl of Soup" was an interesting take on a ten minute play. Because the whole play is mostly a monologue, its interesting to see that the author was able to bring so much to both of the characters, just through one character talking. I also really liked the twist at the end of the play. I like that these plays touch on so little, but are comprehensive at the same time. I think this is what is going to be the biggest challenge when I write these on my own.

Fences

This play was tragic, but good at the same time. I really liked all of the contradictions within Troy's character. He is so self centered, but also gives everything he has (material-wise) to his family. I love the line from Rose, when she calls him out for talking about how he talks about giving and what he doesn't have to give, but that he takes too, and doesn't realize it. I thought that this was a very powerful moment in the play. I also love the contradiction within his character surrounding his son, Cory. He is so stuck in the fact that he thinks he is a good baseball player, but won't let his son pursue his dream of being a football player. I think that these are such interesting contradictions just due to the fact that it makes his character incredibly hypocritical.

There is something to be said about the fence through out the play. The fence represents the entrapment of the characters through out the play and the affect that Troy has on his family. After he tells Rose that he is going to have a child with another woman she tells him that "I been standing with you! i been right here with you, Troy. I got a life too. I gave eighteen years of my life to stand in the same spot with you. Dont you think i ever wanted other things?" (70). The fence not only represents the stagnant trapped lifestyle that these characters have, but it keeps them from being allowed to experience the world around them.

I think Gabe is one of the most interesting characters in this whole show. Troy talks about how he doesn't need anyone to keep him locked up, that he is not hurting anyone with his crazy antics. However, this is another extremely hypocritical aspect of Troy. He disagrees with his sons and his wife pursuing their ambitions, but because Gabe cannot accomplish anything of great matter, he is not affected by the fence. Also that all of Troy's money has come from Gabe is also interesting. This shows that Troy is a complete vacuum to everyone around him. His character is completely dependent on the actions of others to survive, but also completely independent from them in his values and morals. I think that it is also the innocence and good nature of the other characters that makes him stick out like a sore thumb.

I also really liked the dialogue and the dialect of the play. It definitely fit the setting of the play, and i was able to see the characters and hear them in my head right away. I think that this is an extremely important aspect for developing characters, because if the character doesn't has a place in the world of the play that makes sense and keeps the audience in a sense of realism within the world of the play, no matter how quirky or interesting the character is, it may not work.

Blog #3: Eurydice

I thought that this play was very charming, interesting and funny. However I was definitely confused through most of it! I felt that Sarah Ruhl's elements of realism conflicted with her elements of the surreal. I was never really sure when they were talking "in the language of the dead" or when they actually understood each other. I thought she did a very good job of taking the myth of Eurydice and turning it into a charming play. I found it a little difficult to follow because of the purely unrealistic conversations between the characters. I also thought the man character was very weird; however I think I am under the correct understanding that he was the one who killed her?
I thought this was an interesting take on the myth however. I really liked that Ruhl used many different forms of theatre through her writing. She mostly had the characters conversing in dialogue however occasionally she threw in a letter or a monologue or even a scene with no verbal presentation. This allowed for a more diverse play. I think that if characters converse in the same patterns through out the whole play it can make a play very boring. I really liked the use of the letters especially. They were able to establish feelings that the characters have toward each other without having to express them through a monologue to the audience or in a dialogue. I think this helped eliminate unneeded characters. Every character has a purpose, even the old grandmother. I liked that there were scenes with just the grandmother walking by even before the audience knows who she is. This is one of the disadvantages of reading the play, because the stage directions tell you who she is before the audience would generally find out when seeing this show in a theatre. This element of having characters that are unknown to the audience keeps the audience on their toes. I know that I would be curious to her purpose if I didn’t already know that she was the grandmother through the stage directions.
I think when a playwright models another story in his or her play, it is important to make it their own. I think Ruhl completed this task effectively. The myth always takes place from the man’s point of view. Not just in Orpheus’ case but also in Hercules, Odysseus and many other Greek stories and myths. I liked the relationship that Ruhl developed between Eurydice and her father. I also liked that the audience learns so much more about Eurydice because of this relationship. I do not think this would have been as effective if it were not that Eurydice did not remember her father. However, I was confused of how she suddenly got to know that her father was her father. I think that if one is going to take a story line and make it into their own you need to make sure that all your new relationships; characters and situations do not pull the audience out of the story.
I think that everyone has such a picture perfect image of what the lord of the underworld is like. I thought Ruhl’s interpretation was very out of the ordinary but an interesting take on this character because of the innocence that is usually affiliated with children.
Overall I thought it was an interesting take on the story of Eurydice. I liked that she wrote it mostly from the perspective of Eurydice herself, and I liked varying format of the play. I think one very important thing is keeping the relationships and actions of the characters work with the rest of the story, and to make sure you are not confusing your audience.

Blog #2: Dialogue is a conversation

I’ve read through all of the dialogues and honestly I’m not sure what was happening in many of them because I have not read most of the plays that they were taken from. Unlike monologues, dialog has to do with context. Characters do not immediately tell you who they are, what their intentions are and what they are feeling at any given moment. All of this is shown through the conversational tactics of the character and the actor. These characters do not tell you what they are doing, or what they are trying to do. They are not reflecting on an event or telling their perspective or ideas about something that has happened in the past. They are living the action with the audience as if it is being said for the first time. Dialogue must be naturalistic from a conversational standpoint. For example, in Closer by Patrick Marber, there is an interesting progression of the conversation between Larry and Anna. The segment of the play begins when they are happy together, but then it jumps to a time where Larry travels a lot and Anna has been sleeping with Dan for a year. At this point in the play Dan has already told us that he has been sleeping with Anna. Because the audience already knows this, we understand Anna’s attitude toward Larry when he comes home from the business trip. She does not have to tell us that she loves Dan because we already know this from earlier scenes. I think it is important for playwrights to use foreshadowing and give the audience an omniscient perspective in order to be able to understand both the history of the characters and the things that the characters themselves don’t know about yet at various points through out the play.
The play I am the most familiar with that is in this selection of Dialogues is Angels in America. After reading, analyzing and performing segments from this play last year in Geoff Proehl’s Dionysus class, I found this play invigoration for its intense subject matter, unique characters and extremely sad story. Because I am familiar with this script I was able to understand the context from which this segment was taken. From a playwright’s standpoint, characters have to reveal things to each other through conversation. Harper assumes that Joe is a homosexual, and shows him she is angry with him through passive aggressive statements. “Not my dinner. My dinner was fine. Your dinner. I put it back in the oven and turned everything up as high as it could go and I watched it til it turned black. It’s still hot. Very hot. Want it? When speaking with another individual in a play, a character does not need to say straight out what they mean. When writing, you have to take into context of what exactly characters would say if this was a first time conversation and the actors didn’t know the ending to the play. When caught in the heat of the moment whether angry or happy, characters are not going to be able to get right to the point. Like any real argument, in Angels, they are stubborn, passive aggressive. Even in Henry the IV, where Shakespeare has a tendency to have the characters exclaim their feelings right out, there exquisite cleverness in the interaction between Hotspur and Prince Henry. The characters are playing each other in a game of power. “Nor shall it, Harry; for the hour is come/To end the one of us; and would to God/Thy name in arms were now as great as mine!”.
In dialogue I feel that characters have to be more realistic than in monologues. Emotions should not be directly stated, but instead should be reflected in the statements that they make and the actions that they take. Dialogue must also have a forward movement. Unless used to make a point, the dialogue from the plays that we have read do not have a lot of circular repetitious movement. Even in the arguments, the conversations have an obvious build, climax and resolution.

Blog #1: Laramie Project

Well, this is officially my first blog ever. While reading The Laramie Project, it took me a while to get into it, which was probably my fault as I was trying to read in a room where my roommate and her boyfriend were watching some movie about vampires and werewolves and such, but that's beside the point. What did I learn about writing plays?? I am very familiar with the story of Matthew Shepard, mostly because I remember when it happened. When I began to read the play by Moises Kaufman, I found that it was very scattered and hard to follow, and throughout the whole play I had a hard time making a distinction between the smaller characters. As I continued to read I found that the style in which the play was written was the best way to portray the actual people and locations at which this horrible event occurred. Overall i was very pleased with the structure and format of the play.

There are a few things that I found very interesting about the structure of this play. At first look, I thought it was interesting that it was in three acts, all of different length. I personally did not find a clear distinction as to why they were split up that way. The story is so choppy and jumps around from character to character, that I feel that it would have been possible to break it up into two acts, both of equal length. Then after a second look I realize why Kaufman split it up the way he did. There are three sections to Matthew’s story. There is the initial crime, where he is found, brought into the hospital and the whole world hears about what has happened. The second section is about his death and the response of the world. The third section is the resolution, the trial of the accused, along with statements from the people who cared most about Matthew.

Another thing I learned about writing is that they easiest way to portray the feelings and thoughts about real life individuals is to use their actual words. I found the parts where the actual actors were talking about their experience with the interviews kind of boring because it pulls the reader out of the chronological line of the actual story. Because of the direct quotes and characters that are real people, the personal accounts are extremely heart breaking even just on the page. I cannot even imagine the emotion involved with watching this play on a stage. The statements of the people who had direct contact with this horrible event: the kid who found him, of the accused, of Matthew’s father, of the policemen and doctors who dealt with him , etc were extremely powerful. However, I also found a lot of power in the statements of other people Matthew’s age, like Matt Galloway, Jedadiah Schultz, and Zubaida Ula. They each felt like they had a connection to Matthew, even though only Matt Galloway was the only one who knew him personally. I found it interesting that such minor characters to the actual story line could have such a powerful interesting insight and opinions to the story itself. For example, Jedadiah Schultz did not necessarily agree with a homosexual lifestyle, but for some reason had a great connection to Angels in America, which made him feel closer to Matthew.

I found the end of the play very haunting. This was the one place that I loved that Kaufman used the insight of the people from the theater company conducting the interviews. One of the things that had stuck in their minds was that Doc had said that Laramie sparkles. Doc explained that Matt had told him this one night on a drive, and I think the most haunting part of this play is Doc’s last quote: “Matt was right there in that spot, and I can just picture his eyes, I can just picture what he was seeing. The last thing he saw on this earth was the sparkling lights” (99). I love that Kaufman leaves us feeling haunted. He could have written some concluding monologue talking about the amazing response of the people of the world in result of Matthew’s death. He could have written some cheesy ending about how Matthew’s story will live on through this play and such, but instead, Kaufman leaves us as one of his crew members looks in the rearview of the car and sees the sparkling lights.