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.