drama

Sometimes there’s enough drama in real life to fill the pages of many plays. Just in my acting class, for example. There are at least 2 love triangles, constant homosexual undertones, a lot of nerves being strummed like guitars, buttons being pushed… And we only have 10 students and 1 amazing professor in the class. That’s why people are so interesting and why I am going to make characters this summer. I will cast the characters, like actors, into new plays.

The following is an example: (Male 1, thus far unnamed)

• Appears extremely confident, almost to a fault
• Good-looking, smooth-talking
• Possesses an initially undecipherable vernacular that inevitably gets picked up by others
• Labeled as the “jerk” or “asshole”
• Contains a great humanity about him, compassionate when necessary
• Reads and understand people very well
• Finishes other people’s sentences in his mind
• Quick to judge and characterize
• Faster to act than to plan/organize, sometimes rashly
• Very enthused about things he is definitely passionate about
• Medium tolerance for alcohol
• Generally apathetic to very specific things (TBD)
• Question: Is he deeply insecure about something?
• Question: What is a flaw about him that will allow us to fall in love with him ? Right now he mostly angers us.
• Question: In a play, do we want to root for him or love to hate him?

 

service

Alan (my ancient genius director) says that theater is a service art. I thought about that and decided it was only too true. Actors must find the story they are telling, live through it multiple times, and only then generously give back to the audience.

Yet when we are in rehearsal, he refuses to speak of the audience. We focus on controlling our own bodies and speech in entirety, breathing down to our loins and centering ourselves, doing balancing acts around the room with our scene partners, getting personal and sweaty with them- reciting lines all the while…

…taking every thought and attuning it to the minds of our characters, stepping into their bodies without an apology and putting them on like pants… Alma, the spinsterish minister’s daughter in love with a wild-hearted young doctor; Celia, the exhausted housewife of a postwar crackhead; Sheila, the mother of a 9-year-old vegetable daughter; Fanny, a closeted recluse in a fantasy world… until we are slathered like butter on the stage floor, dripping with body fluid and immersed in the full euphoria and misery of our new mutant-person-thing. Every thought has been turned into a mixture of myself and of she (and sometimes he) who is on my script- and all of this happens before I’ve said one word.

We give and give and give to the audience. All the frustration, headbanging, memorization, pantomiming… plus Alan cursing at us: in the end we give 150% of what we earn. Feels like a ripoff, but I guess that’s what service is. And it also explains why Alan looks so, so old. (Hopefully he never discovers computers… he’s probably seen one before though. Okay hopefully he never discovers the internet.)

 

my stage

At the end of my playwriting class, I ended up with a lot of unrevised plays and a mess of new ideas. This will be a good place to put them down. It will be a stage for ideas to plant and grow, for words to engorge into dialogue, dialogue into characters, characters into relationships, relationships into stories. The essential part is your input.

I thank you in advance for helping me grow.