Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Writing to direct

Continuing the series on theatre education for high school students...

So you’ve decided you want to direct a one-act your senior year, and you search and you search and you search, but you just can’t find the right script for you.

In that case, you might want to consider writing your own play. That way, you customize the show for your performance space, your available casting pool, and your overall comfort level. Basically, you choose your own directing adventure.

If you opt for this route, only a handful of limitations stand before you: any guidelines of appropriateness required in your school, budget constraints, your school’s stage, and the laws of physics and reality. Still, you’ve got tons of freedom.

You want to do comedy? Drama? Romance? Sheer absurdity? The choice is yours.

There are many different facets of playwriting I could talk about, but let’s focus on just one for now:

When writing a play, consider movement.

This is especially useful if you’re writing this play for your directorial debut and you’re still learning the ropes about that side of the operation, too. If you incorporate movement into your script, that’s less you’ll have to figure out during the rehearsal process--and more that will organically develop on its own. But the key here is to incorporate movement that needs to happen, as opposed to arbitrary movement for the sake of movement.

I wrote my first play my senior year of high school for the purpose of having something to direct. Without even consciously realizing it at the time, I incorporated a simple set-up that generated tons of action throughout the show.

This one-act was based on my senior Homecoming dinner experience, and therefore, I called it “The Play About Homecoming.” I was part of a group of six. The three girls were friends of mine, and the other two guys didn’t even go to our school...and those two guys were a little on the unusual side. Or a lot on the unusual side. One thought he'd impress the girls by trying to resuscitate his chicken dinner, for example. So, there was plenty of fodder for comedy there, especially when you have license to exaggerate things to absurd proportions. (This is playwriting, not journalism.)

Dinner, of course, is a somewhat static activity. People just sit at the table and talk. While you can develop some fun dialogue in such a situation, it’s not very visual. And theatre is in large part a visual medium. If I just had everyone sitting at a table for 15-20 minutes, it would have dragged.

So, I placed the women’s restroom to one side of the table, and the men’s restroom at the other. I couldn’t build those sets, so I simply established them with signs and had the actors pantomime opening the doors and washing their hands. This gave the girls a place to run off to when they needed to vent about their horribly awkward dates. And I could also have the dorky guys act all goofy while admiring themselves in their bathroom mirror.

By giving a place for the actors to move to, a snowball effect occurred. I kept thinking of more pieces of action and comedy to incorporate into the script.

Movement helps the overall flow of a show tremendously. When you first begin writing your script, figure out a basic set for the show and have it be a functional set. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, and it probably shouldn’t be. I used little more than a table and two invisible bathrooms, and with that, my cast generated tons of laughter from an appreciative audience.

Remember, movement can help actors keep their energy up. Sometimes, it provides memory cues for lines. Most importantly, it gives the audience something dynamic to watch.

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