Writing Archives - Dramatics Magazine Online

Dramaturgy 101: Creating an Actor Packet

Dylan Malloy — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 14:18:25 +0000

This fall, I learned about dramaturgy for the first time by serving as a dramaturg for my college theatre department’s production of Lost Girl, written and directed by Professor Kimberly Belflower. Dramaturgs perform the research and story analysis that make a play come alive for the actors and creative team. They’re also often responsible for creating the “actor packet,” a short research document with information relevant to the play.

4 Tips for Creating a Great Actor Packet

The actors use this packet to gain more context about the themes present within the script, essentially helping build the story from the inside out! While there’s plenty to learn, here are four of my biggest lessons creating my very first actor packet.

1: Read the play.

First, sit down with the play and read it thoroughly. It helps to make note of what you notice while reading. Do certain character dynamics stand out? What themes seem particularly clear? Does the ending make sense, or is it more ambiguous? Is the style realistic or not?

Once you finish reading the play, ask yourself one key question: What information do actors need to know to tell this story well?

The answer to this question can come in the form of themes, historical context, storytelling devices, information about the play’s genre – the options are endless. You’ll research many different things while working on your actor packet, but answering this question for yourself narrows your focus.

2: Research the context.

Next, begin your research into the play’s context, as this often determines so much about the story from the start. Context is the particular lens through which the author, director, and/or creative team approach the material, informing how characters relate to each other and how they interact with the setting.

For example, Cabaret is a story about a passionate love affair between a British nightclub singer and an American author. However, its context is that it’s set in Berlin on the eve of the holocaust, and this affects how the actors might portray the story. Knowing details about the world the story is set in helps you understand what different characters value.

Even if the play takes place in the present, do some broad Google searches into a play’s historical setting and geographical location. What was happening in the world at the time when the play takes place? Where is the play located in the world, and how has that location been impacted by global issues?

Make a bullet-point list of the most relevant facts that actors should know. The list doesn’t have to include everything – just enough information to provide some background. At the end of the actor packet, include some links that actors can reference if they would like more information.

Think of it like drawing: by providing historical context in the actor packet, you’re outlining the sketch. Next, you’ll focus on the smaller details of the story and add some color.

3: Explore themes and genres.

In every play, the playwright wants to communicate a message about the world. They do so by exploring conflict between characters and the world around them. You can help the actors understand the themes of the story by pointing to works with similar themes. Everything you include in the actor packet helps the actors to ground themselves within the story.

For example, if the play you’re working on is a romance that ends tragically, you can provide a list of other romances that end tragically. Actors can read or watch these stories to understand the nuances of the emotions they will portray onstage. When actors understand a play’s genre, they can also work to understand what makes this particular play different from stories of the same genre. Different themes and approaches set stories apart.

While creating the actor packet for Theater Emory’s production of Lost Girl, the dramaturgy team included information about different genres: fantasy and coming-of-age. Lost Girl is inspired by the story of Peter Pan and follows Wendy Darling after she returns home from Neverland and tries to start her life again. We wanted to have a section of the actor packet that talked about tropes commonly found in both genres so they could understand how the play works with and subverts those tropes.

4: Study the characters.

Once you’ve provided research about the context, themes, and genre of the play, shift your attention to the characters. Every character pursues different goals and experiences conflict along the way, and actors seek to find out why they act the way they do. You can help them in this process by sharing research related to psychology and behavior.

For example, if a character is grieving a loss, including a scientific article about grief makes it easier for an actor to understand the character’s emotions. While working on the production of Lost Girl, which focuses on Wendy’s heartbreak after losing Peter Pan, the dramaturgy team provided research about mental health in the actor packet to contextualize why Wendy struggles to move on.

However, always be careful that the sources you include are accurate, professional, and trustworthy. If you have any questions about whether you should include a source, be sure to ask your theatre teacher. It’s best not to try to explain the characters, but to share interesting pieces of research that empower actors to draw their own conclusions.

Once you compile all your research, you’ll have a completed actor packet ready to distribute! Your research and attention to detail will help the cast and creative team see the story in a kaleidoscope of different ways.

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Clarifying Your Vision

Dylan Malloy — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:37:09 +0000

Summer is a season of vision. Vision can be defined many different ways, but I love to think of it as ambition mixed with focus. As a student at Emory University who is majoring in playwriting, I spend my fall and spring semesters studying hard and getting inspiration. So, when the summer rolls around, I’m ready to dive deeper into my playwriting work.

Get a sneak peek into what I’ve been up to this summer — and read about the many lessons about theatre and the power of vision that I’ve learned along the way.

ADAPTING THEATRE FOR LIVE-STREAMING AUDIENCES

Photo of Dylan Malloy by Jack Randall

Recently, a play of mine entitled Venus, and What Else is Nocturnal received production in The Blank Theatre’s 30th Annual Young Playwrights Festival in Los Angeles. This festival annually produces 12 plays selected from nationwide submissions by playwrights between the ages of 9 and 19. The production was live-streamed. It allowed me the life-changing experience of rehearsing on Zoom with some brilliantly talented professional actors (who have performed for groups such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+) over the month of July.

Each day of rehearsal was a crash course in how to adapt physical work for a digital setting. We used technology like green screens and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to make it look as though socially distanced actors were in the same room together. (Magic!) I’m so grateful to The Blank for the opportunity to bring this play to life in such an innovative and moving way.

The rehearsal process reminded me that playwriting involves constant learning and adapting. As technology evolves, the variety of tools at our disposal expands. Staying informed about shifts in the industry makes us as writers more flexible and versatile. However, this need to learn extends beyond just keeping up with the latest technology. Reading nonfiction or listening to podcasts over the summer is a surefire way to stay informed about the world and to fuel yourself with inspiration for your work.

PLAYWRITING TIP: WRITE DOWN YOUR MOMENTS OF INSPIRATION

Having a clear vision empowers your learning. Studying playwriting has taught me that anything can provide inspiration for a story, from a news article to a song, to an interview. It doesn’t matter how strange the topic is!

One helpful playwriting tip is to write down things you read, watch, or listen to that particularly inspire you — sort of like a research log. If you can go back through the list and identify common traits that appear throughout — like a theme, setting, or character type — then you may find inspiration for your next story! This intentional process sharpens your creative vision by reminding you of topics that make you curious and the types of stories you want to tell.

No amount of research is ever wasted in the grand scheme of your writing. For example, I’ve spent a lot of time learning more about technology, a topic that really engages me and appears throughout much of my work. All this reading prepared me ahead of time for this summer’s work of shifting Venus to a remote setting and connecting virtually with actors. You never know how unique rabbit trails will help you later in life — and the surprise factor adds excitement to your work.

WRITING A PLAY CYCLE

This summer also taught me about how to use the idea of vision to create a cohesive body of work. I’m in the process of completing a years-long playwriting project, and here is my mission statement for the endeavor: The River Cycle, a five-play cycle about loneliness, legend telling, and environmental crisis in rural Colorado, where I grew up. (Venus is the first installment.) The fifth and final play, The Groundwater, is in development and is currently set to be produced this fall as a staged reading by Emory University’s Oxford College theatre department.

A play cycle is defined as any number of plays that connect in some focused way. Cycles can cover any topic. Characters don’t have to overlap between stories, but there is always a common thread. Some playwrights utilize cycles to examine life in a particular part of the world over a long period of time. Other playwrights might use their work to explore certain themes.

Writing my own cycle has come with a massive learning curve, and I’ve written countless pages that will never see the light of day! But over the past couple years, I’ve learned that focusing on a vision gives writers endurance.

PLAYWRITING TIP: CREATE YOUR MISSION STATEMENT

Creating a mission statement for your writing focuses your ambition on an end goal. Whether you want to write one play or an entire play cycle, identifying the “why” behind your work gives you a clearer sense of vision. Think of it like an elevator pitch that defines your writing but still allows enough broadness for you to explore bursts of inspiration along the way.

Here are some questions that could help you clarify your mission statement:

What themes do you like to explore?
Who would enjoy your plays?
What do you hope the audience takes away from your writing?

These statements often change over time, which is natural because it means your work is growing and evolving! When we use specifics to define our writing, we give shape and structure to our ambitions. It enables us to visualize the goals of our work and the impact on the world that we want it to have.

As summer draws to a close, I’m eagerly preparing to return to Emory, reconnect with my friends, and begin the fall semester. I’m so thankful for this summer’s unexpected opportunities and the lessons about vision that they taught me.

Dylan Malloy is a student at Emory University double majoring in playwriting and arts management. She recently won the 30th Annual Blank Theatre National Young Playwrights Festival, and one of her plays received a production by the Hollywood-based Blank Theatre in summer 2022 with professional actors. Other plays have been produced by Emory University’s Lenaia Playwriting Festival, Oxford College New Play Festival, and the Emory Oxford College theatre department.

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Writing a Fantasy World for Your Play

Dylan Malloy — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 20:41:43 +0000

When you think of live theatre, maybe a fantasy world with spaceships, androids, or flying cars isn’t what you see in your mind’s eye. Yet through speculative plays, all this and more comes to life! According to Book Riot, speculative fiction “can include literary fiction with fantastical elements as well as hardcore science fiction, fantasy, and horror.” Think: Star Wars or Fahrenheit 451 as examples. It’s possible to take all the imaginative, suspenseful, mind-bending power of speculative stories to the stage. Here are writing tips that transcend time and space.

Your Fantasy World Requires Focus

The first step of world-building is focus. For example, if you’re writing a play about the year 2050, don’t get overwhelmed trying to write about climate change, and politics, and social media, and space travel, etc.

Narrow your focus to one element of the future or alternate universe for your story. This focus allows you to dive into the topic more deeply and flesh it out more fully. You don’t need to explain every aspect of the world you are creating because doing so slows the story down.

Our current world already has given us a lot of technology described in speculative and science fiction stories. So, ask yourself how this technology might change 5, 10, or 50 years. The only limit to this exercise is how far your imagination can go! Thinking about storytelling like this often makes it easier for you, and for audiences, to relate to the world of your story.

Fantasy World Main Characters

When thinking about your main character, try to imagine them behaving inside the aspect you’re focusing on. How does you protagonist interact with time travel, or spaceships, or interplanetary war, or whatever element is dominating your story? How do they navigate this world? Is the world supportive of them, or is it hostile?

And the most important question of all, the question that will define your story: what does your character want, and what stands in their way? No matter in what genre you’re writing, some elements of story stay the same. You always want well-developed characters and high stakes.

Speculative plays ultimately aren’t about the future, but about the people trying to navigate it. The idea of stakes refers to how badly the character needs to get what they want. Sometimes characterization involves writing many drafts of scenes that never make it into the final play. These scenes are helpful because they help you figure out the voices and desires of your characters.

Ultimately, a good story is made of central conflict between two things: a character who wants something and the forces that stand in their way. Take our word for it: unique, well-developed characters who want something deeply will hold the audience’s attention, no matter the genre of the story!

A Fantasy World with a Message

Some writers use speculative plays to communicate a message about the world we live in today. The powerful thing about being a playwright is that you can choose which message to convey. Or, you can also choose not to convey a message at all and simply entertain.

No matter which route you choose, remember that the most critical things you need for any story are character and stakes. If you can also share a message that’s important to you, that’s excellent! But “a message” isn’t necessary for your play to be emotionally impactful.

It’s your choice how much to reflect on the world we live in today. Ultimately, it’s the core elements of a story that will resonate the most with an audience.

When Special Effects Aren’t an Option

Playwrights have to be conscious of how their work will look onstage, but writing speculative plays requires a new type of thought. In speculative movies, special effects can fill in all the gaps of the audience’s imagination, but in the theatre, this isn’t always possible. A more minimalistic approach works better because it allows the audience to imagine the world of the story, and it also saves money.

That means that, because of stage or budget constraints, you might not be able to build a scale replica of a rocket, but you can use lighting and sound effects to create the effect of a rocket. Simplicity is powerful in a fantasy world on stage because it shifts the audience’s attention away from the futuristic technology and back onto the characters that drive the story.

The key to creating a believable fantasy world contains a mixture of focus and fascination with the world where you currently live. How will our world look 50 years from now, or 500 years from now? As the playwright, you get to decide!

Dylan Malloy is a playwright and director who attends Emory University. You can find her on Instagram @dylan_writes.

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A New Age of Criticism

James Palmarini — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 17:00:00 +0000

CRITICS HAVE ALWAYS been part of the ecosystem of theatre. Ideally, the task of a critic has been to assess work and serve as a mediator between the art and the audience. Historically, theatre critics have influenced what plays get seen and even produced — for a Broadway production, a good review can help ensure a long run for the show, and a bad review can result in quick closure.

While the delivery methods have shifted — from print newspapers to online media — the individuals who write or record theatre criticism hasn’t: The field is dominated by white reviewers with common cultural experiences. But that is starting to change. The best example is the BIPOC Critics Lab founded by cultural critic Jose Solís.

The Honduran-born writer has been covering theatre, film, and the arts for nearly two decades, including for The New York Times and American Theatre. He also co-created the podcast and web series Token Theatre Friends, which brings a person-of-color perspective to the performing arts.

Solís had long wanted to create a critic mentoring program. When he found himself quarantined at home in Brooklyn last March, he launched a Zoom-based class to give aspiring critics the chance to learn the fundamentals of the craft and to engage in dialogues that would help them pursue their best path as critics. A few months after he launched the Critics Lab with eight students, Solís was approached by the Kennedy Center to replicate the program as part of its annual American College Theatre Festival. When Dramatics.org spoke to Solís in a Zoom interview, he was a few weeks into the 10-week Kennedy Center version of the Critics Lab. Solís was generous with his thoughts and time, talking extensively about why he decided to start the Lab and about the state of criticism and why it needs to change. Here’s what he had to say.

Let’s start with you. How did you get started down this career path?

SOLÍS: When I was 10 years old, I had this journal that my mom gave to me. I didn’t want a bike like most kids because, Honduras, my home country, was very dangerous. So I spent a lot of time watching American movies and TV shows and writing about them in that journal. I would see the kids in the movies hanging out and think that must be what it’s like. The first time I watched ET, I remember being worried that, when the kids go out on Halloween, they were going to get kidnapped. Every weekend, my dad or grandma would take us to the movies. When I got home, I just started writing in the journal about the things that I’d seen in the movie. There really wasn’t much theatre for me to see so writing about movies that interested me was what I did.

After your graduated from college in Costa Rica, you came the United States. In another interview, you said that when you got to New York, you felt like a brown spot in a sea of white. How did you meet that challenge?

SOLÍS: To begin with, I guess I am what you call a light-skinned Latino. I knew I wasn’t white, but when I moved to New York that became really clear to me. Racism is almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t live here. Many times, when people back home ask about my anti-racism mission to bring more BIPOC voices to criticism, they say to me, “but you’re white.” When I was growing up, in the Hollywood movies I watched, the people of color were always the villains. Latinos were the drug dealers, Black guys were thugs, and Middle Eastern guys terrorists. That can make you learn to root against yourself and to cheer for the white heroes and aspire to that kind of whiteness.

Could you talk about why you created the Critics Lab?

SOLÍS: When I was growing up my mentors were basically the critics that I was reading, because I didn’t know any critics in my country. I always wanted someone to ask things, to find out whether I was right or wrong about something. I’ve always felt that it’s really important to have someone who can give you feedback and also engage with you on your own level.

When I got to New York, I was surprised at how many theatre critics there were—it felt like my mecca. But even here most people really didn’t have mentors. If they did, it was through an experience with a college professor.

That lack of mentorship strikes me as one of the many things that has made this field so anti and white. If you can’t find someone who’s willing to take into account your cultural background and who instead just tries to tell you that what you’re doing is wrong because it doesn’t fit into the parameters of what they think it’s should, that’s a problem. It also means that someone who aspires to become a critic may never discover who they can be. That’s why I started talking to friends and doing research, trying to figure out what I could do.

So you created the Lab?

SOLÍS: When I was fresh in New York in 2013, I started working with magazines. I always brought up that there needed to be some sort of mentorship program for critics of color, because it didn’t exist. I went to the National Critics Institute at the O’Neill in 2016 and I think of 14 of us, only two of us were not white. I didn’t want to be the token BIPOC critic all the time. I knew then that the system needs to catch up. As the non-white population in America continues to grow, its criticism should reflect that.

So in the five years since then, I had this conversation with lots of people who always said that a mentor program for BIPOC critics sounds like a great idea. But then nothing ever happened, it never moved past a meeting or an email exchange. I just wanted a place for people like me to go. I had designed the program in my mind years ago, so when I was quarantined at home in March, I decided to do a primitive version and run it on my own and see what happens. I launched it last June, putting out the call on Twitter. I gave the first slot to the very first person who responded.

Did you really have the course worked out before you started?

SOLÍS: I had the curriculum in mind for years and I knew exactly how I wanted to structure it. But I did have help. My mother’s undergrad degree was in pedagogy and she was an elementary school teacher when I was growing up. So when I explained to her what I was doing, she told me what I wanted to do was disruptive education. That made sense to me — I am not one for anarchy, but disruption needs to happen to change things. I loved knowing that I was doing something that could challenge the status quo.

How did you choose participants for the first class?

SOLÍS: Basically, it was pretty much first-come, first-served. When people saw that what I was doing was for real, I started hearing from more and more people who wanted to be part of it. At first, I was going to take five and then it became six, then seven. I finally settled on eight because I thought that would be manageable. The application I used was the same one I’m using at the Kennedy Center. I asked them for two things. The first was a résumé, but not like you submit for a job or something, and I didn’t care where they went to school. I specified that I wanted this to be a résumé of your proudest moments. I also asked for a cover letter, but that was different too. They could submit the letter in whatever medium they wanted. So I got video submissions, along with written letters. I wanted to learn more about who they were as people and not like, you know, beings in a society where only certain things are considered important.

Could you give some examples of what is included in the curriculum?

SOLÍS: Some of the course focuses on basic things every critic needs to know, like how to engage with publicists and press reps and work with editors. And I talk about how to make a pitch for a story — simple but important things like that. For BIPOC critics, this can be particularly challenging because you are trying to preserve your soul and dignity while working within a system that really doesn’t want you.

How do you begin the discussion about criticism itself?

SOLÍS: I explain that there is a history that we don’t know and highlight the fact that what we know about criticism are things that were decided a very long time ago by dead white men that we haven’t really challenged. Even now this is true. Critics are expected to meet standards that should have been evolving along with the field. No one expects billboards to be powered by gas lamps, right? We’re OK with electricity. So why should we still try to meet standards of criticism that were cool in the 19th century?

How did the opportunity to run the program under the sponsorship of the Kennedy Center come about?

SOLÍS: When they contacted me, I thought at first it was a prank. I didn’t know anyone at the Kennedy Center. They said we see what you’re doing and we want to make it part of our upcoming American College Theatre Festival. My pilot ended in late October, so I started planning it out right after that.

It’s the same curriculum but I have more students — 17 — and guest artists to help me. The only limitation for applicants is they needed to be at least 18. The class includes everything from a freshman in college to parents who are getting their PhD. And I think we have something like 40 percent men and 60 percent women. Every session has a different BIPOC instructor. They’re all given the same guidelines, but I don’t give a manual that tells them exactly how to teach in my lab. I just say, based on a given subject, share what you know about this specific thing before you became a professional.

How do you measure your students’ success and engagement?

SOLÍS: I guess the way in which I measure success is whether they show up or not and are participating. I do have assignments for every session, but it’s up to them if they want to do the work, and if they want feedback or not. I don’t want to force them into anything because I know they have a life — either school, a job, or both. This isn’t really a reverse psychology thing — I want the Lab to be an experience more than a program.

Recently, one of the Kennedy Center Lab critics said on Twitter that instead of doing their college homework right now, they were doing the assignments that I left them. I think that says something powerful about the program.

The one thing I really enforce is maintaining a Zoom gallery view for the entire class period. My visual box or that of my guest instructor’s box shouldn’t take precedence or be more important than anyone else’s. I want all of us — critic and teachers alike — to be on the same footing. The idea is that we’re literally in the same space and time right now, the same way we would be in a classroom. I think it’s important that we acknowledge everyone in the room by reacting together in any given moment because I believe that’s the best way for us to learn from each other.

You’ve said you want the critics to come away with a sense of humanity from the program. What do you mean by that?

SOLÍS: I used to be embarrassed saying I was a critic because people immediately have all these connotations that they relate to the word, like it’s not a good thing to be critical. Some reviews and pieces of criticism are popular because they trash a piece of art that someone and maybe a team has spent years putting together. The trouble is, there are so many critics in every field that are doing this kind of writing but not actually interacting with readers and with their audience. That’s what I mean by gaining a sense of humanity.

Most of the time, the public only calls for critic accountability when they make factual mistakes or they say something that’s sexist, racist, or homophobic. And that shouldn’t be the case. If critics are part of the ecosystem of art, we should be available all the time to everyone, not just through our reviews.

Do you think the pandemic will change how and what theatre is produced in this country and perhaps in schools?

SOLÍS: One of the pros about the pandemic, at least when it comes to the arts, is that many works that were previously inaccessible to people became available all over the country and much of the world. The Lab is an example of that—we have a critic who is in India and one in Liverpool. I think this globalization that has given audiences access to theatrical works that were previously reserved for a much smaller population will help expand the cannon of plays produced.

For school theatre, we know the cannon of plays represents a particular challenge. To begin, the voices of BIPOC theatre makers need to be heard. It’s also about teaching white kids that their voice can also be a Black person or Latino. What I mean by that is you need to be open to someone’s voice who doesn’t share your cultural background and knows truths that you should be open to.

What would you say to a young BIPOC student interested in becoming a theatre critic?

SOLÍS: If you are not getting the encouragement and access to the resources you need, find and communicate with those who can help you. If I was talking to them directly, the first question I would ask is, “What’s your favorite piece of art and why do you love it?” I would also tell them it’s important to remain true to who they are; that there is nothing wrong with them and that it’s not their fault that the system doesn’t want to include them. Students need to learn how to protect the most sacred part of themselves, their essence, so long as it doesn’t involve something that is factually wrong or is causing harm to others.

How would you expect a BIPOC critic to review a classic American play?

SOLÍS: The first thing you do is to ask yourself is, why is something a classic? Why is it valued? Is it because someone else said so? For any piece of art that is considered a classic and widely respected, we want to get to why that is. What happens in this exercise is that we often end up realizing that these are truths that were accepted as the absolute truth, rather than the truth for someone during a specific time in history. Nothing is sacred, really, when it comes to art, other than the fact that it is meant to be dissected and to be interpreted, whether by BIPOC or white critics. All critics look at a piece of art differently, whether it’s theatre or something else. Our processes are the same, but our results are not. With the field of criticism so white, those opinions are going to be taken as truth because these people all have a similar cultural and educational background. A BIPOC’s critic’s perspective is always going to be disruptive and different because we haven’t made room for them to communicate.

You talked earlier about criticism being a sort of town hall opportunity to engage in a dialogue. Could you talk a bit more about that?

SOLÍS: I cannot think of anything more exciting than talking to people about something that you love. If you get an exchange going, maybe someone will tell you that something you loved was the worst thing that they’ve ever experienced and why. And then you create a flow. I feel like so much criticism right now is like a stagnant pond in a museum. The criticism that I dream of is a river flowing, always flowing, with a constant back and forth exchange. It’s in that exchange where the beauty is. I’ve always felt that way. Even when I was a kid writing really bad reviews in my journal, what I wanted was to know was what someone else thought about the same thing I was writing about.

Does the profession of criticism need to be totally rethought?

SOLÍS: It doesn’t need to be rethought. It just needs to open up to the possibilities and accept that a truth cannot be the absolute truth for everyone. Writing criticism and reading it should continue, but we need to acknowledge that it comes in different forms. I mean, even Twitter is written criticism.

What I am saying is that we don’t need to go to same place about same show over and over again. The thing that frustrates me the most is that we, as critics, are constantly demanding that works of art give us something that we’re not willing to give them—the possibility of evolving.

Interested in writing and theatre criticism? Learn tips and advice in Jose Solís’ workshop at Thespian Nation Live, January 29-31. Learn more and sign up online.

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How to Solve Writing Problems

Sammy Buck — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:00:45 +0000

Confession: It takes me forever to sit down to write. A blank screen means I have to solve a writing problem: what to write! No matter what it is you write, facing the blank screen can may bring panic and self-doubt. But there is a solution to the problem!

In fact, here are five quick exercises (solutions!) to stir your creativity and help you solve writing problems.

My last two articles were about the how and why of writing. This one is about the what. Writers know we need a strong hook to bring the reader in. So, sometimes the first problem to solve is: What’s new and different about what I’m writing?

These quick exercises, culled from my writing and improv training — and developed from tackling years of artistic challenges — are designed to spark creativity in mere minutes. I like to set a timer and go for each exercises: no breaks, no judgment. I was always taught that 10 minutes was the ideal. If you want to go longer , all the better, just make sure you spend at least 10 minutes.

Build lists to solve writing problems

The pesky blank page just needs to be filled with what you already know or feel. The quickest way to fill a page is to make a list. Lists provide specific images, objects, and ideas to open a world of possibilities.

Choose any of these topics to make a list. Fill the list to your heart’s content for at least 10 minutes. Then choose another and another and another.

Nouns
Verbs
Adjectives
Adverbs
Objects you dislike (I usually go for food examples — shredded coconut and fennel/anise/black licorice are always at the top of my list)
Objects in your room
Objects in nature
Household products
Skills everyone needs

See? You have way more ideas than you thought. Now let’s use the items on these lists to create characters and situations.

Note: When I say story in any of these exercises, it can mean short story, scene, monologue, poem, song or journal entry.

Mix and match the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs to create a sentence. Write the story that begins with that sentence.
For any of the objects or products you’ve listed, write a story about a world where that thing does not exist.
Make one of your objects a “MacGuffin” — the thing everyone in the story desperately seeks (Raiders of the Lost Fennel?). Maybe your main character uses one of the skills on your skills list.
Start a story with “I love [one of the objects you dislike] because…” Or, create a compelling argument for why one of the things that annoy you can be a useful — or even a crucial — thing for society.
Combine an adverb and an adjective and make that the title of a story about a skill that everyone needs. Then write that story.
Create a character by anthropomorphizing an inanimate object. If Pixar can do it, so can you. Now take something on the skills list and show how your character learns that skill.

Flex your juxtaposition muscles

It’s a challenge to create unique ideas for stories, character traits, and dramatic (or comedic) situations. One technique is to pair two disparate ideas.

Of the many, many reasons Hamilton is so successful, is because it juxtaposes the history of the white Founding Fathers with a multicultural cast and contemporary music. It’s a story about America “then” told by America “now.”

So now you get to exercise your juxtaposition muscles:

Make a list of combined titles, names, or objects. Examples: The Empire Strikes Back to the Future III, Ryan Reynolds Wrap, Hello Dolly Parton.
Create an unusual relationship between two people, places, or things that don’t normally go together. For example, The Odd Couple, a ’70s sitcom about two divorced men with polar-opposite personalities that created hilarity.
Write a story about ordinary objects or activities in an extraordinary place, such as washing dishes at a funeral on Mars.
Write a story about extraordinary activities in an ordinary place — tap-dancing on your hands during a final exam.

Change one thing to Solve Writing Problems

In the 1980s, the success of the movie Die Hard boosted the action genre, so a lot of movies tried to riff on that formula. Die Hard’s skyscraper setting for high-octane thrills was substituted to become “Die Hard on a Bus” (Speed), “Die Hard on a Plane” (Air Force One) or “Die Hard at an Airport “(Die Hard 2).

When spinning new ideas out of the ether, sometimes it comes down to changing one element of something you already know. On a micro level, when you’re hundreds of drafts into a script or a song and simply stuck, all you need to do is change one word or one sentence.

Let’s hone that skill:

Choose an ending of a story you hated and rewrite it to your liking.
Choose an ending of a story you loved and flip the outcome.
Choose an ending of a story and create a different beginning.
Switch the genres of your favorite stories (i.e., turn Winnie the Pooh into an action hero a la Fast and the Furious).
Think about the one time you made a huge choice. Now write the road not taken.

Amplify a viewpoint

One of the most important tools in your arsenal as a writer is having a strong point of view. Your voice is important. Also, characters need strong points of view for us to understand and emotionally connect with them.

We certainly live in an era of strong opinions. Social media has amplified the ability to air points of view, so let’s create an imaginary social network post as a way to explore character voices.

This is a multipronged assignment, each part takes 10 minutes:

Choose a character with big personal problem. Write an imaginary post asking for help.

- Respond to the post as someone who offers to help and gives all the right advice, then as someone who thinks they are helping but gives the worst suggestions ever.
- Have #a respond to #b calling them out, then have #b strengthen their resolve. See how far they can go back and forth.

Create a fourth person who weighs in. Whose side do they take? Do they offer something new? How do all the other characters respond and interact? Remember that the character with the original post will react and weigh in.

Write with friends

We’re experts at procrastinating but thrive on a deadline. It’s super useful to pair up with a friend or meet with a group to do these exercises:

Participants provide each other a unique two-person relationship. Each writes a two-person scene with the characters they are given.
Participants provide each other an unusual word (think spelling bees). Each writes a story sparked by the word. It’s equally fun if you don’t know the meaning. I once lost a spelling bee with phlox (I thought it was “phlocks”). Though it’s a flower, it prompted me to write about magical deli lox (again, my default is food).
Each participant creates a character by answering the following questions (different person for each question). Then each of you writes a story in which your character is locked in a room with a rival with only 10 minutes to escape.
- What is your first name?
- What is your last name?
- How old are you?
- What do you do?
- What do you do on weekends?
- What do you say all the time?
- What brings you the most pride?
- What scares you?

These exercises can lead to full pieces. When I was a student, a classmate gave me the opening line of a monologue. After about 10 minutes of writing, I had created a new character, who became the protagonist of my first produced play.

At any point in your process, the more your brain can access objects, traits, experiences, and points of view, the richer your writing becomes. The more you juxtapose incongruous ideas or change your angle, the more you unlock your genius.

And the more you give yourself time to write, the more you write.

I didn’t think I would stay at my computer this long to write, but 10 minutes of commitment cascaded over me like a wave and led to more and more minutes, hours, and days of writing. I wish you the joy of navigating such rich waters of creativity.

Sammy Buck is an award-winning writer, story consultant and creator of Structure! The Musical: Everything You Need to Know About Musicals You Can Learn From Star Wars. Visit his website for more information.

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Black Girl Joy

Allison Dolan — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 18:58:56 +0000

WHEN SHE WAS around 8 years old, Phanésia Pharel ― then a newcomer to the Miami, Florida, area ― found herself enrolled in an amateur theatre camp housed at the local mall. “It was hilarious,” Pharel said. “They had a guy come in every day who showed us magic tricks that I don’t even feel would pass the YouTube test, then they had us watch movie musicals. I guess they didn’t know to get us sheet music or bring in someone to be a pianist. There was no technique. So, we learned Hairspray the musical from watching the movie.”

Despite the less-than-illustrious introduction, Pharel became hooked on theatre and, later, playwriting. Her first completed script, Penelope ― a biting allegory about systemic racism and the ways in which public education fails students ― earned Pharel a trip to the 2016 International Thespian Festival as part of the Thespian Playworks program. In Penelope, a young Black woman must literally walk the tightrope to survive the circus that is her school. During what Pharel describes as a dark time, the Troupe 3637 alum said, “Thespians was a light.”

Currently a member of the Barnard College class of 2021 at Columbia University, where she recently won the Brandt Playwriting Award and Helen Prince Memorial Prize for excellence in dramatic composition, Pharel will soon mark another milestone: the end of her virtual residency at Los Angeles’ Echo Theater Company, where her latest work, Black Girl Joy, will be read via livestream in December.

Pharel sees the play as emblematic of her work, which often focuses on marginalized voices. “I write about a lot of different things,” she said, “but one of the things I love specifically about writing about Black girls is if you give Black girl characters the space, they will take it.”

When were you introduced to playwriting, and whose work inspires you?
I didn’t know about playwriting until I was 15. I was very much interested in being an actor. I also wanted to become a comedy writer. When I was 13, my house burned down. It was really traumatic, and all I did was watch Saturday Night Live. That was my coping mechanism, getting into comedy. I was a Tina Fey fan, a super Sarah Silverman fan. So, I would write my own comedy sketches about what it was like to be a teenage girl getting her period, weird stuff like that.

I remember my drama teacher ― there was a public theatre program through City Theatre to teach young people how to write plays. It was during the summer, it was about two hours away from my town through public transportation, and he really encouraged me to do it. I submitted a spoof of Mean Girls called Vegan Girls. I showed up thinking I was going to learn to write screenplays because I had some experience in a film scholars program through the University of Miami. I showed up, and they were talking about plays.

I was so confused because, even though I was reading all these plays in my theatre program in high school, I never really thought writing plays was something someone could do. I have a continuous relationship with City Theatre ― I interned there a couple of years later, and I was part of their program for the next generation of playwrights. So, they really nurtured my voice as a young playwright, and that was where I got my understanding of playwriting.

I read a lot of Suzan-Lori Parks. She’s the benchmark for me of what it means to be a great playwright. Her plays were so crazy, and I didn’t understand a lot of them, but I felt them. And that’s something I really liked: You might not understand every piece of theatre you read. We live in a world now where so much content is digestible. Even in classes, they tell you, “Make your work digestible.” And I’m just now working with a theatre company that’s telling me to do the opposite, that I don’t necessarily have to make my work digestible. I feel like Suzan-Lori Parks is similar to Toni Morrison because her work asks you to meet her where she’s at. She’s not talking to you. You have to get to that place.

What inspired your Thespian Playworks script, Penelope?
As a performer, I felt very much put to the side. I would always get typecast as certain characters, or I wouldn’t get to play characters that spoke to my experience. So, I decided to write. I started to loathe performing because it was so stressful, whereas playwriting opens worlds. It opened opportunities.

With Penelope, I was coming from a place of feeling unheard in my high school. There were so many experiences, but a lot of people above me in their roles in public education, they still had work to do in terms of being complicit within white supremacy. If you don’t acknowledge racism ― if you are not fully prepared to acknowledge that ― you’re not going to be prepared when a young Black girl comes up to you and explains to you how racism is happening; you’re not going to be prepared to hear her. I think Penelope was that no one was hearing me, but here I found this really great way of expressing myself. I wanted to write a satirical play clowning the public education system, turning it into a circus, taking all my frustration and putting it in one place.

I used to write rants on my high school drama teacher’s computer about my feelings, and I would perform them at our spoken word night. I have so much love for my high school drama teacher, Juan Espinosa, because ― and I’m getting emotional thinking about it ― he would tell me, “There’s nothing you can’t do.” Even when I didn’t know how to use my emotions in a healthy way, he was such a loving professor that he cheered me on and told me, “Keep expressing yourself.” Because of him, I felt comfortable writing that play. I didn’t have anybody who was encouraging me in that way. He will always be someone I treasure because of that.

Penelope is at the center of the story because I like to write from my perspective, but even within the play, all these different types of people who have different experiences and struggles come together to stand up and revolt. Public education can sometimes really limit expression when it’s done poorly. And, when it’s at its best, you’re able to fully express yourself. I’m inspired by all the high schoolers right now who are writing petitions and calling out racism. These students who are speaking up ― that’s so important. That’s the essence of Penelope.

Was Penelope the experience that made you decide to pursue playwriting, or did that come later?
It was a mix. At the International Thespian Festival, we had an amazing staged reading. It was one of the best memories ever, so many people were just on the edge of their seats. Is Penelope the best play ever written in the history of the world? Absolutely not, but it was a play that a 16-year-old Black girl from a low-income school in Miami wrote. I wrote really boldly, and I think the reception it received ― the best play in the world might not be the play that people care about because it might not be the play that drives us as humans or pulls us in.

After the reading, this girl came up to me, and she was crying. And I remember this changing my life ― she just looked at me and said, “This is incredible. I feel so seen.” And I thought, “If I can do that, I should totally keep doing this.” I knew to hold on to writing. I didn’t necessarily know how it would manifest. There are other things I want to do with my life. I didn’t major in theatre; I majored in urban studies. But I do feel like playwriting is kind of my life’s calling. Too many things have happened that have confirmed that for me to just walk away.

Your most recent play, Black Girl Joy, has been described as the coming together of four young women grieving the loss of their friend. Why was this story important to you now?
Black Girl Joy started in January. I was studying abroad, and in a fever dream, I wrote a scene of this girl coming into a room and talking to her mom, and her mom being like, get away from me. The girl is haunting her mother because she has something important to tell her. These two ― the mother and the daughter ― have been under so much stress just from being Black. Black women take on so much. I think part of what you have to learn as a Black woman is to let things go. You don’t have to do everything. You don’t have to be everywhere. You can ask for help.

There’s this idea of the strong, independent, magical Black woman. That’s not a human being. No one can live up to that standard, and even trying will kill you. I really wanted to write a play that brings down our toxic ideas of Black women and how that manifests on Black girls. Black women face a lot of danger. We experience the most domestic violence. We experience the most assault as young women. We get targeted more in schools. I wanted to write a play that had a diverse group of Black girls. They’re talking about all these experiences ― the neglect, how they’ve been left behind, the expectations placed on them, and how they had to push back against those expectations.

Through viBe Theater Experience, you teach young women of color about leadership and writing. What is the most important lesson you share with them, and what would you tell Thespians interested in provoking change in theatre today?
What’s cool about working with viBe is that it reinforces my interest in writing about young people for as long as I can. When I’m there, I’m so inspired. What I try to teach them is how to get out of their own way and let their voices lead. There’s so much programming that tries to shrink girls and make them feel small. But they’re brilliant. Put a young woman in office, and just see how the world changes.

Young people have a lot of power because they are among the biggest consumers. Young people are incredible innovators. I feel the best thing you can do is speak to power, critique, do the research, listen to different perspectives. Learn from other people ― don’t just hold the mike for yourself. Be willing to have tough conversations. They say it’s much harder to change an institution built on certain ideals than to make a new one. I think people who want to make their own projects, want to make their own theatre companies or their own collectives, that’s really important. That’s where innovation in theatre will come from. I don’t think we necessarily have to follow the old rule book.

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Finding Your “Why”

Dylan Malloy — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 20:25:28 +0000

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER changed my playwriting process forever.

At the Colorado Thespian Conference last December, I attended a play produced by Curious Theatre Company, written by playwright Norma Johnson. Sneaking a glance at the person sitting next to me, I saw it was Johnson herself. She smiled through the entire show, as though this work was a part of her personified. As a playwright, I had to know her secret.

After the performance, I turned to Johnson and asked about her writing process and how she handles writer’s block. She looked at me and said something that struck me in the heart: “Always stay in touch with your ‘why’ for writing.”

Sketching character portraits and hanging them in your writing space can help you move forward when stuck in a rut. Drawings by Dylan Malloy.

The pandemic forces us to ask ourselves: What is our “why”? What pulls us to the page even when the words aren’t easy, even when theatres across the world are closed? When we tap into creative momentum and stay in touch with our why, we empower ourselves to finish plays ― and keep the industry thriving.

Now more than ever, this work is needed. Here are some ways to keep your “why” close as you draft your play.

Make an inspiration binder
One way to crystallize inspiration is to compile it into a binder that reflects your style as a writer. For some playwrights, this means printing off interviews with your favorite writers and highlighting lines that energize and inspire you. For others, it could mean binding scripts and programs into a scrapbook of the theatre you’ve seen or created.

Filling a binder with the moments that made you want to write gives you a tangible reminder of why you began writing in the first place. This energy proves invaluable while drafting.

See writing as self-care
Allison Kisicki, a senior lighting designer at Ralston Valley High School in Arvada, Colorado, recently finished her first play. Titled In My Head, the script follows teens who battle mental illness. I asked Kisicki to explain her writing process. “I don’t really have [blocked] out [writing] times. It’s more when I can and when I’m motivated,” she said. “Sometimes I do it when I’m in a tough moment and I need an outlet.” Between the stress of shows, school, and everything in between, Thespians often need an outlet for expression and reflection more than anyone else.

A quick boost to your writing momentum can be as simple as framing writing differently in your head, looking at it not just as a task to complete but also as a treat to enjoy. For a lot of writers, this means the exhilaration of writing whenever, wherever. Backstage during dry tech? Sure. In the wings during intermission? Fabulous. Giving yourself time to write whenever you can ― whether that be three minutes or three hours ― can be a form of self-care. By giving yourself an outlet and a project that’s close to your heart, you’re furthering your goals and releasing stored-up feelings.

Take inspiration breaks
Often, it is unstructured creative time when you are not writing that gives you the most inspiration. As a theatre maker, you have the advantage of working closely with design, movement, music, and memorization. Any of these techniques can be used to invigorate your writing when you get stuck in a rut.

The next time you sit down to work on your script and feel uninspired, try taking a day off to read, breathe, think. Tune in to your performer side by listening to musical theatre albums or creating a playlist of music that inspires the style of your writing. Sketch pictures of your characters and hang them in your writing space. Make a collage. Memorize a monologue from your favorite play and recite it to yourself. Get into nature and become inspired by the world around you. Inspiration will come and go over the writing process, but taking time to listen to your creative voice will show you story pathways you may not have imagined.

As important as momentum is when drafting a play, it’s equally important to pause when you need to give yourself grace or feel burned out. When you come back to the page, you’ll have a clearer sense of what you love about the story.

Organize a table read
When a play sits in isolation, even in its final stages, it becomes stagnant. The interaction between actors and the text is critical if you want your piece to reach its full potential.

When you finish your final draft, try gathering a few friends to read your work aloud. At this stage, don’t worry too much about design concepts. Hearing your words illuminates the nuances in your writing. Though the table read shows you where you have room to grow, it also has the magical effect of revealing the power your words already have.

When I completed my second play and hosted the table read, I was shocked at how the actors found nuances in the text I never could have imagined ― and how their energy and passion rounded out the story. From that experience, I learned that letting a play sit is the same as pausing work on a painting when all you’ve done is prime the canvas. As afraid as we may be of letting our work enter the real world and become colored by people’s opinions, we will never know its potential if we smother our bravest work in a desk drawer. Sometimes, the best encouragement is a reminder of what our work is capable of becoming, filling us not only with determination to finish the play but also with pride at what we’ve already accomplished.

It’s no secret that drafting a play can be a long process. Keep the finish line in sight ― a packed house of eager audience members ― and you’ll find the momentum to carry you through. By holding tight to your “why,” you complete the plays you start, freeing yourself to start even more.

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The Corona Monologues

Anita Martin — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 13:42:04 +0000

“I THINK THE HARDEST thing for me personally — I think for everyone — is the lack of being able to be close to people. … It’s been a real eye-opener for me how much we are social beings. That even though there isn’t a lack of technology to communicate, contact and human touch are so necessary and important.”

These words frame The Corona Monologues, a recorded performance by Thespians in Herbert Hoover High School’s advanced theatre class. For this project, students interviewed 40 people in their Glendale, California, neighborhood about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their lives, then reinterpreted the material as a series of monologues focused on enduring human connection.

Juliana Acevedo (right) with her sister and interviewee Karina Acevedo, a social worker. Photo courtesy of Juliana Acevedo.

In March 2020, the same class was consumed in research for their spring play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, including hosting several guest speakers exploring autism spectrum disorder. So, when the coronavirus shutdown canceled that production, David Huber, director of Hoover’s Thespian Troupe 430, knew he “needed to replace this with something meaningful — something they could create from home.”

Huber had always admired Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, plays Anna Deavere Smith developed by interviewing real people about real events. “Using the issues within our community and our own voices is the most immediate form of art,” he said. “Documentary theatre can really get to the heart of these local issues in a more timely manner.”

The concept of documentary theatre wasn’t new to Hoover Thespians. In spring 2019, teachers and administrators from the school had performed monologues compiled from interviews with homeless people by the organization Homeward LA as a fundraiser for Midnight Mission, a human services nonprofit in Los Angeles. To prepare students to collect and perform their own work, Huber discussed interviewing techniques and showed them interviews with Smith and excerpts from Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.

While both of Smith’s productions address race and criminal justice, Huber and his students completed their work in March and April, months before the death of George Floyd sparked a nationwide racial reckoning. The class focused their project on the human impact of the coronavirus shutdown, but in early June, they added an epilogue addressing the protests.

Recent Hoover graduate Katrina Manor saw the assignment as a chance for students to appreciate the bigger picture of the shutdown without detracting from the pain they felt from missing rites of passage, including prom and graduation. “I thought it would be great for high school seniors like me to know we’re not the only ones suffering,” she said. “The entire world is affected.”

Rising senior Juliana Acevedo said the project forced her to confront her camera shyness. “I was eager to start the project because I knew there wasn’t much else we could do,” she said, “but I was nervous as well because I prefer acting onstage. I tend to get very nervous when I’m on camera.”

Huber asked each student to interview one relative and two non-relatives, looking for those particularly impacted by the shutdown. Suggestions included people who are elderly, self-employed, or extreme introverts or extroverts; medical workers, teachers, police officers, or politicians; individuals planning a wedding or other large event; and those who lost their jobs. Overall, Huber wanted a range of ages, races, economic situations, and professions to provide variety.

Acevedo explored the impact of the pandemic on people’s work lives. She interviewed her older sister, a social worker “who works with felons who tend to be homeless, mentally ill, and battling addiction, and are disproportionately affected by this pandemic.” Acevedo also talked to an attorney adjusting to working from home and a woman who runs a travel agency. “[Travel] was one of the industries that has suffered most,” she said, “and I was really curious how she was handling such challenges and how she thought the travel industry would change after the pandemic.”

Manor, meanwhile, focused on the convergence of inner and outer struggles. “I chose people who had internal or home problems because I wanted to see if the external problem of the coronavirus opened their eyes, pushed mental health to a breaking point, or changed things for the better,” she said.

According to Huber, “Anything the interviewees said was fair game. They needed to feel free to talk without censoring themselves — understanding a teenager was doing the interview, and these [discussions] will be performed.” Huber himself conducted supplemental interviews to include perspectives from a nurse, an Asian American experiencing coronavirus-related discrimination, and a school principal.

One challenge was getting adult subjects to open up to teenagers over the phone, which Acevedo said could feel “cold, clinical, even impersonal.” Despite knowing her interviewees quite well, she said, “At times I felt like a doctor talking to a patient rather than a person talking to a person. … That in-person, face-to-face contact is what I really missed. But that’s the whole point of this project, right?”

Acevedo wanted to explore “the rapid and absurd changes everyone underwent in a matter of weeks” and how each person was coping. Although she came to each interview with a list of carefully worded questions, she said, “I found myself straying from what I had originally written and asking questions that popped into my head as I listened to each woman speak.”

Manor also moved off-script in interviews. In fact, her first question ― “How have you been personally affected by COVID-19?” ― was the only prepared question she asked every subject. After that, she allowed responses to guide the rest of the conversation.

Students scheduled, conducted, and transcribed interviews, then Huber selected excerpts for them to perform and record. He admitted the transcripts were “all really boring for the first few minutes. But, as I got farther along, I found the monologue.” Most performed material was mined from each conversation’s conclusion, he said, noting that longer interviews tended to yield better monologues. “It took people a long time to warm up, to get past the facts and talk from the heart.”

Afterward, students recorded themselves performing their monologues and sent them to Huber, then had one-on-one Zoom sessions with him for feedback. Compared to in-person directing, the process took some getting used to. “I love working with my actors in rehearsal,” he said. “The spontaneous discoveries, all the talking about the characters and why they do what they do. This part of the process was limited and a bit disappointing for me.”

Still, he enjoyed helping young actors develop original character choices based on words by people they knew, especially in terms of physicality. “The voice, nervous habits, gestures — all that,” he said. “I had a few students who were quite successful at creating distinct characters.”

Acevedo had to “fight every urge to copy the mannerisms and gestures and intonations” of her sources. “I had to find a balance of doing their interviews justice and staying true to their messages while also developing a character of my own,” she said. “It would’ve been easier if we’d been given scripts written by people we’ve never met, but then they wouldn’t be as personal.”

For Manor, reinterpreting characters became easier once she realized she did not have to precisely embody her interviewees to capture the authenticity of their words. “Once I got over the fear of doing them perfectly and [instead did] what was natural, I got the take I needed,” she said.

Next, Huber stitched the monologues together into a cohesive performance. Huber “really enjoyed discovering the story through the editing and the placement of the monologues. The play could tell a different story if I simply rearranged the order.”

During the editing process, Huber found a through line. “I discovered the many ways the characters talk about being ‘in this together’ — that we are all here for each other,” he said.

The original YouTube premiere was set for May 30 to allow teachers to promote the performance in their classes before finals. But as Huber finished editing the show, Floyd’s murder sparked protests across the United States.

“In a matter of days, a more important historical event was happening throughout the world, and I realized our little film might help add our voices to the call to action,” Huber said. “I needed to add something to the end of the play that would help connect the two events and add an exclamation point.”

Huber interviewed a former student who had attended marches. “I simply let him talk about his thoughts and feelings,” Huber said. “He helped put it all together as our epilogue. I was hoping [he] would add to our theme (without telling him to), and he really did.”

When The Corona Monologues “opened” on YouTube on June 6, Acevedo was surprised by both the emotional range of the final product and “the support and feedback we received from people who watched the monologues. I wasn’t sure we’d get many views, but we were overwhelmed with love.”

Her interviewees loved the performance, Acevedo added. “They felt the project was something very needed in these troubling times,” she said. “I also liked seeing that no matter how different the monologues were, they all felt so human and real and connected. It was very touching.”

When Manor watched the final product, she said she was struck by the commonalities connecting everyone’s divergent experiences. “It’s very hard to explain,” she said, “but watching the film — we are more alike and less different than we think.”

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Five Questions with Laura Jacqmin

Allison Dolan — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 15:33:25 +0000

AS AUTHOR OF HER LIFE STORY, Laura Jacqmin chose to pen an eclectic journey. The Cleveland native’s writing career ― spanning theatre, television, video games, and most recently film ― launched as a student playwright in Thespian Troupe 815. There, the Shaker Heights High School alum says she learned essential lessons that still serve her today.

“I had a truly singular high school Thespian experience,” Jacqmin said. “My program featured both a playwriting class ― which I took three years running ― and a yearly student-written, student-directed short play festival. I had plays in the festival every year and learned how to write for production as well as direct. The festival asked you to be your own producer, skills that would prove immensely valuable down the line.”

After using her theatre skills to earn a B.A. at Yale University and MFA in playwriting at Ohio University, Jacqmin first moved to Chicago, immersing herself in the city’s thriving independent theatre scene. In 2016, she settled full time in Los Angeles, where she works primarily as a writer for screen projects, such as TV’s Grace and Frankie and Get Shorty, as well as video games The Walking Dead and Minecraft. Joining Jacqmin’s list of plays that includes Residence, January Joiner, and Ski Dubai, the yet-to-be-released We Broke Up marks her feature film debut.

As Jacqmin’s career progressed, she wanted to use her platform to amplify voices that haven’t yet received similar recognition. Seven years ago, she helped found The Kilroys, a cohort of New York and Los Angeles-based playwrights, directors, and producers working to achieve gender parity in American theatre. The group raises awareness about unproduced and underproduced scripts by women, trans, and nonbinary authors.

Jacqmin’s latest project is the upcoming Netflix adaptation of the long-running manga series One Piece, for which she serves as writer and co-executive producer with showrunners Steve Maeda and Matt Owens. She says reimagining the popular Japanese comic series is “a very tricky needle to thread, to take 20-some years of a tonally intricate, action-packed, much-beloved manga series and turn it into a live-action television show that appeals to a broad swath of audiences. But we’re really excited about the scripts we wrote and hopeful that COVID-19 lets us proceed soon.”

In what ways has playwriting prepared you to write video games?
I work exclusively in what are called branching narrative games, which means the story changes depending on the player’s choices. It’s like writing and solving puzzles at the same time ― very challenging, but very engaging. You can’t just take the story in a singular direction. You have to make every choice valid and every choice interesting (no dead-ends allowed), whether it’s a simple dialogue choice or a binary decision point (for example, run or fight).

Like in playwriting, so much of the storytelling lives in the dialogue and character work. Your characters have to be living, breathing human beings that the player wants to spend time with or enjoys struggling against. Unlike theatre, you have to constantly consider player agency: What is the player doing in any given moment? What might they want to do? How can you ensure the player is active and not passive? Very complex stuff, but I’ve been a game developer going on six years now, so I must love it.

How was writing your first feature film, We Broke Up, different from writing a play?
Theatre and screenwriting are both inherently collaborative, but the collaboration started early for We Broke Up. My co-writer and director is Jeff Rosenberg, a fellow alum of Shaker Heights High School. Our senior project was producing each other’s short plays in our dusty basement black box, so we were building on an existing relationship. Early in the process, we would pass scenes back and forth and change things for the sake of change ― not a very efficient way of doing things.

In 2019, once we had financing secured and it looked like the movie was a go, we spent two intensive weeks in my office after hours and on weekends, working side by side on a big revision. That way, we could talk through scene work together and adjust as we went. Because we both have so much more experience now than when we first started and understand scene structure (and everything else) so much better, it was infinitely easier to hammer out the production draft while also figuring out how to implement notes from our producers and financiers.

We just finished postproduction, which encompasses many, many rounds of editing (showing to trusted friends in between cuts to gather feedback), color grading (improving the look of the film by adjusting contrast, saturation, etc.), sound mixing, and ADR (rerecording some dialogue to improve clarity) ― all from a distance. Now we’re starting to submit to film festivals, with the full knowledge that the festival circuit will look very, very different in the age of COVID-19. We shot in February 2020 after nearly eight years in development and wrapped just days before Governor Newsom shut down California, so we’re thrilled to have a completed film despite this insane year.

What was it like adapting Get Shorty!, a novel turned film, into a television series?
My showrunner, Davey Holmes, took the central premise ― a tough guy decides he wants to be a movie producer ― and outfitted it with new characters, a new setting, and a different protagonist. Our story was completely different ― it had to be to become an engine that powered dozens of episodes. Chili Palmer has been replaced with Miles Daly, played by Chris O’Dowd, and Gene Hackman’s iconic hack producer became Rick Moreweather, played by Ray Romano. Really, as writers, it was about setting a certain tone and then staying consistent. Elmore Leonard’s original novel has so much fun with these quirky, specific renderings of low-level gangsters, making them human and flawed. It was our job to make sure we did the same.

Talk about your work with The Kilroys. What can young Thespians do to support the group’s mission?
Founded in 2013, The Kilroys are a collective of playwrights, directors, and producers taking radical actions toward gender parity in American theatre. We mobilize others in the field and leverage our own power to support one another. One significant way we’ve achieved this is through publication of The List, a yearly collection of unproduced (or underproduced) plays by women, trans, and nonbinary writers. Each year, The List has adjusted focus to better help writers. A few years ago, every writer on the list was BIPOC; this year, it’s a living document of productions canceled by COVID-19.

One way to support The Kilroys’ mission is to work outside of the box that is sometimes presented by high school theatre programs and urge your teachers to expand the types of plays they present for study. Are you being taught “classics,” or contemporary plays that represent the full breadth and depth of experience in this country? Are you reading works by women and BIPOC playwrights? Are you studying scenes and monologues from plays that are representative of your ethnicity and gender identity? These plays are out there ― find them. Ask your teachers to buy copies of the monologue books The Kilroys have published through Playscripts, and learn those playwrights’ names and work.

How did your Thespian experience pave the way for your multifaceted career?
It taught me about the moral responsibility of storytelling. My junior year, I wrote a play about a kidnapped girl and the two cowboys holding her for ransom. In it, the girl and one of her captors danced. She stole his gun; she shot him; she escaped. The week we were supposed to open, a freshman girl was shot and killed on her way to school. Later, we’d learn she’d been stalked by an acquaintance, and that our community had missed ― or ignored or blamed her for ― the signs that something was deeply wrong. Her best friend’s brother was one of the actors in my play. He was, as it happened, the actor whose character was supposed to be shot.

We made the decision to cancel the play. It was the first time I realized that what I put up onstage wasn’t just a fantasy. That art had a connection to real life ― a responsibility to say something, to mean something, to do something. That everyone seeing my play would bring their very personal experiences to the theatre: their own trauma, their own triggers, their own hopes and dreams. And that artists need to take care of [the audience], regardless of the story they’re telling. This applies in every medium ― especially in TV and features, where you’re curating and controlling so many more elements of the audience’s emotional journey.

The post Five Questions with
Laura Jacqmin appeared first on Dramatics Magazine Online.

On Show Tunes and Star Wars

Linda Buchwald — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:17:19 +0000

BEFORE BILLY RECCE graduated college, he had already opened his first off-Broadway musical. Recce wrote the score to A Musical About Star Wars, which opened in March 2019 at Theatre Row on 42nd Street. His already impressive career includes winning the 2014 Thespian Musicalworks competition with his show Balloon Boy and being the youngest composer, at 17, accepted into the New York Musical Theatre Festival Developmental Reading Series (NYMF) in 2015.

Recce’s interest in writing musicals started when he was around 7 or 8 years old, acting in community theatre productions in his hometown of Long Island. “My favorite day for rehearsals was always the first day where you would get hardbound copies of the script,” he said. “Seeing this physical manifestation of the work we were going to do and being able to expand my imagination based on the script we were just handed, that was when I started writing musicals.”

He would write furiously, four or five musicals a year. Although he says no one will ever see those early works, they prepared him to write and compose the show that kickstarted his career, Balloon Boy. In seventh grade, he wrote the first draft, loosely based on a true story from 2009 when a man claimed his son was stuck in a weather balloon. That early draft was produced by a children’s theatre when Recce was in eighth grade, and it was called Balloon Boy the Kazoozical because it was performed on kazoos and slide whistles. Though that was the first time he saw his work staged, he says the International Thespian Festival was the first time he saw a staged reading that envisioned his work as he pictured it.

Thespian alum Billy Recce began writing musicals while still in elementary school. Photo by Gabriella Spiegel.

Recce applied for Thespian Musicalworks his junior year of high school at the encouragement of his Hauppauge High School drama teacher, Ruthie Pincus, director of Thespian Troupe 7097. “They’re so good to young writers, and you don’t see that a lot. You don’t see a program that supports high school-aged writers of musicals,” Recce said. “It’s such a weird, niche thing that I guess it’s sort of hard to support, but when you see [a program] that does so lovingly and openly, it was the coolest experience.”

A highlight of that experience for Recce was sitting down with Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the Tony-winning songwriting team behind many movies and musicals, including Hairspray. “They were my heroes growing up. I got to play half the score for them, and they gave me notes,” Recce said, recalling that Shaiman even sat down at the piano and tinkered with parts of the score, resulting in some collaborative changes.

Winning Thespian Musicalworks showed Recce that his voice mattered and his desire to write musicals wasn’t a pipe dream but a possibility, even though it would take a lot of hard work. In addition, he learned the importance of collaboration in the fast-paced process of creating theatre. “Things had to be cut, keys changed, lines changed. I think that was a really beautiful aspect of Thespian Musicalworks,” he said. “It was about the sense of community and finding your tribe and finding a familial aspect to the work you were doing where everybody’s voice is heard and everybody carries their weight.”

Thespian Troupe 5989 of Monarch High School in Colorado also was represented at the 2014 ITF, and because that school was so close geographically to where the original story took place, they asked to premiere the musical during Recce’s senior year. “They flew me out, and I felt as much like a rock star as a gay kid who writes musicals in Long Island can feel,” Recce said.

From there, he applied to NYMF and got in as a high school senior. The festival (which ceased operations in January 2020 after 15 years) was another learning experience, as participants must do everything themselves, from fundraising to marketing. “It was something I wouldn’t wish on most 17-year-olds, but it definitely showed me that this is how you produce a show, this is how you build something from the ground up, this is how you make people notice, and this is how you tell a story you’re passionate about — by just taking the reins, getting many smart, talented people in the room with you, and making it happen. Nobody else is going to do it for you,” he said.

His involvement in his next big show, A Musical About Star Wars, can also be traced to his high school theatre teacher. Pincus founded an annual workshop, Stage the Change, to encourage students to create theatre with a social voice, and Recce continues to participate. It was at that workshop he met Tom D’Angora, one of the show’s creators.

Recce grew up in what he calls a Star Wars household and wrote his college essay on being taken out of school to see Revenge of the Sith. This project was a natural intersection of his love for the famous George Lucas film franchise and musical theatre. He specced some songs and was hired for the composing job.

“I really appreciate Tom taking such a big risk on somebody young. It’s hard for young writers, especially in theatre. I think people are afraid of young people telling stories,” Recce said. “So, it really was a great honor to go into the industry so quickly and headfirst.”

The musical is not a straightforward parody of the Star Wars films. It’s about two Star Wars fanatics who want to write a Star Wars musical and perform it at Comic-Con, but due to a restraining order, they have to perform it off-Broadway instead. They hire a woman to play the female roles, but she has a hidden agenda. “I’m really proud of the show. It’s silly and it’s ridiculous, but I do think it’s trying to say something about fandom and how best we can funnel the things we love into productive discourse,” Recce said.

After opening, the show transferred to St. Luke’s Theatre, a larger venue, in July 2019, where it was still playing until the COVID-19 shutdown in March 2020. Recce believes it will come back when theatres are safe to reopen. Because there are constantly updates to the Star Wars universe — the movie The Rise of Skywalker and the TV show The Mandalorian both were released after the show’s original opening — Recce continues to make updates.

When Recce writes, he always starts with an outline, even if it’s not one he wrote, as was the case for Star Wars. “I definitely need to see the visual map of the story I’m going to tell laid out for me,” he said. He writes both music and lyrics but doesn’t necessarily write one before the other because they’re ingrained together. He usually writes the hook first, which is his way into a song. “From there, it’s about writing that three-act play. How does the song end, what is the middle of the song, how does the song start? Every song is a mini-play in itself. It has to be treated that way. I believe every character has to leave the song from a different place than they started,” he said.

Thespian Musicalworks taught Recce lessons about the writing process that stayed with him, such as how best to pace a story and how to make a joke land. Since he started so young without formal training, he mostly learned by listening to musical theatre composers who valued a classical sense of songwriting. If you listen to his music, you might notice that his lyrics rhyme, which is not always the case with younger writers.

“With theatre, you have to make sure those words are hitting from the moment the audience hears them,” Recce explained. Rhymes help by confirming to the brain that what you think you heard is what you heard.

Recce also cut his teeth on the New York City cabaret scene. “I love cabaret specifically because it’s so intimate. The audience is right there, and especially with a place like 54 Below, you’re always competing with the risotto balls in the front row, so it forces you to put on the best or at least the most abrasive, loudest, and most exciting version of your work. It is sort of a competition for people’s attention, no matter how intimate the space,” Recce said. “Once a song really kills in a cabaret venue, that’s how you know it’s a winner.”

Recce advises young writers to play in small, intimate spaces, “even if it is that grimy piano bar where there’s two people in the audience.” The most important thing, he says, is just to do it. Write for yourself and write what you love. “Meet as many people as possible. Say yes to as much as you can. It’s a few sleepless nights now. Staying up all night to work on a draft of something is going to be worth it in the long run. And learn from the masters. Steal from the masters,” he said. “I think good songwriting and good theatremaking are experiential and based on going out and doing and seeing and getting your friends together and having them sing your stuff.”

At the time of this interview, getting together with people to perform was impossible. It’s a scary and uncertain time for artists, but they are adapting by making digital content. Recce is excited people are trying new types of projects. “Theatre has survived centuries upon millennia, and it’s not going to go anywhere because of this,” he said. “It’s up to us to continue to invent, to create ways to be creative, and to get our stories out there … even if it is four Evan Hansens playing Jackbox video games.”

Check out Recce’s work on Spotify and iTunes, including the cast recording of A Musical About Star Wars and Recce’s solo album, The Perks of Being a Snowflake, released in 2018.

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