Plays

So the program I'm in at my CEGEP has this nifty English class that is highly theatre related. To a point where our mid-terms are Scene Studies and our final exams are Final Showcases. It's great. The classroom is the school theatre itself. There are three teachers, and anywhere from ninety to one hundred and ten students in total. A majority of the students are from the theatre programs, be it professional theatre or theatre workshop. There are some other students from other programs who get in simply because it fits their schedule. One way or another, it's a lot of fun.

A Scene Study is simply this; a group is formed (your decision). You select a scene from a film, television show, or play. Then you assign parts, rehearse it, and then reenact it. Costumes, props, as much as you can manage. It's a lot of fun. And it's great too, because since we're all in college, language is never an issue. In one of my scene studies last semester (I did two; American Beauty and Shaun of the Dead), I got away with saying "And your mother seems to prefer that I go through life with my dick in a mason jar underneath the sink." It was intense. I even broke a glass bowl on stage, and then got beaten up as a zombie later on.

A Final Showcase... this needs a little more explanation. In this English class, there's one major writing assignment. If it's your first semester in this particular class, you have to write an essay. But if it's your second to fourth semester, you can write a play. If the play is well written, it could be selected as a piece for the Final Showcase assignment, where these plays are actually performed in our studio theatre space.

Last semester I wrote a one-act, one-scene, small casted play titled Nameless Love. Five actors, three characters. It was an abstract piece about two people in love who didn't know each others' names. The script was about eleven-and-a-half pages, and the performance lasted roughly seven minutes. It wasn't a comedy, which made it different from roughly ninety percent of all the other final showcases. And it was the last play to be performed, making it such a bigger deal.

That's it if you care to see it.

It was an interesting concept. I had two extra actors because I wanted the audience to have an intimate closeness to the characters. You'll notice in the first half of the video, two of my actors are dress the exact same. The one that doesn't move and stands at the corner of the stage is supposed to be the "Inner Thoughts and Feelings" of the character. There's the same for the leading lady of the play as well. This way the audience knew what the characters were thinking and feeling. And the names of the characters were never said until the very end, when they finally introduce themselves to one another. It was very well received.

I've been working on a play lately for myself. It's going to be about superheroes, simply because one day I got the idea of how one could portray super powers on stage. It has absolutely nothing to do with my books, just to clear the air. This play is for me, but I was planning on using the Final Showcase assignment as a way to "test the waters." To see if it would actually work on stage. There's just one problem.

It's big.

The first draft of the outline makes this play out to be seventeen scenes long. I haven't even written the script yet, and I already know that that's bigger than whatever's been done before in Final Showcases. So this is my plan of action: write the script and try to shorten it wherever possible. Come up with set designs and figure out the fastest and easiest way to do set changes. Even begin to arrange the choreography for the fight scenes. If I can get this all done by the beginning of the semester, I can try to convince the teachers to allow this play to be put on as a Final Showcase.

I hope it works.