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Writers Studio 2008 Season
The Writer's Studio spent a lot of 2008 looking at alternatives to the usual model of: writer sits at home and writes, director casts and actors come in and transfer the writer's (and to an extent the director's) vision from the printed page to the stage. After the exercises already detailed on here (writers starting from a given line, or starting from characters invented by the actors, or from situations etc.) and before work commenced on Round One, we did an ongoing project which I will try and summarise here.
This was a long time ago and I was not at every session so please fill in the gaps those who remember or add your thoughts here.
Consequences: Each writer went away and, in the usual fashion, wrote the first scene of a play for no more than three actors, with no constraints. After some rehearsal the following week the writers swapped groups, with each watching a different first scene. We could also speak to the actors about thoughts and ideas, but were warned away from asking about the previous writer's original intentions. Our challenge was to go away and produce the next scene using the same characters. We repeated this for four weeks, with the actors as far as possible remaining with their plays, ultimately producing a dozen or so four scene, twenty ish minute plays.
Some useful things that came up for me were:
- Forcing us to write for characters, situations and in styles that were not necessarily our comfort zone
- Having to very consciously engage in decisions about plot and structure in a technical way - as what we had were givens it was up to us to decide how best to advance the narrative. This was especially evident in the last scenes where it was our job to unite the whole play and where possible to draw out the themes etc that had emerged.
- Allowing us the freedom to make bold decisions and the playfulness to pass on the responsibility for fully executing them to the next writer! This produced a few cheeky 'There's something I need you to do for me but I can't say what yet' - kind of lines, or even at one point 'A woman dressed as a giant rat walks into the room.'
As a partner to this we also explored using one writer per character, taking a line each - an example of which is on this site. Sadly I missed this session so if anyone else could fill in about this that would be great.
When watching the pieces we were often surprised to see just how seemlessly they fitted together. The audience, it seemed, often justified changes in style and tone (both of the play as a whole and of individual characters) as being pertinent to the piece, and by and large the narratives followed on and most if not all loose ends were brought together and tied up. It did, however, raise the question why? There were very few moments, in my opinion, that were 'better' or perhaps it is clearer to say 'more dramatically interesting' than one would expect to see in a play written by one writer - so the factory's experiment succeeded only in that we were able to do with four people what has for centuries been achieved by only one! However, that is slightly facetious. The point, if I may be so bold as to sggest we had a clue there was one, wasn't necessarily to discover a new system of working.
It was in part to examine the old one, in part to provide creative stimulus and challenge for the writers - and any of those who had to write the scene with the time travelling rat would probably attest to the success of this challenge in pushing our work out of our comfort zones - and in part just a way of developing the relationship between actors and writers, sans directors, that would be vital for Round One and future projects. At times, however, there were gems to be found. When one writer stated a theme or idea boldly (such as the anti-capital punishment argument in the political kidnap scene) and a later writer, slightly mischieviously, took the same characters and twisted the argument around, I felt there was a real excitement and lively and playful debate occurring within the plays themsleves that perhaps is missing from a lot of new theatre where, by and large, the writer uses a play to propound an idea or concept.
I suppose this is the writing equivalent of The Hamlet Project's removal of the word 'character' from rehearsal - the audience still sees character because of the words and actions the actor does on stage, and often the 'character' they see is all the richer for not being subservient to an actor's concept. It was, on those few occaisions when it worked best, the same here. We weren't being given the writer's idea of each character, or their opinion of a subject/theme served up on a plate for us (or at least when we were it was often contradicted or somehow shifted in the next scene, then again in the one after that).
Very rarely, if ever, did these slight contradictions shatter the theatrical illusion and destroy our ability to believe and invest in what we were watching. More often than not it made the experience of watching the play more challenging, difficult, complex and richer. I don't know who said it but there is an idea that goes along the lines of 'if you know exactly what you want to say there's no need to write a play about it' - write an essay or a newspaper article. If you want to explore something from myriad points of view, and if your own feelings are still confused or ambivalent towards each of those points of view then perhaps that is the thing to write a play about.That at least was the biggest over-arching thing I learned from the exercise.
I'm not sure but I think we went from here to the initial work on Round One, the sessions each week then focussing on devolping these pieces, but perhaps I am missing something. Please add it if I am.
Steven B
2008 primarily consisted of exploring and developing the Round 1 Project brief, and was very much focussed on individual Writers working on the specific pieces with Actors.
As the year went on the sessions became less about group workshops or master-classes but shifted focus on the Writer having the time and process in the Studio to have access to actors and to develop their pieces from this ongoing collaboration.
ORIGINAL ROUND 1 PROJECT BRIEF
Writers Challenge
Each piece must be a self contained piece in one scene that runs from beginning to end and is no longer than 10 minutes.
No more than 3 characters.
No props, costume, set, LX, SFX or stage directions to be on the page.
The empty space can be transformed through the words into anything or anywhere.
Any definition of character must be in the text as the actors will not change their appearance for each role and will cross gender, ages and ethnicity.
Any information about characters, setting, time, action etc must be in the text as there are to be no stage directions and all characters could be played by anyone.
Actors Challenge
To explore and learn multiple roles in multiple plays.
To share those plays with an audience in the most truthful, free and spontaneous way having been cast moments before.
To have only yourself and the text to do so.
ORIGINAL ROUND 1 PROJECT BRIEF
Writers Challenge
Each piece must be a self contained piece in one scene that runs from beginning to end and is no longer than 10 minutes.
No more than 3 characters.
No props, costume, set, LX, SFX or stage directions to be on the page.
The empty space can be transformed through the words into anything or anywhere.
Any definition of character must be in the text as the actors will not change their appearance for each role and will cross gender, ages and ethnicity.
Any information about characters, setting, time, action etc must be in the text as there are to be no stage directions and all characters could be played by anyone.
Actors Challenge
To explore and learn multiple roles in multiple plays.
To share those plays with an audience in the most truthful, free and spontaneous way having been cast moments before.
To have only yourself and the text to do so.
TimEvans |
Latest page update: made by TimEvans
, Feb 17 2009, 4:33 PM EST
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