Revision Reflections

I think Peter Shaffer is insane. I don't know how he could keep coming back to Amadeus like this. I'm having trouble getting myself to revise The Celtic Cross, and that wasn't a West End hit! I guess it's just weird to me that when a play goes up, it isn't necessarily "finished." When a novel is published, that's it. There's not re-writing it at that point. You can do sequels, you can do spinoffs, you can do re-releases, but generally speaking, the original text remains intact. It's weird to be working in a medium where that isn't necessarily the case.

I don't know why, but I seem to have a hangup over changing something after it's "finished." It seems like once I see a play, that's the final product, and it should be changed. Sure, you can do different takes on it - you're going to have different productions, maybe even cut a few lines here and there, but overall, the text should remain the same. The differences in production should come from different interpretations of the text. I guess that's my feeling. But maybe I have a false sense of where the finish line should be for theatre.

Maybe it's that I don't want to be another George Lucas. The guy can't leave his stuff alone. And he just makes it worse. He created something awesome, and he should just let it be. I understand doing remakes of movies - like redoing Ocean's 11 to make it modern and sexy; and I can even understand the sequels (I'm not saying they're GOOD, I just understand continuing the story a bit), but if they were to go back and redo Ocean's 11 with the same characters, slightly changing certain plot points, it would be uber weird. But at the same time, I know that anything I've written as of now is not good as it is, including CC, and it needs to be rewritten. But I don't really know where to draw the line.

I don't want to become a JK Rowling, who will never be able to get away from Harry Potter. She can't seem to leave that alone, either, doing those rinky-dink books about magic that are kind of a part of HP's world, but not really. Harry Potter is done. The series is over. She should leave it alone now. It seems to me that this process should be more stressful, because if there's something Rowling doesn't like 4 years from now, she can't fix it. The books are published, finished, and there's nothing she can do. But, for reasons unbeknownst to me, that process seems less stressful to me. There's a clear deadline - at some point, it actually is finished. It seems that in Shaffer's view of theatre, there is no "done." You could keep going on forever and keep obsessing over one project. I don't approve. I think that would suck up too much energy, when you should be focusing on somthing new. I want to know that I'm actually done with something, instead of having a nagging sense in the back of my mind all the time, telling me I should fix something.

That being said, I think I liked the fim version of Amadeus's ending the best. I don't really know why. It just seemed the most fitting. I found the current ending to be somewhat dissatisfying. Maybe it was because I really wanted some barnburning action, and I got a more subdued encounter. And I really wish he would have kept the whole plot of Salieri dressing as the Figure and tormenting Mozart that way. I really liked that, and I wish he would have kept it. But this is an award-winning playwright - I'm sure he knows what he's doing.

KG

Comedic Quickies

It's interesting: the "comedic" 10-minute plays were a lot different from the dramatic ones. I thought there really wasn't going to be much of a difference - I thought they would be similar structurally and content-wise, but the comedic ones would just touch on funnier subjects. I found the comedic ones to be quite different; I found there was less suspense (even comedic suspense), less buildup, even. I thought it was mostly just banter and situational comedy. I felt that I was kept in the dark a lot less in the comedic scenes than in the dramatic ones.

I look at a play like The Philadelphia, and I get fairly intimidated, because I think, "how the hayballs am I supposed to write something like THAT?" We talked earlier in the semester about how that kind of dialogue is pretty funny, but for only a short period of time. Especially the banter with the waitress and the kind of beers she's checking off the list. I might go mad if I had to listen to three acts of that. There also seemed to be less character development in the comedic ones. Maybe it's just the ones we read, but it seemed like these ones had less character development, and that most of the humor came from the lines or the situations, rather than the characters themselves. Anything for You was a possible exception, but even that, I thought was fairly predictable.

I guess a lesson I would take away from all this would be pacing. 10-minute plays, especially comedic ones, really need to zip along and don't have any time to dawdle. And it feels like SOMEthing has to happen. It doesn't have to be anything huge, but I don't think you can do a 10-minute Uncle Vanya. If you sat around watching people do their everyday thing for ten minutes on stage, and then it ended, I think you'd be pretty pissed off. You don't have the time of a full-length play to get the characters interesting enough for them to do nothing.

I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot from the first entries, so I'll probably just leave it at that. Woot.

KG

10-minute Trajectories

It's weird. This whole ten-minute play thing. I've never heard of anyone going to a night of theatre where they saw 10-minute plays (and I'm excluding Directing-Class One-Acts and school one-act festivals). Maybe it's just because I'm such a pleb that I wouldn't have heard about 10-minute play festivals. Meh.

I thought that the trajectory of the plays we read (and I mean plot, character development, overall story) was much different than what I'm used to reading for this class. There is so much back-story, and even story-story to convey in such a short amount of time. I don't know if was just me, but all the plays we read for today seemed somewhat underdeveloped. It seemed like these should have been scenes of more complete plays. I really liked "That Midnight Rodeo" because it seemed like it's own complete play. It's weird, my first two years I did almost exclusively one-act plays. Maybe I've just gotten used to thinking about full-length plays.

It's important, I think, to create such full characters in such a non-full story. I think a lot of that comes from the off-the-page work; i.e. all the stuff the playwright knows about the character, but doesn't necessarily show up on the page. For example, the author might now that this character's favorite kind of jeans are Levis, or that his wife's biggest fear is losing control of their house. I mean, all of these thing are important anyway, but when you have so little time/room to develop, it's important to go in with these things in mind.

Another thing; I think that you have to have in mind where things are going, because you don't have any room for the characters to write themselves as much. That is, it seems like you should come into the project with pretty clear ideas for the characters, rather than wandering around the story, letting the characters fill in the blanks. When a play needs to be so tight and concise, there isn't much room for that kind of stuff.

I think there was more, but I can't really remember, since the internet logged me out as I was trying to post it last time. So if I think of it, I'll put it in later. Sorry 'bou' tha'.

KG

Amadeus Annotations

I loved this play. Oh my gosh. I thought it was incredible. I thought it had everything a play needed: humor, tragedy, character development, plot development, suspense, everything. I liked this so much more than Vanya, because the characters were just as strong, but stuff actually happened. I really wanted to find out what was going to happen by the end (even though I already technically knew, because I'd seen the film before).

My playwriting teacher in London said that character drives plot. I've never really understood what this meant until I read Amadeus. In this play, the characters motivations really determine what happens in the play. It is such a clear example of conflicting objectives and how they clash. I think that most of the time, when I write, I have a few characters, and they do stuff for a while, and then something happens. The plot isn't usually determined by whether or not they achieve their goals/objectives. I think it's usually some kind of outside force. And I think it would help a lot more if I had my characters' motivations be the driving force behind the plot.

Since we're talking of character development specifically, I'll just mention that I thought the pacing of the play was interesting. The entire first act is exclusively character development. Nothing really happens until the second act, and the reason why the audience cares what happens in the second act is because of what has been established in the first. It reminded me of the movie "Match Point", a thriller by Woody Allen. The first 3/4 of this 2+ hour movie was exclusively character development. NOTHING HAPPENED. But it kept me hooked until the point of no return, after which I was on the edge of my seat for the rest of the ride. I think the exact opposite would be The Da Vinci Code. This book gave you the point of no return on the first page. And character development mattered very little. All Dan Brown had to do was make the protagonists likable enough to make the readers want them to win, and not the bad guys. But other than that, it was all plot development.

I read the preface by Shaffer, and I thought it was so interesting how many endings this play has gone through since its opening in London however many years ago that was. Alternative endings have always been a bit weird for me. Even on the extra features of DVDs, I like the one ending, because that's how it should be. It wigs me out when movies start to become "choose-your-own-adventures." It was just weird for me to think of the play with so many different endings. I'm afraid that I'd like one over the other, and that one wouldn't make it into the final cut. It's also weird for me to think about as a writer, because while it's awesome to have a range of options for where the play can go, sometimes options suck, and it's nice to know how this current project is going to end. Sometimes options suck, because you have to choose, and choosing is hard.

Ok, I think that's about it from me. Woot.

KG

Vanya Vexation

Ok, so this isn't exactly an accurate title. But it's alliterative, so who cares, right? No, I do have some bones to pick, but that will come in time. I've never been a huge Chekhov fan. Everyone says that he's a brilliant storyteller and creates marvelous characters. BS about the first point, fair play on the second. He is good at creating some interesting characters, but so many of his stories are ridiculously boring. And to me, the interesting characters don't outway the banality of his storylines. Some people say that they can watch interesting characters doing nothing all day, and it would still be interesting. I guess that doesn't work for me. I guess I just have a pretty low tolerance for listening to the Russian aristocracy sit around and complain all the time (thinking mostly of Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters here). I guess one lesson I take away from not liking Chekhov is that I actually want my characters to DO something.

I have seen two productions of Chekhov that I've liked - Ivanov and Uncle Vanya. Ivanov was different from the rest of the Chekhov I've seen, because the title character isn't spending the entire play complaining and moaning about how life is so unfair to the Russian Aristocracy. He is legitimately unhappy, and he has no idea why. He's in a mid-life crisis, and he wants to fix it. Uncle Vanya is also a bit different, because the play actually goes somewhere. There is a plot arch and a visible sotryline. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very interesting storyline for me.

But I think Uncle Vanya was an perfect example of how even with a fairly uninteresting story (I did NOT like this play the first time I read it - I did read a different translation the first time, too), if you have a good directer and a good cast, you're going to get a good show. This, I think, is evidence toward my theory that a good performance can outshine a bad script, but a good script will hardly ever shine through a bad performance (just look at all the crappy productions of Shakespeare out there. That guy is a legit playwright, and there are still some miserable performances). That being said, I would much rather see a good production of a good script than a good performance of a bad script. Now, I'm not saying Vanya was a BAD script, I'm just saying it's not as enjoyable a story as other plays I've seen/read. It's definitely a testament to the cast and director of this production of Vanya that I wasn't bored during this play. Not once did I think: ok, when is this going to be over? They kept me hooked the entire time, and considering it was Chekhov, this IS impressive.

Kurt Walls was talking about the attendence of the shows, and how it's so hard to get students to come see Chekhov. I totally get him there. I mean, I'm a theatre major and I don't want to see Chekhov. But I guess here's what I want to take away from Chekhov/Vanya - I want my characters to be as human as Chekhov's, but I want a little more plot (or INTERESTING plot, at least) than what Chekhov usually provides.

Adaptitude

So, I totally didn't realize that reading Eurydice was for our section on adaptation. I just thought it was a continuation of our work on dialogue, and I think my misguided belief was sustained such a long time because of how much dialogue there was in that show. Most of the play was between two people at a time, with an occasional chime-in from the chorus. Now that I realize the assignment was for our unit on adaptation, I'm thinking about it in a new light.

I'm still trying to decide if I liked the play. There's nothing in it that made me say, "Oh my gosh, that was incredible." At the same time, it flowed well and I never found myself saying, "Why the hayballs am I reading this?" But whether I liked it or not doesn't seem as important as questions such as, was this actually a good play? Answer: no idea. But it made me see adaptation in a new light. The playwright uses the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice quite loosely, and really takes her own track of the story. There's nothing that says you can't do this; I guess I was just a little surprised. I was definitely expecting a dry, crusty translation from ancient Greek, with a whiny chorus that moans on about how much the world sucks. So I was pleasantly surprised to find this wasn't the case.

But I guess my point is that adaptations don't have to stick too closely to the original text - depending on what kind of adaptation you're doing. I mean, if you're adapting from stage to film, you're probably going to want to keep it fairly close, so that the original fanbase isn't too pissed off. But in many cases, especially working with old Greek myths, the playwright can take as many liberties as s/he wants, because it's not copyrighted. I read "By the Bog of Cats", by Marina Carr, which is an adaptation of Medea, set in the Irish Midlands. It's very loosely based around the myth, and it's modernized and Irishized and much easier to read than an old crusty version of the myth. I guess it's interesting to me that this version of Eurycide is an adaptation, because it's taking another character's perspective on it. It would be like calling "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" an adaptation of Hamlet. I never would have thought of it that way.

I tend to like adaptations, I think, because it takes a familiar tale and tells it in a way that one wouldn't expect or sets it in a time/place that brings it home to an audience that would have a harder time relating to the original myth. For instance - I saw "Oedipus" when I was in London, and though it had some AMAZING acting (Ralph Fiennes (the dude who plays Voldemort) was Oedipus), I found myself sitting in the audience, marveling at the acting and thinking how much life sucks for that dude rather than thinking about how the story had any pertinance to my life. People say that myth is so relevant to everyone and that every person can relate to a guy who want so have sex with his mom. What? A bunch of crazy Freudian psychos if you ask me. I've never understood that myth or why it has any significance in my life, and I would like to see an awesome adaptation that shows me just how much this myth can make an impact in my life.

Going back to Eurycide, I really liked what the playwright had to say in the interview about having a chorus in her plays. When she was working with undergrads, they thought so linearly and couldn't break outside the mold of a realist play. I thought it was so cool that she made them write with a chorus. I think that's a trap I fall into a lot - needing to sound "realistic" and stuff. So I think that's something I want to try. maybe not a chorus, but possibly a narrator (wait, what's the difference?) or something of that sort. I think it will help me focus on the story I'm trying to get across rather than the way I'm trying to tell said story.

Woot. That's all from me.

KG

My Deal with Dialogue

Dialogue . . . Hmm. I don't know if it's just me, but dialogue seems harder to write than monologues. You need two contrasting voices (which you can have in monologue form as well), and in order to keep the flow of the scene going, you need to write them concurrently (at least, in my opinion). It's much harder for me to write two voices at the same time; it's easier to write a monolgue, where only one character is in your head at a time. I guess dialogue is much more schizophrenic. In my past experiences (which, honestly, isn't a whole lot), whenever I've tried to write dialogue, it's turned out as the same voice arguing two seperate points.

One thing I found in reading these scenes is that many of them are very stage-direction heavy. I think this is helpful to the actor as well as the playwright, because it helps both parties visualize the character. Even the simple stage direction of Roy (in Plaza Suite) saying his line calmly and softly helps us visualize the humor. And when he isn't freaking out when he says "Call the doctor", it's even funnier.

Also, the use of pauses is helpful for a dialogue scene. I tend to think of "Good Dialogue" as being snappy, witty, fast-paced, and plowing through a scene. In comedy this is great. Sometimes. This is great in drama, too. Sometimes. But comedic pauses can add so much humor to a dialogue, and even in reading it it's funny. Dramatic pauses are good too, and I am a firm believer that just as much is said through silence as it is through words. But the danger with any of these pauses is that is can slow down the scene, and that can be dangerous.

One scene I really liked was the one from Closer. It was naturalistic dialogue about heavy stuff, and each of the characters seemed to be handling the tough situation in their own way. Something that was slightly reassuring to me was that the characters didn't seem inherently distinct. That is, there was nothing about them on the page that made them stand out to me in my mind. I mean, they didn't all have the same mannerism or anything, but they didn't seem completely different, either. This was refreshing to me, because I realized that when actors who have distinct voices act this out, it's going to sound like they're very different people, even if you can't quite tell on the stage. Martin McDonagh is really good at giving the actor a distinct voice to work with, and each of his characters has his/her own way of speaking, and that's great. But I'm no Martin McDonagh. So it's nice for me to realize that I can make two similar-sounding characters and have them end up distinct by the time it's actually performed.

One last thought: dialogue, in its most simplified form, is two people talking. DIalogue. But the scene gets altered quite a bit when a third person enters the mix. It's even more voices in the schizophrenic world of playwriting. I have yet to try it, but I think it would be so difficult to keep the flow of a scene going when you're constantly changing characters while you're writing. As an actor, one of my favorite roles was TV Man in Captive Audience by David Ives, because I was constantly shifting characters all the time. I was able to rehearse that, though. When you're writing, it seems like it should flow organically, and that seems tough to achieve when you're constantly stopping yourself to get into a different character. I guess it would be like trying to read through Captive Audience, doing all the voices on the first run through. It's doable, but very tough. (And I'm saying all of this as though you can't go back and re-write. There's nothing wrong with re-writing, but it seems like it's hard to be creative in the first place when there are so many road blocks slowing you down.)

So yeah. That's my deal with dialogue.

KG

Monologue Mania

I always thought monologues were an odd form of theatre, mostly because it doesn't seem very natural. It seems like the form would lend itself to a naturalistic setting - natural speech patterns, good opportunity for distinct voices, room to develop a strong character - but who on EARTH would pour out their inner soul to a room full of strangers? Makes no sense to me.

Hamlet does this all the freakin' time. Pretty much everyone in Shakespeare does. But that's a completely different style of theatre than what us naturalistic-loving Americans are used to. In an Arthur Miller play, you're not likely to see the main character break away from the action and discuss his inner turmoil with the audience.

But even in naturalistic theatre, monologues serve their purpose. Connor McPherson's The Weir is made up almost entirely of monologues, but it still maintains the fourth wall. That play showed me how monologues can be really effective for storytelling. It's really distracting when a character is trying to tell a story, but other characters are always interrupting to remind the audience that they are active listeners.

But New Orleans Monologues, The Laramie Project, and Vagina Monologues are different. They understand that they're monologues, and they embrace it. (I mean, two of them have the word "monologue" in their title - doesn't get much more obvious than that.) I thought it was interesting how you can still drive narrative without actually showing the audience the action. A lot of it is storytelling techniques; how to make the narrative interesting in monologue form. One thing NOM was good at, I thought, was telling the story in past tense, but making it feel like the story is taking place now. Both NOM and LP were telling stories that the audience already knew the outcomes to, but because they were personalized accounts, the audience didn't know how the stories would end for those particular characters.

Another thing that I need to bear in mind with monologues is what LP does really well - telling several sides to the same story at the same time. So when Reggie Fluty is describing how she found Matthew Shepard, Dr. Cantway is telling his story of when he first saw Matthew. Not only does it break up the monologues (which is easier on the actor and the audience), it provides a suspense, almost, drawing out the conclusion a little longer and making the audience wait just a tad bit more for the resolution to that particular account.

The Vagina Monologues is the only one of the three that I'd never read or seen or been in before. To me, women standing around telling stories about their vaginas is a bit odd. Kinda weirds me out, I'm not gonna lie. But in the select few monologues we read there were some very distinct voices.

My playwriting class I took last semester was frustrating in some ways, partly because we started out with monologues, but they were all too "prosey" for my prof. She wanted them to be more immediate (still not entirely sure what that means, because it's hard to right a monologue in the past tense but keep it immediate), and she said mine was more like a short story told in the first person than a monologue. I still don't really know how to fix that, but after reading some of those selected monologues, I think one thing I can work on is voice. This will make any monologue I write more textured, even if it isn't "immediate." Maybe immediacy will come in time. How ironic is that?

KG

Testing?

This is just a test. Just making sure I've got this bad boy figured out.