Tag Archive | Plays
Vomit Writing Magic Muse
Being a playwright- finding your muse is very important- having your space, having your music, having your spells, chants, and charms around you as you write is very important. But sometimes it just doesn’t come. My first mentor/friend in playwriting was Stephen Adly Guirgis. Outside of my mother, he was the first person who told […]
Scn Std: wk1
I just had my first rehearsal? meet and greet? chat? run-through? stumble upon? of a short piece I’ll be doing with Sara Katzoff and three undergrad actors/actresses. For the past semester and a half I’ve been working on my thesis play which is this dark tragedy. It’s been so long since I’ve started a new […]
Revision
I’ve been doing a ton of revision this week. HAPPILY. With actual JOY. And if that last word makes perfect sense to you, then you can probably stop reading now because you’re one of those magical creatures who’s loved revising ever since you started writing. Let me tell you: I am not one of those. […]
As a writer
The setting is the first thing I think about – Where? In my plays the set becomes more than a prop, it becomes as much of an organism of force as the living characters on stage. When I begin to develop a play I think about how I can manipulate the set into consciousness. How […]
WTF is a play cycle – Pt. 6 – Night Cap
Returning to my former naive B.A. acting studies questions: They can do that? Of course they can, the mind and hand of a writer has no restrictions. If the writer feels the stories out of Pine City is incomplete and if there is an audience that will watch or read another visit. There will be […]
WTF is a play cycle – Pt. 5
I remember the day well when I first heard the words – play cycle A week before, my B.A. acting professor had given my small troupe a play to analyze – Craig Wright’s Orange Flower Water. It was my first real touch on something contemporary – very exotic and exciting to me. The play examined […]
Casting and Fear
As a playwright, I have to make it my goal to know the scope and mission of various theatre companies. Trying to find the right companies for my work–and tailoring submissions appropriately so that their relevance to the company is obvious–involves serious study of theatre companies’ websites, and sometimes (with a little bit of good […]
WTF is a Play Cycle – Pt. 4
The Purpose of Play Cycles/Artist Prophet The Greeks were not only telling tales to reintegrate their citizens but they were developing stories that encapsulated their history, stories that allowed the viewer to examine civilization. In Julie Spark’s Playwrights’ Progress she states that the greek plays were performed as a mode of civic self-examination. Writers get […]
WTF is a play cycle – Pt. 3
Going All The Way To The Beginning – What Cycles Meant to the Greeks Skimming through the index of old theatre history textbooks looking for modern cycle plays I came across the word – Trilogy. Millennials typically think of a trilogy as a collection of books – that eventually turn into blockbuster movies but looking […]
Writing “Evil”
One of the old adages of playwriting is that you should love all your characters. After all, if you’re creating them, you think they’re important to your story, and subtlety will make that story shine all the more brightly. So–even your villains should have a personality, a rationale, a “way in” that lets us see […]
WTF is a play cycle – Pt. 2
But Why Serializations? Similar to our desires to be intrusive, we have a natural instinct of habit which modernly can perpetually turn into rituals and addictions. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon in the 1950s, found that it would take roughly twenty one days to create a habit or one episode of Absolutely Fabulous to get […]
And on and on and on
In theatre, unless you’re lucky to land an ongoing tour, every piece of theatre is ephemeral not only metaphorically but literally. You’ve got a few weeks or a few months on a project, and then it’s over–you move on to the next, or rather, spend a good deal of energy finding the next. As a […]
WTF is a play cycle – PT.1
Since I started calling myself a serious playwright (a writer in general) I’ve been invested in exploring what play cycles are. My goal in this weekly exploration is to expose the purpose and need of cycle plays in our modern day; and to answer some of these questions: What are play cycles? Why do playwrights […]
Who You Want Your Audience To Be
I’ve been thinking a lot about “audience” recently. I went to three shows this weekend, two fringe and one mid-size, and saw a huge disparity in who was attending the shows. This wasn’t surprising. It was exactly what you’d expect: majority older white subscribers at the mid-size, majority 20-40-somethings and theatre artists at the fringe, […]
Opening Doors
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “success.” What does it mean? Does it even exist….. Who defines it? What happens if you achieve it? Then I stumbled across the documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened on Netflix and some of these questions were answered. The film, directed by Lonny Price, is […]
Every Brilliant Thing
If you live a full life and you get to the end of it without ever once feeling crushingly depressed, than you probably haven’t been paying attention. –Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan I first came across Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing about a year ago. I had ordered a bundle of Macmillan’s plays in order […]
Shockheaded Peter: Youth and Darkness
This week I saw Company One’s production of Shockheaded Peter at the Modern Theatre, and I can safely say it is entirely like anything else I’ve seen before One of the production’s primary tools is a celebration of the dark and grotesque. The company members perform vignettes that intersect the title story line. These include a story about […]
Collective Efforts: Playwrights Unite
I dream to be a playwright one day… which is probably the most stressful dream I have ever had. While I hide in the safety of BU’s College of Fine Arts typing away I am continuously nagged at by one fact. Soon enough I will have to start submitting my works if I ever want […]
Those Who Shape Our Futures
Two things have sparked my reason to write today… an occurrence in Drama Lit where we were shown this video and Howl Round providing me with this article. The video starts off with an amazing quote: If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. […]
Family Theatrics
Sometimes my friends tell me I should write a play about my family. Not my immediate family, but my extended family on my mom’s side. There are seventeen of us in the Boston area–eighteen if you include my great grandmother’s sister, Phyllis. There are also four generations of us. I’ll make a chart so it […]
Drama Lit Blog 2.0: BU School of Theatre 