Did you know that the last Sunday of every month is designated as Free Play Sunday? We give away PDF preview copies of our scripts to our Facebook and Twitter followers.

We’re fresh back from a trip to England where we saw lots of theatre. We’ll be sharing all the wins and fails on future podcasts and blog posts. In the meantime, this month’s Free Play Sunday is celebrating England. We’re going to dedicate Free Play Sunday to the theme: “Theatrefolk plays based on English literature.”

All you have to do is follow Our Facebook Page or our Our Twitter Stream throughout the day on Sunday, May 26 for the goodies.

 A dark ride  is an indoor amusement ride where riders in guided vehicles travel through specially lit scenes that typically contain animation, sound, music, and special effects. – Wikipedia

As a frequent visitor to Disney World I have been on my my fair share of dark rides. You sit in a ride vehicle (on Peter Pan’s Flight it’s a miniature pirate ship, on Winnie the Pooh it’s your own hunny pot, for the Haunted Mansion it’s a “doom” buggy) and travel throughout rooms. The rooms portray scenes that could be a tableau but more often than not has movement and music to tell a story.

I find dark rides rather lovely actually  - it’s interesting the way the designers choose “scenes” to tell a story. If you have a finite number of pictures to tell a complete story, which do you choose? The ride for Peter Pan has six scenes: the bedroom, flying over London, Never-never Land (which showcases the lost boys, the Mermaids and the Indians), Wendy and the boys in trouble on Captain Hooks ship, Peter saving the day, and Captain Hook being chased by the crocodile.  That’s it.

I find that the dark rides at Disney World are more focused on complete storytelling than those at Disney Land. By far my favourite dark ride ever is Disney land’s Mr Toad’s Wild Ride mostly because it is an an adventure in WTF? (Hey we’re in an out of control car! Hey we’re going to hell! The end!)

Exercise: I think it’s a great exercise to take something, a piece of literature, and re-frame it to show comprehension. To that end, take the Shakespeare play you are currently studying and have students come up with a dark ride for that play.

• What ride vehicle will travel through the ride? What vehicle would best fit the world of the play?
• You have six rooms, six scenes, to show the entire story. What are the most important moments to highlight? What scenes/pictures will you choose? Will the pictures be tableau or have moving parts? What music would you put underneath?
• The ride vehicle is constantly on the move, so any lines of dialogue have to be quick and short. Think of one line that a character could say for each room.

That my friends, is fast. Which I knew full well going in, and in fact I proposed. It’s interesting, I always thought of myself as a fast writer and I still think I am. But there’s a huge difference between fast to a deadline and fast when you’re writing for yourself. The pressure of fast when there’s a group going into rehearsal is huge. And add to that, I wasn’t only working on this play during my writing time – I was adjudicating, I was acting as dramaturg on a project, I was trying to bank many podcasts and blog posts in preparation for a trip, I was in the middle of an intense Greek Literature course and a side Spanish class.

That my friends, is a lot for work for my poor brain. Which again, I knew full well was going to happen. I do it all the time. I am a rabid multi-tasker. I never do just one thing, I never focus on just one project, I like to move around. But it all circles back to that deadline. I am fascinated by how the deadline changes things. Sure, I have had deadlines before. I make them up all the time. But they were always of my own making, in my own little world.  Sometimes Craig and I have to look at each other when we’re waist deep in work and say “this is not a real deadline. If this doesn’t happen the world will not end.” And sometimes we walk away from things for just that reason – there’s no reason to work yourself to death when the deadline is arbitrary. But for this particular project, the deadline was not mine and it was real and necessary.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to have participated in this project. I worked my butt off on the play and I think it’s lovely. I did not back away, I did not cheat the play in order to get it done. I did not cheat my writing process to meet the deadline.

But it was a learning experience for me in time management. And how I need to manage my brain, how the different parts don’t play nicely together. The week that I was adjudicating, I had the  time during the day to write. I figured, “hey no problem. I have time. I’ll write in the morning, and  prepare for my adjudication in the afternoon.”  But I literally sat at the kitchen table each morning with my head in my hands totally incapacitated.  Unable to make myself think. My analytical brain didn’t want to let my creative brain out to play. And that led to some rather un-productive freaking out because I wasn’t getting the work done that I needed too in the time I had. Tick Tock. Tick Tock.

Further to that, I didn’t anticipate the unexpected that life sometimes throws at you which would take a bite out of my scheduled writing time. And when the unexpected happened, that freaked me out a little too. Life does not care about deadlines – nor should it.  But still…. Tick Tock.

But my friends, it’s all fine now. I met my deadline because as well as being a rabid multi-tasker I am very, very stubborn. And there was no way I wasn’t going to meet that deadline. But this was definitely one to grow on. Now I know how fast is too fast especially if I’m going to be an idiot and schedule a million other things at the same time. And please always remember and never forget, I am that kind of idiot.

Lindsay talks to drama teacher Tracy Garratt about the difference between drama and theatre in the classroom.

Show Notes

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Music credit: ”Ave” by Alex (feat. Morusque) is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Here is an interesting question to ponder. Can Improv create change? I’m not talking small step interpersonal change, which is something I fully stand behind: Improv can create a level of self-confidence and quick thinking in an individual that changes lives. Improv is a viable skill. But to say that it is a skill that promotes big change? Global change? No war change? Over at Good.is that’s the correlation that’s being made in an article entitled “Best-Kept Secret to Creating Social Change: Improv.”

Based on the hypothesis of the article, the small step interpersonal change that improv can give you makes you a better person and thus is a natural stepping stone to changing the world at large.

I don’t think I can follow that leap. Yes I believe improv can change your place in the world, (if you are a quick thinking self-confident person, it’s only natural) but to then in turn say that Improv will push you to change the world? As a layman speaking out of my proverbial butt, I don’t think there’s a precedence of improvisers changing the word. Is there any historical data that says individuals active in world change spent time in an improv class? Or is that something that is part of the up and coming generation, those who are posed to take over the world?

Whether or not improvisers are becoming world leaders of social change, what a fascinating question to ponder in terms of the place of improv in the classroom. It many classes improv is seen as (sometimes by both students and by administrators) a bunch of silly games. What if improv wasn’t seen as a bunch of games but a methodology to create activists? Leaders? Changers? Would that encourage administrators or scare them?

What specific improv games could change the world?

Today’s Movie Monologue Monday takes a look at Kirk Douglas’ speech in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.

There is no shortage of movie monologues that take place in a courtroom. This, in my opinion, is among the finest.

Douglas plays Colonel Dax, a French commander whose soldiers are on trial for refusing to take part in a suicide mission. The trial is unjust. Everybody knows it’s unjust, and yet it continues. Douglas

Douglas does the opposite of what you would expect from a grand courtroom speech. Rather than building to a climax, he starts strong and gets quieter and quieter, drawing you to him. By the end you’re hanging on every word he’s saying.

I love his physicality in the piece. He stands and walks like an aged soldier, his back ever-straight, his head ever-held high. And Kubrick’s direction keeps the camera low, making Douglas look larger-than-life.

I’m thrilled to announce that we’re continuing to expand our free resources page. We’ve added seven new activity sheets, all about Romeo and Juliet. Five are under the Romeo and Juliet heading and two are under the Monologue Performance Tips heading.

These are all extracted from our recent three-part newsletter on Romeo and Juliet (Part One, Part Two, Part Three). There are even more free resources contained within the newsletters themselves, so check them out as well.

The free resources added to the Monologue Performance Tips section include a monologue performance activity. Also included is a Monologue Assessment Rubric that isn’t necessarily tied to Shakespeare. It can be used for any monologue activity.

Enjoy!

This picture is a poster outside Muppet Vision 3D at Disney’s Hollywood studios at Walt Disney World. There’s a lot going on in this poster – it’s a spoof on two different movies – Alien (In space no one can hear you scream) and the Pixar film Wall-E. The poster is pretty much a copy of what the original Wall-E poster looks like, but re-frames it to fit the muppet world of Beaker. I love how they fit in Dr. Bunsen Honeydew!

Exercise: The purpose of this exercise is to take a character from one genre (a Shakespearean play) and re-frame that character by way of a second genre (Science Fiction movie) through the medium of poster design. Both genres should be clear on the poster.

• Choose a Shakespearean character.
• Choose a Science Fiction movie. What sci-fi movie could your Shakespearean character star in?
• Re-frame the title of the Science Fiction movie so that it fits your character. (e.g. Wall-E to Beak-E)
• Create a visual that incorporates elements from both the Shakespeare play and the sci-fi movie.
• Create a tag line for this new movie that helps describe who the Shakespearean character is and what they do in the play.

I never enjoy looking for monologues. It’s sort of like a hunting expedition and I don’t like hunting. And don’t get me started on fishing…

But – big BUT – I love when I actually find a great piece that suits both me and the thing I’m auditioning for. I feel like Livingstone seeing Victoria Falls for the first time.

Here’s some advice on finding the perfect monologue for you.

Monologue Books

Monologue books are a great starting point. Monologues in collections have usually been curated by editors who have gone through dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) of plays to create the collection. And they can be a godsend if you really need something specific in a pinch. But they’re just a tool, not a solution. They’re not the end all and be all.

Lots of people buy monologue books. And it’s very likely that lots of people have the same monologue book that you have. And it’s possible they like the same piece that you do. And I’m not saying that they’re better than you per se, but if they happen to have their audition scheduled before yours, then when you announce what you’re performing there will be a small drop in the room’s barometric pressure as the director thinks to herself, Dang, how many times will I have to watch this same piece today???

But as I say, these books are great starting points. Here’s how to use them…

• Find a piece you like in the book – you identify with a character, the writing appeals to you, etc.
• Buy a copy of that play and read it.
• Look for the monologue from your book. It’s possible that the piece in the book is edited down from a larger monologue. Maybe you can reshape it into a different piece altogether than the one in the book.
• Look for other monologues by the same character. It’s possible they have more than one monologue in the play.
• Look for other monologues in the same play by a different character. Playwrights who write good monologues , ones that aren’t in the monologue book.
• Get other plays by the same author. There are probably well-written monologues in those plays as well.

Visit the Library

Yes, the old-fashioned library. That building with all the books. While a lot of theatrical publishers are starting to put their plays online, there are still thousands of amazing scripts that are only available in book form.

If you’re near a major city, budget a day to spend at their largest library, whichever branch has the best performing arts section.

Just start completely randomly. Grab a couple dozen plays off the shelf and start flipping through them. You’ll begin to get a feel for which playwrights are likely to write monologues that appeal to you, then start focusing on those playwrights.

Editing

Here is the one place in the theatre that I think it’s ok to edit the playwright’s work to suit your needs.

Don’t be shy about cutting together a monologue from a series of smaller speeches.

Don’t be shy about slicing out bits that don’t make sense out of context.

The object of this piece is not a performance. It’s a showcase for you, not the writer. You’re the one auditioning.

When I was auditioning a lot, this is where most of my pieces came from. Since I was the one putting them together, I could be pretty sure that what I was doing was unique.

Consider What You’re Auditioning For

If you’re auditioning for a play, look at pieces by the same author. Or look at pieces in a similar style.

If you’re auditioning for a school, look at the plays they’re doing in their season. Again, look at pieces by the same playwrights and in similar genres.

More often than not, young artists have a clear picture of what they want for a character, what they think about a moment, what they intend. They do spent time thinking about their craft.  They are smart and articulate when they describe what’s going on in side their heads in terms of that character or that moment. But just as often, they are surprised to hear that what I saw on stage did not match what was going on in their heads.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Sometimes it’s difficult for young artists to manifest a thought – to bring the idea of a character into a three dimensional representation. To solve that issue I always tell actor to physicalize their idea. Turn their thoughts into physical action – something tangible.  A physical stance, a gesture, a movement. Ideas and thoughts are hard for an audience grasp.  The way a character moves across the stage is something concrete on which to hang an idea.

So what about what’s going on in a director’s head? How do young directors make sure their intentions are clear in the presentation? Again go for the tangible – make sure there is some kind of physical action that matches each idea. For the director, this could be a blocking pattern, the choice of set and costume, a gesture that shows the relationship between two characters, a specific picture. Think of the pictures that represent the thoughts and words in your head. Visualize your theme, visualize your concept, visualize your interpretation.

Furthermore, get an outside eye to look at the play. This is especially important if you’re taking the production to competition. Don’t get involved with likes or dislikes of the person providing feedback – you really only need the answer to one question:

 “This is my intention. Is my intention clear on stage?”

That’s what you need to know, if what’s on stage matches what’s in your head. And then after that, it’s all up in the air – you can’t determine whether or not an adjudicator is going to like your work but you can make sure an adjudicator sees exactly what you want them to see.

How do you make sure intention and presentation match up? How do you marry internal thought and external production?