Spotlight! E-news from Theatrefolk
Issue 19 - What's New?Welcome!
For this issue of Spotlight we're going to look at some of our new and upcoming scripts. We'll talk to the authors, plus give you a sneak peek at Lindsay's new play, Sweep Under Rug.
In this issue:
- WHAT'S NEW
You asked, we listened. We now offer PDF downloads and photocopy licenses. Theatrefolk just keeps a-changing! - SWEEP UNDER RUG
How Lindsay turned a ten minute play to a fifty minute play and how a reading can change everything. - ONE HUNDRED LIES & BEING BIANCA: THE SEMI COMPLETE GUIDE
It's a two-fer from Alan Haehnel! - MOVING/STILL
Two short plays by Lindsay Price. - THE FIRST HERALD ANGEL
An interview with John Donald O'Shea about this upcoming publication. - THE FRIED KOBASSA
Bob Wilkins talks about this rollicking fun comedy. - DOWNLOAD OF THE MONTH
Read a sample from Lindsay's latest, Sweep Under Rug. - CONFERENCE ALERT
Meet us in person. - IN THE NEXT ISSUE
What you can expect next. - STAY IN TOUCH
Contact Info/Read Our Blog.
What's New?
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New Scripts
Check out our newest scripts.
Need a script by yesterday?
In a time crunch? We're now offering PDF downloads of most of our plays.
Visit: www.theatrefolk.com
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Sweep Under Rug
Sweep Under Rug is a futuristic tale. Underprivileged families must take part in the "Bobby Sue" program. A "Bobby Sue" is a guardian of sorts, someone who warns against missteps and guides its owners along the "appropriate" path in life. But what happens when people want to make their own choices and think for themselves?
Sweep Under Rug started out as a ten minute play. I was writing plays for the Girl Talk collection. I had a "What if" idea of "What if a group of people were told what to do every step of their lives and what if they didn't want to be told what to do anymore? I have a relative who works with poor families and she has often talked about the sense of despair that can happen in the community: this group is put in such a box that, despite their strongest desires to work their way out, they find themselves mired in red tape.
To that end I wanted to personalize the red tape, which became the "Bobby Sue" character: A walking, talking computer who tells the family she's placed with what to do, how to act, and so on. She looks and acts like a teenager from the 50's. I always go to this time period when I think of misguided perfection.
In the beginning, I had a couple of language twists I wanted to try within the script, some more "what if" situations: What if one of the characters has deteriorating verbal skills? Miranda, who is the embodiment of despair over what's happening around her, shows this element by losing her vocabulary. I wanted to create a plane where her verbal ability and emotional state are linear and connected. What happens when a character simply cannot communicate as she once did? Her change and depression goes so far she can't even form sentences. I also wanted to make Bobby Sue's language as computer-like as possible. No contractions. No emotions. The Bobby Sue character is a parent of sorts, except for the loving part!
After trying to write the ten minute version, I knew I had more to say. I couldn't fit the play into the ten minute format and after a reading decided that I should explore the play further. The short version focused solely on the Bobby Sue character and the family she was placed with. The longer version included two more characters: an underground mercenary, who used to be Miranda's boyfriend (another additional emotional level for her) and Counsellor Kelly, a character who is 110% behind the program. Kelly added another language challenge for me: Kelly's language is always sunny, emotionally chipper and verbose - the complete opposite of Miranda.
At this stage I was incredibly lucky to have the play chosen by TADA! Theatre as one of the winners of their one act playwriting competition. The play received a high functioning staged reading (all that was missing was the blocking!) which made me come to a rather huge realization - the language I had created for Miranda, Kelly and Bobby Sue didn't necessarily work! The story was fine, the characters were fine but the way they expressed themselves, not so much. That's what you get when you answer "what if" challenges. Since I had never written characters in this way, I certainly didn't know how it would turn out.
This turn of affairs was a bit shocking for me. It meant I had to go back to the drawing board, which can be pretty depressing. But of course, this is the purpose behind having plays seen and heard - plays don't exist on a flat page. They exist in the flesh and blood of action and emotion. And if they work on the page, but not on the stage, then it's not good enough.
What I learned at TADA! was that my intention was good but I needed to change the execution. Bobby Sue' clipped computer manner slowed the play down incredibly. The pace was so slow! I was sitting at the back of the theatre watching the reading, with a growing lump in my stomach. The girl was doing the part exactly as I had written it and it was all wrong. I decided to change Bobby Sue so that she would move in a mechanical way but speak in a cheerful manner, not unlike Counsellor Kelly.
To have Miranda speak in half sentences (to show her absence of vocabulary) didn't come off the way it appeared in my head. Again, the actress playing the part was doing it perfectly. But it didn't show Miranda's language falling apart as I thought it would. It just slowed the pace down some more. I decided it would be better to have Miranda speak through silence rather than in a stilted manner.
The whole thing was a great learning experience. I was able to make changes, do a few more workshops and end on a very fulfilling piece. The play was a challenge to write structurally and I'm quite proud of the final product. You can read a sample of Sweep Under Rug as this month's download.
One Hundred Lies & Being Bianca: The Semi Complete Guide
Alan Haehnel has two new offerings with Theatrefolk. One Hundred Lies' main character Liz presents her life as a competition. The goal of the game: To dramatize in 30 minutes one hundred significant lies told to and by Liz.
In Being Bianca: The Semi Complete Guide, Bianca teaches the audience how to "Be Bianca." Bianca just knows that everyone wants to be her. And why not? By her estimation, she has everything: good looks, humour, popularity, fashion sense and, above all, intelligence.
ONE HUNDRED LIES
In One Hundred Lies, the main character presents her life as a game show of sorts, complete with countdown clock and scoreboard, to show how lies have been told to her and by her. What inspired this convention?
Always a difficult question because inspiration comes from the internal compost pile where you throw all sorts of garbage and eventually something starts to grow. When someone asks for the exact inspiration, then, it's impossible to pinpoint - it's like saying, "That particular growth sprang from the banana peel I put on the compost pile three months ago."
Sometimes I can be fairly exact, but usually, and in this case in particular, I can only guess at the various fruitful elements that may have contributed to this particular "growth" - the scoreboard convention.
One element was something I learned a few years ago, that you can add excitement to a play when you have a "ticking clock" of some sort, when some sort of time pressure is placed on the characters. Since hearing that, I have been looking for a way to add a literal ticking clock to a play, and the scoreboard was one of the most immediate and visual ways I could think of to do that.
Another voice that may have contributed to the scoreboard idea was that of a friend. One of his recurrent questions is, "How much is enough? Who is keeping score of my life and will let me know when I have 'won'?"
The final bit of inspiration that may have had impact was when I went to see The Blue Man Group in Boston. They use a lot of electrical, scrolling signs in their presentation, and I loved that. Those bits of compost plus the banana peel from the banana I ate last Tuesday may have been the inspiration for that choice.
Even though the scoreboard isn't human, it's definitely an important character in the play; I think there's quite a strong relationship between Liz and the scoreboard! Was that always your intention, or did it come out during the writing process? Who is the scoreboard to you?
The "personality" of the scoreboard was one of the pleasant surprises that emerged during the writing of One Hundred Lies. I didn't know that would happen when I started to write.
The scoreboard is enigmatic, of course, and I allowed it to remain so even for me. Clearly, though, I think audiences will start to connect the scoreboard to the concept of God - either an external God or an internal one, more like Liz's conscience. Personally, I tend to think that most of what we need to govern our lives we have inside of ourselves, so I favor the internal God idea.
The tone of the play at the beginning is vastly different from the tone at the end. (The last page of the play has made me cry twice!) When you write, do you start at the beginning of the play and write linearly? Do you start at the end? With a specific character?
When I start to work on a play, I just write whatever scenes or snatches of dialogue are appearing on the stage in my head - I try not to worry about where they would fit into the final version. For One Hundred Lies, I wrote several of the early segments - about the white lies, about Liz's relationship with the other actors - and just threw these bits into a manila folder. I just kept adding bits here and there until I got the feeling that I needed to start at the beginning and try to work out an actual draft.
One Hundred Lies began with the idea of lies - how everyone's life is comprised of millions of them. Somewhere along the line, I began to fall in love with Liz; I began to want to tell her particular story. I wasn't sure how the whole thing would end - that came very late in the process. When I got a handle on the contrast between Liz's concept of winning and the scoreboard's, then I knew how it should end.
I was grabbed immediately by this play because of the title. Do titles come easily to you? How important are titles?
This title came fairly easily, thank goodness. Many have not. Over the years, I've somewhat honed my skills as a title writer, but I am still stymied quite often. I've learned, generally, that simple is the way to go - don't try to be thematic or even all that clever with a title. Just try - the constant mantra for the writer - to tell the truth.
I think titles are important because they are the first thing that might catch a potential reader's or audience member's eye and interest. I hope One Hundred Lies does that. Probably my most successful bit of title writing so far was when I came up with 15 Reasons Not to Be in a Play, which has turned out to be my best-selling play to date.
Did you encounter any difficulties during the writing?
The biggest difficulty was that I kept losing count of the number of lies! It drove me absolutely out of my mind! Annoying as that logistical problem was, though, it was minor and completely solvable. I had many more significant difficulties with this play, ones that threatened to keep it from ever being completed.
I didn't know who Liz was for quite a while - I didn't know why she was telling us about her life using this convention. I couldn't decide why, exactly, the scoreboard convention was appropriate.
But I've learned to keep chipping away.
Playwriting, for me, is like trying to clear thick ice from a sidewalk or peel old wallpaper. At points, you feel like you're making no progress at all - that the project is insurmountable. But you keep at it, trying to succeed, to make headway from different angles, using different tools, and suddenly you're conquering large chunks of ice, big sheets of wallpaper, long sections of the play. Then you're back to another tough section, making glacial progress.
Finally, after a while, you look back and find that you have a clear sidewalk, a stripped room, a finished draft. The big break for me with One Hundred Lies was when I discovered that Liz was a deeply competitive person, and she wanted to use that competitive nature as a shield from hurt.
What do you want the audience to take away from this play?
I would like them to become paranoid and distrustful of their world because they realize that it's all just a web of prevarications. Not really, though that may happen for a little while. I want them to sympathize, or even empathize, with Liz. I want them to be entertained in a humorous way for a while, but then I want them to become engaged and find themselves in an entirely different emotional place by the end. I want them to have had both a visceral experience - laughter and tears - and an intellectual one - the contemplation of the concept of truth.
You present two very different leading ladies in Being Bianca and One Hundred Lies. Which one was easier to write and why?
Bianca was definitely easier to write because she is essentially a stereotype. The challenge with Liz of One Hundred Lies was to create a flesh-and-blood character; the challenge with Bianca is to paint a cardboard character with the most outrageous colors possible.
BEING BIANCA
This play is a ton of fun. Was it as enjoyable to write? How so?
This was a lot of fun to write because the character - and her vision of herself and the world - is so outrageously self-centered that I had all kinds of permission to play with language and situations in ways I wouldn't have if Bianca were hampered by such constraints as logic, self-knowledge and deep intelligence.
What's your favourite moment?
That's a tough one. I really like when Bianca's brother Carl demonstrates how he brushes his teeth, but I'm also pleased with how Bianca's stuffed animal scene came out. I think both of these moments would be a lot of fun to enact. As a writer, I'm acting things out in my head as I go, and I enjoyed both of these moments.
Bianca is such a specific character, from the way she speaks to her insane self-confidence, to her relationships. Is she based on anyone you know? Where did she come from? Did she change throughout the writing or did she appear fully formed?
Bianca was Bianca pretty much from the moment I envisioned her. As I said, she is quite a cardboard, cartoonish character. She's not about growth or introspection; she's about the celebration of her own narrow, quirky, unabashedly egoistic take on life. Bianca is not based on any one person. I have just noticed that everyone loves an airhead, so I decided to take that stereotype and see just how far I could take her vapid world view. Bianca is unaware, materialistic, fashion-centered, clique-dependent... all of the typical qualities of the airhead. Yet she's so naive and childlike, I found that I liked her.
You've created a wonderful balance with Bianca - she's engaging to watch, even though as a real life person she's probably be quite irritating! Did you worry about going too far with Bianca?
"Too far" has to be defined, I guess. Given who Bianca is, her behavior, expressions and views could be quite outrageous, but they had to be consistent. I worried about staying consistent. For instance, when I sent the play to Theatrefolk, Craig noted that Bianca's vocabulary level didn't seem constant - that she would misconstrue one term, but then correctly use another equally complex term later on. I appreciated that advice and made some changes. In every play, the writer creates a world. Once the parameters and possibilities and limitations of that world have been defined, he has to stick with them. "Too far" means going outside the boundaries of the particular established world.
What advice would you give to a school producing Being Bianca?
If I had to label the genre of this play, I would call it a farce.
For me, the challenge of a farce is variety, and I think that's the fun challenge of Being Bianca: The Semi-Complete Guide.
As a writer, I looked for a thousand different ways to manifest Bianca's weirdness. Directors and actors should perpetuate that search. Vocally, physically, in costume, set, music - Bianca and those who inhabit her world should be as idiosyncratic and surprising as possible.
So, to those preparing this play - get ready to play! Memorize early and explore freely how to make these characters as wacky as possible. (Within the boundaries of the established world, of course.)
ABOUT WRITING
And some general questions... You are an extremely prolific writer. How long does it take you to write a play? How many plays do you write a year?
First off, I'm pleased that you consider me "extremely prolific," but I don't believe that label myself. A lot of the time, I feel like a "slacker" because I haven't written enough. The actual writing of a draft of a play, once I have reached the stage when I'm ready to write a draft, probably takes about two to three weeks, for a one-act. But the entire process, from inception of an idea to completion of a solid draft - that time could vary from a month to several years. For the past five or so years, I have been averaging 10 plays a year.
For me, it's extremely hard to answer "Where do my plays come from" because everyone wants to know of this specific place where there are ideas lined up on a shelf and I pull them off like at Walmart. When in reality, the answer is "I have an unhealthily overactive imagination that often keeps me up at night." Which of course no one wants to hear! How do you answer the question, "Where do your ideas come from?" Do you have a shelf?
A writer filters the world through the lens of his writing. He wears writer-colored contact lenses at all times.
Everything could be the germ of a play - both what is happening externally in the "real" world and what is happening internally in the writer's thoughts. In concrete terms, my "shelf" is the collection of manila folders with bad working titles on the tabs, the ones I have shoved in my duffel bag and in a box, the ones with single pieces of paper in them with perhaps a paragraph or two describing a scene or a snatch of dialogue.
Otherwise - and I say this as much because as it's pithy as anything else - my shelf is myself.
Do you have a favourite play of all the ones you've written?
No. My favorite play is the one I am working on at any given time. We love what we serve, so when I am serving the needs of a particular idea, I am in love with it. Once it is done and making its way in the world, I am still fond of it, but not in the passionate way I was while creating it.
One final comment...
All of the above is accurate to the best of my knowledge at the present moment. But the present moment is, by nature, momentary, and if you ask me again tomorrow, I might have discovered where I was wrong. And if you ask me again the next day, I might have discovered that I was actually more right a year ago. Such is life, I have heard.
Moving / Still
These two short plays can be performed separately but thematically have enough of a link that they could be performed together.
MOVING
Movinglooks at five best friends as one of them prepares for a date. But Darcy is keeping secrets about the guy she's dating and it's only a matter of time before everything explodes. In Still, Nate and Caroline used to be the Fun Couple: nicknames, silly catchphrases and secret handshakes. But there's a problem: Nate doesn't want to grow up, and Caroline already has.
For me, these plays are all about the characters. I love these characters! I'm such a sucker for interesting flawed characters. I hope everyone else is too, I guess. I'll never be a plot first writer...
The girls in Moving are introduced in a rapid-fire overlapping monologue - stereotypical teenage girl talk. I wanted to show these girls as everyone probably sees them: a bit shallow, talkative without substance, few cares, few thoughts on the world at large. My aim was then to show the heart of each: even the most flighty of girls is not a cardboard cutout!
I had written Still first so I knew that Moving would be called "Moving" before I had written a word. Sometimes that works, sometimes it can be a hindrance to write a play around a title.
I also knew that I wanted a lot of fast talk in the play to go with the theme. I had a clear image that the play would open with the girls basically speed talking, all at once. When I first heard the play read aloud the speed talking sections went so well! It was one of those moments where I jumped up and down with playwright glee. I get such a rush when something in my head translates to paper and then translates to flesh and blood (it doesn't always happen, as Sweep Under Rug shows...)
It took a couple of tries though to get the story going in the direction I wanted. This process went title, then characters, then theme and then story.
I started the play on three or four different directions. Darcy is a girl who lies about the age of her new date. He's much older and not only that, he thinks she's older too. I have a strong memory of someone I knew in school who always wanted the next level: When she was in eighth grade, she wanted to be in high school. When she was in high school she wanted to be in university. In university she wanted to be out in the world. She always thought that the next level was better than what she had, which essentially meant that she was never happy. It was a great starting point for Darcy's character and a great conflict for the others to deal with.
A lovely moment for me in the writing process happened last summer and I walked by a house that had a rock in the driveway. Underneath the rock was a piece of paper with the word FREE written on it. Because there were other items around, I figured out that it wasn't the rock that was free but something that was once beside the rock. But what if a character thought it was the rock that was free? And that opened up her mind to a new way of thinking? A whole monologue burst open in my mind as I was standing there, and it was one of the few times I didn't have my notepad with me! I had to write the monologue on a used napkin, and the back of a couple of receipts. Note to self: never forget notepad!
STILL
Still is a couple of years old. I knew when I wrote it that it would be good for Theatrefolk, but it was a bit too short to be on its own. It's a two-hander with mature material: a past couple sees each other the day before they leave for college and have to relive the pregnancy of the girl from the year before. The "Still" from the title comes from the fact that the baby turned out to be stillborn, interwoven with the fact that the incident caused the girl to grow up real fast, and the boy remained childish and irresponsible.
I knew that it needed a companion piece and it took awhile to find it.
Carolyn (the girl in the play) has such sorrow in her, she makes my heart hurt. In the play she tries to be the girl she was when she was with Nate but realizes it just won't work. My favourite line in the play is in reference to this. She says, "You can't dip your feet in the same stream twice."
Change is something that every human being goes through; there's no stranger feeling than when you see someone from your past and you realize you've changed and they haven't. Change or the resistance to change also makes for a nice dramatic conflict.
I look forward to seeing how these two plays do. They both definitely have a variety of interesting characters to play. I think they are solid competition pieces but we'll see!
The First Herald Angel
John Donald O'Shea, author of Little Nell and the Mortage Foreclosure sent this Christmas tale to us recently and we were captivated by the script. On the First Christmas Eve, a shepherd finds a small child in the hills surrounded Bethlehem. To the shepherd's surprise, the child says she is an angel and is practicing so she can herald in Jesus' birth. The shepherd believes the child, while his wife is skeptical. I asked Don to talk about the play.
What was the inspiration for writing The First Herald Angel?
In the early 1990s, I was very active as a Director and a Board Member of the Quad City Music Guild. Some years before, the Guild had begun producing a winter show as a fundraiser. At first, perhaps because they were novel, the winter shows yielded well, but in time net revenues dropped. I suggested that we instead stage mini-shows - perhaps melodramas. The Board liked the idea, put me in charge, and told me to find a melodrama.
At that time, I sat down and wrote the first part of Little Nell and the Mortgage Foreclosure. The Board liked it, and I began booking it around town. It was an immediate success. But as Christmas time came, I realized we needed a mini-show with a Christmas theme. So I decided to write one.
My first effort was a piece called The Little Herald Angel. That play, which I interspersed with traditional carols, was somewhat similar to the The First Herald Angel, which I wrote a few years later. Because the Little Herald Angel proved successful and was done so much, we needed a new Christmas piece for those organizations who had already seen The Little Herald Angel. The Little Herald Angel, together with my Catholic grade school education served as the inspiration for my later play, The First Herald Angel. After all, the nuns had taught us about angels, guardian angels, archangels and herald angels. Somewhere along the way I asked myself, "Where did Herald Angels come from?" The First Herald Angel was my attempt to answer that question in a light hearted, non-theological, way.
When you submitted the piece, you mentioned that it's been performed many times for your music guild. Has the play changed at all over time?
The play itself has changed little since I first wrote it. The music has changed greatly. As originally written, the play contained my original song "Come Sons of Men" as well as a number of traditional carols. Over time I retained "Come Sons of Men," but deleted all the carols. In their place, I inserted a number of other pieces I had written. When I submitted the play to Theatrefolk, I deleted all musical numbers, except "Come Sons of Men" which has always played well, and of which I am very proud.
What I especially like about the play is that character express views on both sides of the story. There are those with ultimate faith and those who question. Was that your intention from the beginning?
You have put your finger on my intent. I wanted the Shepherd to be a man in search of a savior and a man who wanted to believe. I wanted to contrast him with a wife for whom day to day matters came first; someone not inclined to believe. ("Mary vs. Martha") Micah was meant to be an utterly sincere character who "men of good will" would instinctively trust. The Lion was meant to be comic, but a character who would make the prophecies come true ("The Lion would lie down with the Lamb.")
I also like the humor in the play. What do you like more, writing comedic plays, or drama?
I like writing, period. I enjoy crafting serious political articles. I like writing theological tracts. I especially enjoy combining religious themes with political themes in dramatic plays. That being said, I always come back to comedy and farce.
In my most recent dramatic piece, which I have not yet submitted for publication, The Gates of Hell, I deal with a young priest who runs afoul of his bishop for giving a heretical homily. The play deals with the tensions between the conservative traditional Catholic hierarchy, and newly ordained priest who comes, in his troubles, to understand that heretics become heretics only because they are men of deep faith and deep conviction. Drama gives me a chance to write of things of surpassing beauty.
At the same time, I take great satisfaction in writing and directing a play like The Day Ma's Boys Done Went to Town to Rob the Bank Again, a comic farce set in the hills of Arkansas.
For me, writing is creation. I find the creative process very satisfying. I somehow get an original idea, and turn it into a play. I have not yet attempted an adaptation.
What's your favourite moment in the play?
My favorite moment in the play is the moment when Micah sends the Lion with James to lie down with the lamb - when a "troublesome" prophecy is fulfilled. And it gave me a unique ending with a twist.
Do you have any tips for schools producing the play?
If I were producing the play, I would try to cast actors who portray great sincerity as James, Micah and Asreal. James must be a good man, who knows he isn't perfect, but seeks his savior. Micah should be sincere, warm and clever. Asreal should be supportive and genuinely kind. The Lion is not a bad guy as lions go, but like all lions, he will eat whatever fresh meat he comes upon. He is a lion who is past is prime, and who looks for easy meals. He is the comic relief character. Susanna is a carping wife, who always wants "more." But even if she had "more," she would not be satisfied.
I think the set should be a night scene (backdrop) in the hills with a small village in the distance. A few rocks and trees would complete the set. Keep it simple. Area and spot lighting could be used to great effect. The feeling should be "Christmas eve." That being said, when we did the show as a mini-show we used no set. We set the mood with basic costumes for the Shepherd and his wife, for the lion, and for the angels.
The First Herald Angel is due for release in May, 2007.
The Fried Kobassa
I can't help it, the title of J. Robert Wilkins' newest play makes me giggle, and every time the Inspector says FRIED KOBASSA in the play I burst out laughing. The play is simple but effective: Inspector Kupusta is hired to find the Camp Cook's missing Kobassa. He'll leave no stone unturned. Well, maybe he'll leave a lot of stones unturned... Hilarity ensues!
Ok, I have to ask, what made you decide that "Fried Kobassa" was the missing object? Did you try any other foods or did you know right from the beginning?
I am married to a Ukrainian and the small Alberta town where I taught has many Ukrainians, so the choice was obvious to me. I knew that the student who was going to play the detective was one half Ukrainian and could easily do a Ukrainian accent. When I was originally thinking about the story I saw an ad on TV for the movie "The Pink Panther." The leap from a diamond to kobassa was a no-brainer!
I think you have an easy, relaxed way of writing comedic dialogue. Is it easy for you? What do you find easier to write - comedies or drama?
Most of my writing is comedy, but strangely enough my most frequently performed play is a drama. Comedy probably is the easiest for me, especially if it involves teens. I taught 37 years in junior-senior high schools. I was fully immersed in teen culture on a daily basis. I appreciate teen thinking, mannerisms and speech, and sense of humor. I have often read that you should write about what you know. I think I know teens.
I would never say writing is easy. Some days it is, but most of my days are spent in a creative void. I find it challenging to take my personal experiences with teens and put them into the context of an entertaining story.
How long did it take you to write the play? Any difficulties? You wrote the play for a variety show, what was that process like?
The play took about five days to write. I had to write a story that incorporated a number of individual variety show acts. The first rehearsal of the show took place about 10 days after the auditions. I needed to get the script to the director, cast, and technicians as soon as possible before that first rehearsal.
I certainly wrote the play with some specific actors in mind. From the very beginning, I knew who was going to play Kapusta, Cook, and the cheerleaders. I knew their capabilities. In the case of the cheerleaders, the girls had established their characters in a previous show. It was very easy to expand the characters in this play. I had often witnessed the actor who played Kapusta hamming it up with his classmates using a variety of accents. I knew he was capable of performing anything I wrote for him.
The writing was made easier by three factors. First, I had established the setting and general storyline before the auditions. Second, I was only one year removed from the school setting, so I was still familiar with the talents of most of the performers. Third, the setting of the play in a summer camp for teens made it easy to incorporate the many different types of performances.
As a side note, I also wrote the script for this year's variety show, but I reversed the process. I completed the play well before the auditions. I had to fit the variety show acts into the existing play. The task was no more difficult or easy than the way I did it for The Fried Kobassa. I wrote the script knowing that I would have to adapt it. Again, I made sure that I had a setting and story that could accommodate a variety of performances. The adaptation of this year's script took about three days.
What's your favourite part of the play?
I am not sure I have a favorite part. The play was so much fun to write because of the wacky characters. I really liked writing Kapusta and the cheerleaders. I was able to get into their heads and become them as I wrote. When that happens, it is a very satisfying experience.
When you submitted the play, we felt it was funny, but a bit long - we knew that it would make an excellent competition play. You came back with cuts almost instantly. What was that process like? Did you find anything hard to cut?
The cutting process was very easy. In the original, I had to incorporate some actors that were part of the variety show but not absolutely necessary to the story. Once I had identified who these characters were, the rewrite was easy. (I have recently gone through the same process for two plays I submitted to a publisher of plays for seniors. Again, identification of the "extraneous" characters made the rewrite very easy. I think these experiences will help me write plays that are more focused and faster paced.)
Any tips for the actor playing Inspector Kapusta? He's such a great part!
Kapusta is what he is - basically intellectually challenged! He knows it, but does not want everyone else to know. In many ways he is still a teenager. He acts like he knows everything, but deep down he knows he doesn't. In his own simple way, he tries to put on a good show. I think an accent is a key to his character, but the actor must be careful that the words are understood. His look is as important to his character as his words. He needs to have more of a farm look than an urban look. The actor who played Kapusta wore the following:
- trousers (not jeans)
- suspenders
- a plaid shirt
- a newsboy type cap or old style felt farmer's cap (a modern style baseball cap does not fit his character)
- a light trench coat (worn open)
- rubber boots (the black kind worn by most farmers)
Anything else you'd like to add?
This is not a play with a life altering message. It was after all originally a variety show whose purpose was to showcase student talent and to provide an hours worth of live entertainment to the community. To me, the play is all about having a good time. I enjoyed writing it, the actors told me they had fun performing it, and I am told that it received positive comments from audience members. What more could I ask!
The Fried Kobassa is due for release in May, 2007.
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Inspired by J. Robert Wilkins' Variety Show, we're going to look at putting on a Variety Show in your school!
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