Spread the Love: Oddball by Lindsay Price

This week on Spread the Love, Lindsay talks about Oddball, a vignette play.

Transcript

Welcome to this week’s Spread the Love. This week I’m going to talk about Oddball. Oddball is a vignette play, short scenes on a theme, and I think the theme is fairly obvious. The odd, the mildy freakish and the slightly left of centre, left of normal. What I like about this play is that it was a lot of fun to write. I tell students all the time that theatre has to be extraordinary in some way, even a light hearted comedy. So, we have not just a character with one odd job she’s got 27. We have the odd sock that has not just gone awry, it has been purposefully eaten by a pouty dryer. You get what I’m saying: odd socks, odd jobs, odd situations, odd boys, they’re all in here.

What I love about the play is its origin story. We had a Florida teacher, Deb Barnun, who we must give a shout out to, Deb I know you’re getting better and stronger every day, and she was looking for a very specific type of play for her students that had very specific limitations: cast size, experience level, what costumes, what set, whether they could put music between or not. And whenever I hear that there are limitations, my ears perk up and my radar goes up. I love having to write around the “can’t” in a situation. The first go round with Oddball was for Deb’s specifications and then we modified it for the Theatrefolk audience at large, and here it is ready for you to partake in. Lots of fun, lots of odd, just my cup of tea. That’s it for Spread the Love.