Playwrighting Week 10

It was actors and read through time for the first six plays. Everyone was nervous and had brought in their rewritten drafts for the actors in multiple copies. Daryll, the stand up comic went first with his play about The Conceptual Artist - Grayson and his assistant Helena. Daryll had chosed Anna a professional actress to read the role of Helena while he read Grayson. They had been e-mailing each other all week in preparation for the performance. Which was definitely the stand out of the evening. My play now titled The Portrait Artist was apparently not a 10 minute play but ten minutes of a play of much larger scope. I had also still included the filmic scenes that would be difficult for a low budget theatre company to do. Too many props and the need for the main character to also be artistic on stage drawing and painting etc. Robert listened to the actors read his play about Mavis and Gerald who have experienced the loss of the Temperance Society's membership money when Gerald gambles it away on a horse called Certainty in a race. This time his play was much tighter and there were more laughs from the audience. Evan's actors read his play about two Special Forces opperatives - a strong repartee between two characters that had a great ending. It was a polished redraft and also very good. Caz's play set in a dodgem race track was massacred by the actors who somehow loused up the subtext and comic aspects. We had heard her read out the draft the week before and this memory kept our listening on track.
Next week we hear the final set of plays read out by the actors. This is the end of our Beginners Course in Playwrighting. Some of the things I have learnt are:

• think of what the audience will be left with at the end of acts and coming in and out of intervals
• include the information the audience needs to know up front
• keep in mind what is at stake and the motivations of each character
• use rich detail of mundane tasks to create subtext
• you can always try the transitive verb exercise within a draft if you loose the plot
• keep the dialogue happening without the needs for lots of stage direction
• include silences when they amplify the dialogue
• give minor characters roles of substance
• don't keep a character off stage for a long time as they will loose their mojo
• bring important details forward in a script and use other characters to question them
• give the main character a likeable aspect for the audience to enjoy them
• end with how you want the audience to go off into the night

Well - till next week and the last blog entry on this course. I hope you have enjoyed following it as much as I have attending it.