TEN-MINUTE PLAYS: comedy

“Aimee” to me is a statement that the real is sometimes better communicated through the absurd. As we have frequently reminded each other and ourselves in class, everything has been done before, everything is an adaptation of something, and nothing is really original. When we come to this realization, we have a few options: 1) accept that our story will not be original and go with it anyway, 2) try to forget that we just realized we cannot truly be original and live in denial while writing something we keep telling ourselves is original, 3) take a story/plot/idea that has been done before and do something really absurd with it, thus improving our chances of it appearing more original, etc. Erin Blackwell chose option 3 and made the subject of love, a well-used subject, new and interesting by setting up such an absurd situation. This taught me to think outside the box, a problem I have been having with every assignment. “Aimee” is helpful to me for taking an idea and then coming at it from an unusual and unexpected angle.

As I said, nothing is truly original. Yet there are always new ways of saying things because everyone has at least a slightly different take, a slightly different tone or voice than someone else. And beyond that, even the stories that are overdone can always be done more. Love, love, love; such is life. But is it everyone’s life? “Anything For You” got me thinking about how love means something different, well, to everyone, but also something different within varying socioeconomic statuses. It means something very different to someone who has grown up in a tiny, economically tragic coal mining town in Tennessee than it does to someone in San Francisco going to a college prep school, and so on and so forth. I’m not entirely sure what love means to these two women, but I was reminded after reading this that love can seem to be an exhausted subject, but never in fact will be exhausted as a result of its infinity.

“Aimee” and “Anything For You” demonstrate that you don’t need ‘drama’ to get a point across. I like how real and believable these are—they make use of comedy to still communicate an important point, idea, or story.

“Duet For Bear and Dog” was not particularly helpful to me. I can see that it may be funny in production, but it is hard for me to pick out an actual point here.“The Philadelphia” was more successful to me than “Duet For Bear and Dog” at being strange and overtly funny and still having a point.

Interactions between friends or any people who have an established relationship are most effective to me. With enough attention, these interactions easily present back-story and character development without handing either of these to the audience on a platter. Dialogue between friends is more dynamic than that between strangers and so by virtue of having the characters know one another, you automatically get more interesting, complex characters and a more interesting and complex story.

TEN-MINUTE PLAYS

“A Bowl of Soup”

Having Eddie talk the whole time gives us so much more information about Rob and Eddie’s relationship than if Rob had been participating in the conversation the whole time. It simultaneously provides back-story and shows us the rhythm and habit of their relationship. I learned from this play that sometimes a lack of something can say more than the something itself.

However, since Eddie’s voice is the only one we hear for the vast majority of the play, it needs to be especially believable and convincing. From the character description, we know that Eddie is, at the very least, in his late twenties, but probably in his thirties. He often sounded childish and did not convince me that he is an adult. Perhaps this is part of his character.

“That Midnight Rodeo”

“That Midnight Rodeo” also makes superb use of the unsaid. Particularly by using the close relationship between a husband and wife, Price is very successful in portraying the idea that connections between people do not always require excessive words. Contrary to “A Bowl of Soup,” where the babbling of one character illustrates clearly the relationship between the two characters, “That Midnight Rodeo” uses short, concise statements from Bo and Cindy to illustrate their particular relationship.

I learned that revealing little bits at a time of what is going on keeps the reader interested and still surprises us at the end. The ambiguous ending is exceptionally intriguing.

“The Man Who Couldn’t Dance”

There is a fine line between integrating background information casually, as part of the story, and shoving the background information down the audience’s throat. Mostly “The Man Who Couldn’t Dance” does the former, but a couple of places miss that boat. I learned from this that not everything can be perfect and there may just be some imperfections, even in a finished product.

Rhetorical questions are handy tools for back-story, character development, etc.

“The Roads That Lead Here”

This is a brilliant play of dialogue. The plot develops so seamlessly as the brothers go back and forth about their findings and contributions to their ‘project’. And once Jason joins, he facilitates the additional necessary back-story as seamlessly as Xander and Marcus had been setting it up before he enters.

Like “A Bowl of Soup,” “The Roads That Lead Here” gains a great deal with the surprise ending. It is unexpected, yet also somewhat expected based on Jason’s hints about their father not wanting them to continue their project. The play is brilliant.

What I learned from all the plays: ten-minute plays are very short…and yet a lot can happen and a lot of information can be conveyed in them.

Learning About Playwriting by Reading 'Fences'

As we have discussed in class, voice is difficult to capture and even more difficult to make distinguishable from character to character. Words we write on a page sound different when they are read, and performed, out loud. The characters in Fences have a very distinct way of speaking in comparison with someone we would run into today, which does something for discerning them from the everyday person.

In developing the characters, their beliefs, and their back-stories, August creates frequent arguments among the characters as a tactic for giving the audience this necessary information. Troy is always griping about this or that and with Rose, Bono, Lyons, and Cory to banter with him back and forth, the audience learn about Troy’s character, his job, his relationship with his sons, and his opinions on baseball and white people excluding black people from sports in general. With Bono present while Troy interacts with Rose, Wilson shows the audience their relationship by showing Bono their relationship. The interactions about jobs, school, drinking, death, etc. give us the present, and how Troy is now. For a look into Troy’s past, August uses Troy’s sons as ignorant characters to whom Troy wants to tell a story. Teaching his sons lessons through his own experiences, Troy gives the audience information about why he is who he is, and why he thinks the way he does.

From reading Fences, I learned that the interactions between characters are really the most useful tool for playwriting. The idea of a play is to tell a story, to portray to the audience a situation/life/moral/idea, etc. Your characters are your number one tool because they speak; they use their words, their fictional knowledge, their fictional pasts, their fictional emotions, to tell and show the audience your story. The key, of course, is to make sure you, as the writer, can put your words together in such a way that when your characters get on stage and start saying those words, the words do what you intended and tell your story out of the mouths of your characters. That’s the hard part.