Talking about a play

On Thursday, I was blessed to go and visit with the cast of the new production of The Mayfair Affair - a dedicated group of high school students at The Wesleyan School in Norcross, GA, under the direction of my good friend Steve Broyles.  I got to see the set under construction and the first scene being rehearsed.

But most of our time was spent having the actors ask me questions about the play, what something meant, what I had in mind regarding a particular action or character.  What I found was that some of those questions I had answers to, others less so.  Good questions, all, but some of them I really had to dig into the recesses of "what DID i mean by that..." to come up with an answer.  I think eventually I did come up with answers, and reasonable ones at that.  I was happy that a number of questions I was able to divert to the director - it's about what he thinks will play best opposite what other people are also playing.

But I'm continuing to understand the idea of farce as a comedy machine - the difficulty in playing it is turning off the improv impulse after rehearsals are over in favor of supporting the big laughs as you've rehearsed them.  You can get an extra laugh at just about any time in a production - but it will hurt the overall work unless the laughs help an audience carry through.  They have to get the information they need (exposition and development) and the rhythm of the play must be maintained in order to connect the info to the big surprises and revelations later in the script.  And in the climactic moment of the play, realistic character response and processing of new information (revelation) only slows down the rhythm of the machine.

I can't wait to go back and see the production in October.

Internationally produced playwright

Last night (or thereabouts - with the time difference), two short plays of mine - called East Wind Unfair and Peach Blossoms Fall - were produced at Guizhou University in China.  This was a joint project between students of mine at Belhaven, and Chinese students under the leadership of my good friend Charlie Pepiton, who is in China wrapping up a two-year stint with the Peace Corps.

Our assignment was to write a cycle of 10 plays using the ancient poem called The Phoenix Hairpin by Lu You.  We broke the poem into 8 parts, wrote a short play based on just that phrase, then wrote an opener and a closer - between 4 students and myself, we each wrote two plays.  The plays were then given to 10 students in China, who cast and rehearsed them.  Last night was the performance (in front of an audience of about 500, I'm told).  Hopefully, I'll be able to post photos (or maybe video) at some point.

It's been an exciting project, and certainly a resume-builder. :)  Very proud to have been a part of this.

Workshop Production scheduled

The premiere workshop of my new farce, The Mayfair Affair, will be produced at Belhaven University in February of 2012.  My good friend, John Maxwell, has agreed to serve as the director for the show, even though up until now, the play has only been a series of outlines, and one really terrible draft that has to be almost completely set aside for the next pass.

Yesterday, I started the new draft, a 12 page rewrite of the opening scene - a much better version (if I do say so myself).  The hope is that I can get enough pages of this draft done in the next few weeks that we can cast the show and have an initial read with them in place, so I will have time to do at least one more draft, if not two or three, before rehearsals begin at the start of the spring semester.

I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to be in rehearsal as the playwright again, where I can put all my focus on the script, and leave the directing to someone else.  I found that process to work well for me during the staged reading of Anathema at Square Top Repertory in Colorado - made a lot of progress in just one week.