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Devising and Moment Work with Barbara Pitts McAdams

Devising and Moment Work with Barbara Pitts McAdams

Episode 182: Devising and Moment Work with Barbara Pitts McAdams

Barbara Pitts McAdams is a company member of the Tectonic Theatre Project and was an original cast member/co-creator of The Laramie Project. The Laramie Project is a devised, interview-based play about the beating and death of Matthew Shepard. Since the play was published it’s been in production somewhere in the world, every day for 17 years. Listen in as we talk devising and moment work in The Laramie Project as well as with high school students.

Show Notes

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Drama Teacher Podcast brought to you by Theatrefolk – the Drama Teacher Resource Company.

I’m Lindsay Price.

Hello! I hope you’re well. Thanks for listening!

This is Episode 182 and you can find any links to this episode in the show notes which are at Theatrefolk.com/episode182.

All right, guys.

Today is a very cool conversation which I am excited, I got tingles, I got my goosebumps, I am thrilled to share this with you. It’s a conversation which I could never imagine happening and the fact that it came together, well, that just made my day, my month, and my year.

My guest, Barbara Pitts McAdams, was an original cast member and co-creator of The Laramie Project with Tectonic Theater Project. Yes, as I’m sure you all know, The Laramie Project is a devised interview-based play about the death of gay university of Wyoming student, Matthew Shepard.

Barbara is also one of Tectonics’ master teachers of moment work – the devising technique they use to create original work. Barb devices with a lot of high schools and colleges – actually, that’s kind of how she found us. So, of course, we’re going to talk about devising with high school students.

Enough of me! You don’t want to listen to me! Let’s get to the conversation! Let’s do it!

LINDSAY: Hello everyone!

I am speaking to Barbara Pitts McAdams.

Hello, Barb!

BARBARA: Hello, Lindsay!

LINDSAY: First of all, tell everybody in the world where you are.

BARBARA: I am in New York City. That’s where I make my home and where my theatre company, Tectonic Theater Project, is based. But I do a lot of teaching at high schools and colleges around the country. So, I get around.

LINDSAY: Yeah, you’re actually going very much around. You’re going to Vietnam soon, too, aren’t you?

BARBARA: You know, as I was getting my computer ready for this and saw that it was less than two weeks away, I got a fat little lump in my stomach. “Oh, boy, I better open my guide book, figure out what I need to know!” I’ll be working with a Pan-Asian high school theatre conference so that’s my favorite way to travel – to be hosted by people who live and work in a place and get to be brought into their culture and see what I can do to add to their conversations.

LINDSAY: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned this right off the bat so we’ll get into this, too. You are a member of Tectonic Theater Project which I know that many of our listeners will connect to The Laramie Project.

BARBARA: Right.

LINDSAY: How long have you been a member of Tectonic?

BARBARA: I guess since about 1999.

The company had made one trip to Laramie, Wyoming, a month after Matthew was attacked in 1998. Somebody else was scheduled to be in the first sort of workshop of the interview material. Then, she got on a Broadway play and I had been working with company member, Leigh Fondakowski, on her interview-based play which was called I Think I Like Girls.

And so, Moisés and company had seen that. They’re very supportive of each other’s work. Leigh said, “Well, what about Barb? You liked her in my piece.” He said, “Yes, yes, bring her!”

Just for the students who might be out there listening, I mean, I was very well-aware of Tectonic Theater Project and who they were because I had made a show everyone kept comparing to Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde which was the play that preceded The Laramie Project and actually was so successful. There was enough money in the bank – which is such a rare thing for a theatre company – that they could take ten people to Laramie, Wyoming, and conduct this research without any inkling of whether or not there was really a play to follow.

I had seen Gross Indecency. When Leigh asked me if I would come join them in the room, I knew that was the room I had been waiting to get into as a theatre artist. So, I moved a lot of stuff around to make sure I didn’t miss that opportunity and it’s been a good fit ever since.

LINDSAY: Did you know anything about the specific project you were getting into? Did you know what they were doing? Or was it just, “I want to work with Tectonic. Whatever you’re doing, I am walking in the door”?

BARBARA: Well, it was both. Matthew Shepard was attacked in October of 1998. The company went out there in November of 1998. And then, the first workshop was just after January 1st in 1999.

The whole world was sort of holding their breath in the four days that he was in a coma before he passed. You know, I was definitely aware of what had happened and I was aware that Leigh had gone out there, sort of vaguely – you know, I wasn’t really in the loop on that.

But, as soon as she asked if I would be in the room, I mean, when we had read I Think I Like Girls in Moisés’ living room some time before that and I was sitting there staring at the actors who had made Gross Indecency – including Michael Emerson who people know from Lost now and Person of Interest – and just how generous they were with each other and asking, “What do you need, Leigh? How can we support you?” You know, I just felt like, “Wow! That’s the kind of artistic home anybody craves.” When I was going to have the opportunity to be in their creative process, I felt like, “Oh, my gosh! It’s the overnight miracle that took five years in New York to get to.”

LINDSAY: Well, that’s how it is with everything, isn’t it? It’s the ten years of work to become the overnight sensation.

BARBARA: Yeah.

LINDSAY: Tectonics’ creative process – in terms of how you make a play or how you create a theatrical experience – is very unique and I’ve read a lot and just sort of heard about that process. It’s not devising; you call it “moment work.”

BARBARA: Right, and I think we’ve come to accept that umbrella term – devising. I think a lot of us who have various ways into creating work, we’ve sort of all agreed, “Okay, I guess we’re calling this devising.” But, you know, devising is a little bit of a troublesome label because it’s really defined by what it’s not. You know, it’s not a process generally that starts with a playwright alone in a room. It’s everything that’s not that. It can really take on a lot of different forms. You know, sometimes, when I’m devising with kids, I’m using writing prompts that have nothing to do with moment work. But the nice thing about moment work, as we’ve come to call it, is that it allows you a way to really commune with whatever your hunch or your subject matter is without having to know where the pieces are going to fit.

If you make a little moment that is about a use of a prop or a lighting effect you think might be cool, you could be talking about the kinds of forms you think your play might take. Maybe you think you want to use puppets but you’re not sure. You can make moments to explore that so that you can have a conversation in the rehearsal room with the work right in front of you in three dimensions rather than sitting around, thinking, “Well, what if we did this? What if we did that?” actually, putting it on its feet and see what really resonates when you get into the room. You know, with a few people, I’ve done moment work with as few as two other people – just exploring a subject that we weren’t sure if there was a play that might be generated from it. It allows you a way in without feeling like you have to know where you’re going to get to.

LINDSAY: Right. Well, it’s process. You’re not thinking about the product which is very interesting when we talk about creation work with students. They’re very product-driven and it’s for good or for ill. That’s how they deal with all of their other classes. It’s a product – it’s an essay; it’s a test; and the product is how they get their mark. It’s interesting to go in the other direction. Like, “Let’s not worry about where we’re going. Let’s worry about the moment.”

BARBARA: Right, and there always is that awkward transition. I’m working at Drew University right now in Madison, New Jersey, with an old friend and colleague, Lisa Brenner, who has brought me in now twice to work with the senior capstone to create a piece. And so, for a whole semester, we’re keeping the editor out of the room, we’re generating a lot of ideas, and now we’ve shifted more into now we’re really putting it on the page and figuring out what stays and what goes and the editor is very much the centre of the process and we’ll still go back and tease out moments as needed. But that shift from the freeform “every idea is a good idea, we’re not even going to worry about what isn’t working because we’re just going to keep gravitating toward what we love” to “that’s out, that’s out, that’s out, this is in.” That’s a really awkward transition.

Also, in our process with Tectonic, there’s always one central director devisor who’s going to have the last word. You can use moment work to make collective work but I hope you have a lot of time because making work by committee is much more time-consuming and sometimes can water down a really strong vision.

I think, with Laramie, one of the things that makes that play so strong and so enduring is that we were all enfranchised to be kind of character advocates or as we called it “actor dramaturgs.” You know, it was also before Google Docs and things like that so we really had to have these big binders and really be the dramaturgs for a certain portion of the material just to keep track of it all.

But we would all really fight to the bitter end for the material or the characters that we thought needed to have a voice in the piece. I think that makes it a very far-flung portrait of Laramie, Wyoming. We all had the area that we were sort of interested in. There’s something to be said for that.

In the end, the way we worked, there was usually one really strong director who gets to make those final decisions.

LINDSAY: I think that brings out a very specific and an important point when it comes to – however you want to call it – creating a work, devising, or whatever. You make a good point that there is a time for free-for-all and there’s a time for someone to go, “Okay, free-for-all is done. We need to make decisions.” And then, in the middle, that someone needs to fight for the work. So, we have free-for-all, we have fight for voices, and then we have decision. I know that’s very simplistic what I’ve just said but in terms of the framework of where you guys are going?

BARBARA: Yeah, I think so, and I think, any time you put up a new piece, you have to lock it at some point so people can do their best work. If your actors are just feeling completely insecure about where they’re at, you’re not going to know if the piece is working so you have to lock it at some point so that everybody can do the work they need to do.

We all start out as generators of material – whether we come out as an actor, a designer, a dramaturg – anybody in our process can get up and make a moment – including the director. You have an impulse, put it up, and then, eventually, in our process, we all kind of revert back to whatever we were brought in to do – whether it’s to act or assistant direct or house manage – whatever it might be. That’s always sort of organic falling away as well. Like, some people feel like they need to drop out of the creation phase of it sooner than others in order to then be able to focus on being the actor or being the designer. But it’s a really fun way to work. I’ve been working on the moment work book with Moisés Kaufman, our artistic director, and there’s five other collaborators who also do some of this moment work teaching.

I was realizing that, in college, we had to take a lighting design class and we got one of those little templates that you can trace an L or whatever those other lighting instruments are called, but I don’t think I ever got my hands on any actual lighting instruments whereas, when we teach moment work, we bring in some clip lights and we’ll really play around with how people bring interesting other kinds of lights – like laser lights, Christmas lights, whatever it might be – and we experiment with what light can do to create narrative. I thought, “Gosh, if I had ever been allowed to really manipulate lights, who knows? I might be a lighting designer today.” That’s one of the things about moment work – you get to try on all those hats.

LINDSAY: What I read – and I think this is very exciting just in terms of students and text – is that the notion of all elements of the stage are on equal footing as text.

BARBARA: Exactly.

LINDSAY: So, lights are equal to text and sound and costume. When I read that, the first thing that came to my mind was how many students I know who are deathly afraid of writing – like, they’re afraid.

BARBARA: Yeah. Me, too.

LINDSAY: If you can get into their head that text is above – like, we’re supposed to all and I am a playwright too and I do believe respect the text, that is an important factor. But, if we have students who are working together to create work, there is a pretty huge stumbling block if we all have to work towards text. But, if we have other things that are as equal as text, it just must be exciting.

BARBARA: Right. This play that I was commissioned to devise with the students at Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire, we couldn’t really black out the space where we were doing some initial moment work. So, I kind of skipped over lighting and we knew it was going to be the fall school play. In the end, the kids weren’t really going to operate the lights most likely anyway.

So, I thought, “Okay, well, I’ll focus on sound then.” Because the theme was about the masks we wear as opposed to being our authentic selves and, going up in the fall, I thought, “Okay, I think this play, I don’t know what it’s going to be but it’s going to start with a Halloween party and then things are going to go very wrong at the Halloween party.” So, I had them make sound moments.

That whole opening of the play ends up everybody’s cellphone notifications are going off. There’s a whole soundscape of cellphone notifications. There’s the soundscape of the songs that the kids wanted to play at the Halloween party they would want to be at. I had people make moments about Halloween sounds.

It turned out, for example, that one of the actors would scream a really loud bloodcurdling scream and we found a way to use that scream three times in the play and have that vocabulary of the scream be different each time – like, serve a different purpose, narratively.

I didn’t even realize that until we were getting into the final weeks of rehearsal and, you know, the TD was saying, “We usually do sound last.” I said, “But this whole first ten or fifteen minutes of the play is sound-driven – really, sound cues tell the actors what to do next.” So, we had to go in and record all that stuff early. You know what? It made their tech in some ways much easier than usual because everybody knew where to go and what to be looking at because they had been already rehearsing with the sound as though the sound was part of the dialogue, you know?

LINDSAY: Yeah. You know, any time you can take an element away like the stress of tech or the stress of writing a play, it just opens doors. I know students that it’s easy and it’s a very knee-jerk reaction to go, “I’m not creative,” and to say, “I can’t do this.” It’ usually because it’s weighty. There’s the weight of some of this stuff that they have to do. When you can take it away or find another way through – like recording sound cues early so that everyone’s working with them – that they just are able to use their minds in an amazing and in fashions that you would just never expect.

BARBARA: Yeah, it is really fun work to do and it’s always terrifying to go into a new process and have no idea where you’re going to get to and then, somehow, theatre magic, it always ends up coming together.

LINDSAY: Taking this notion that all elements of the stage are on equal footing as the text – and I’ve also read Moisés – am I saying that right?

BARBARA: He says Moi-ses.

LINDSAY: Moisés.

BARBARA: Yeah, that you go.

LINDSAY: Excellent. Moment work is writing performances as opposed to writing text. How was it then when you were doing workshops of Laramie and you had over 200 interviews? It seems like text would be king. So, how did you go about making sure that it wasn’t and that you were doing the moment. How did you do the moment work then?

BARBARA: You know, there are always times you just need to hear the words. We usually would present some kind of a table read at the end of a workshop. We wouldn’t try to show an audience our rough draft of writing performance because it’s not going to add up if you haven’t had the context that you have in the room.

What it would really look like in the process is, let’s say, for The Laramie Project, representing the fence, do we want to build a buck fence and put that onstage or do we want to have some kind of vocabulary that is a little bit more flexible? We tried a lot of different things in rehearsals. We had one workshop that was sort of the platform workshop where the set designer built some platforms that could be easily tipped over and, when you tipped them over, the braces kind of resembled a buck fence. That was one vocabulary we explored.

Ultimately, I think it was company member, Greg Pierotti, who lined up some chairs and had some people delivering some text and they would leave as their text was finished. As the last person left, the row of chairs there, a character, Stephen Mead Johnson, the Unitarian minister, comes out and addresses the audience and says, “The fence – it’s become a pilgrimage site.”

And so, the audience’s imagination can turn that row of chairs into the fence. You know it when you see it – when you’re like, “Aha! That’s the form.” He didn’t necessarily nail all the correct text leading up to that moment.

So, the other thing to know is that, every time you’re making a moment, it’s a way to sketch. Some sketches end up being very close to the finished product. Some end up being like, “Oh, okay, I’m going to show my designer that so they can build me a more theatrical theatre-ready version of what I’m looking at.”

And so, he had sketched the form that ultimately then we could work backward to and we had tables in front of those chairs and those got peeled away so that, by the time you got to the fence, the only thing onstage were those eight chairs – the eight company members. But that’s a vocabulary we couldn’t arrive at continuing to try things. Does that make sense?

LINDSAY: Oh, absolutely! It’s that whole notion that you never arrive at the right answer straight out of the gate.

BARBARA: Very rarely.

LINDSAY: In devised work, I think particularly, again, it’s all about students getting towards that finish line and about how, no, we actually have to try different things to arrive at the most effective.

BARBARA: Right, and we always ask people to listen for when there’s an audible reaction in the room. Somebody puts up a moment and you hear an “ah!” in the room or a little laugh or a “wow!” When you get those responses, your ears prick up – like, “Okay, what just happened in the room that got some kind of a wow moment response?” And so, you work towards those moments.

You know, the nice thing about moment work is you really can’t fail at it because, if it’s not resonating, we just move on. Unless you’re a little further in the process and then you need to tweak the moments and restage them and see if they hold up, then you might rework things a lot. But, in the beginning, you can just make hundreds of moments just trying to find the right, you know, as they say, Michelangelo said when he was carving the David, that all he had to do was find the right marble and then remove everything that wasn’t the David, you know? That’s what you’re trying to do – find the right marble.

LINDSAY: I wonder, when doing this work, particularly with college and with high school students, again, talking about the pressure of creation, that there’s less pressure because you’re not working on a play. You’re working on this one moment. If it works, it goes in this pile. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll make another moment.

BARBARA: Exactly, yeah.

LINDSAY: Yeah. You’re working at a university now. You’ve also done this kind of work with high school students?

BARBARA: Yes.

LINDSAY: What’s that experience like?

BARBARA: It can sometimes be a little sophisticated. Even with my last high school kids, we were making some moments. We did a round of what I like to call virtuosity moments because it’s a great way to get to know what your kids’ special skills are.

For the listener, a moment is framed by, “I begin.” Something happens, “I end,” Or if a group is making a moment, they say, “We begin.” They show us something – might have text, might not. And they say, “We end,” when the moment is over.

It can be as simple as, you know, “I begin,” show me a gesture, “I end.” It can be as complicated as lights that go on and a sound cue that comes in and a text is spoken. They can get quite layered and quite complex. But, in the beginning, we keep them real simple, focusing on a single element of the stage.

For us, that can really mean anything. You know, you can talk about the element of props or costumes. You can also talk about the element of surprise. It’s just a way of titling something so you can turn your attention toward it and not forget it. Oh, spatial relationship – let’s do some moments about that! What happens when we’re really far apart onstage versus all clumped together? It’s a way to really have a dialogue with the elements right in front of you.

I think that part can be really fun for kids. But I had a person, after we’d done this round of virtuosity moments and I could see who could rap and somebody’s virtuosity was showing us a film of the special effects makeup class that she had taken and made these really gory scars, really, it was a wide variety of special skills these skills had that I could then incorporate as I was figuring out what the play was going to be and help make their characters more appropriate to their skill set. And then, somebody raised their hand and I thought, “Oh, good! I’ve got a question and everybody is getting real hooked in now.” The question was, “When are auditions?”

LINDSAY: Oops.

BARBARA: So, here I thought I was really explaining how we’re going to devise this piece together but it was just such a new idea to them. They do really beautiful, very detailed theatrical productions at this school. And so, you know, changing everything and including not auditioning for the play was just a really big 180 for them.

We made this particular play – a play within a play. So, everybody did get to audition a piece of text so that we could kind of figure out in the play within the play who they should portray. I think, you know, there’s something to that. I think kids enjoy the thrill of the audition process to some degree. So, I was able to sort of adapt my devising to accommodate what they think of the process of making theatre.

LINDSAY: Well, I think that probably was really eye-opening for them that you were being flexible – you know, that it’s not a rigid process which, you know, sometimes, the act of putting on a play – which is wonderful – but it can be a rigid process. There are auditions. We are going to read the play. Okay. Now, we’re going to block it. Okay. Then, there’s a performance. That’s comforting.

BARBARA: Yeah, that’s a known way to get out the work.

I think, for high school, and I’ve had other short workshops where, for example, I introduce the moment work process and I think I had three 45-minute class sessions with this group. They made a beautiful piece about Hurricane Katrina just using the elements of the stage and some text from an article that we found in the paper. Sometimes, you really can turn those things around very quickly. In the particular case I was just talking about though, I was brought in to really create the fall school play. So, they were expecting it to kind of follow the usual production schedule.

LINDSAY: Yeah. Well, you can see how they would just fall into that. “Well, it’s the fall school play so it has a process.” I can’t believe we’re coming to the end already which is just the time just flying so quickly. It’s really interesting. It’s really interesting to talk to you and I think it’s really important to get something like this out for our folks with that exact thing – that there’s more than one way to make a play and there’s more than one way to turn an idea into a play.

BARBARA: When I stumbled upon you guys recently, when I was looking for some resources and I just thought, “Oh, it’s so great – the content that you guys are providing and this platform for people to share ideas,” because you could just get tapped out with what you know how to bring to the table. It’s really nice to know that you guys are out there compiling all these different resources.

LINDSAY: Oh, thank you very much!

BARBARA: You’re welcome!

LINDSAY: As we end, you guys go into the creation of the work, you don’t think at the end of mind, you don’t know if what you’re doing is a play. You just go into it focusing on the moments. When did you know The Laramie Project was a play?

BARBARA: Oh, that’s such a great question.

We did this first workshop and did a table read at the end and invited friends. If you’re Moisés Kaufman, your friends include Tony Kushner. So, there was a pretty lofty group of people sitting under fluorescent lights, looking at two long tables of eight actors presenting this material.

We took a break about halfway through. I looked out in the audience and I just saw these hard masks of pity and fear on people’s faces. You know, usually, when you’re performing, you don’t get to sort of stare at your audience right before intermission and nobody was really moving from their seats. I thought, “Oh, my gosh! I think we’re experiencing catharsis.”

You know, the play that was just after the first of five trips. The perpetrators hadn’t even gone to trial yet so we didn’t know how the story was all going to unfold. But I think, for me, I thought, at that first reading at intermission, “Oh, my gosh! I think I just made theatre for the first time,” you know? In the Aristotelean sense of the word that somehow that transfer of purging of pity and fear seemed to really be happening in the room under those fluorescent lights.

LINDSAY: Well, what an amazing thing! Because, you know, we talk about Aristotle in the theoretical sense and that whole notion of catharsis. But to actually see it happen!

BARBARA: Yeah, it was extraordinary.

LINDSAY: Wow! That’s wonderful! That’s wonderful, Barb!

BARBARA: Yeah, just so your audience knows, yes, we might go in with a very general hunch about what might make a play. Eventually, one of the things that Moisés is really great at is structure. Tectonic meaning architecture – architectonic, tectonic plates. Even though our work is sort of known for these social justice-bent plays, really, what we’re interested in is the science and art of structure.

How can we create theatrical forms that resonate? And then, if that’s the theatrical focus, then the dramatic focus of the playwright’s providence of creating a well-made story, you know, this is not to replace that sort of dramaturgy and that sort of well-made structure, that’s something that we really drill into and we always are searching for that central question or organizing principle that is going to tie all the material together in a way that will feel satisfying for an audience.

LINDSAY: Well, my last question was going to be, you know, what advice would you give to a teacher who is thinking about creating work with their students and having that devising, but I almost think that that’s the best answer – that in with the free-for-all, there has to be structure.

BARBARA: Yeah, eventually, you have to figure out, “Well, okay, how do you know what stays and what goes?” You have to have a strong central question you’re asking. The Laramie Project isn’t “Who was Matthew Shepard?” The organizing principle is what happened in the town of Laramie, Wyoming, before and after the death of Matthew Shepard. That really keeps you focused. You might have a really great interesting character but what they’re talking about is just too tangential for, in our case, a three-act play.

I would say, for teachers, with devising, it really gives students a chance to take seriously the things that concern them, even if not every concern can be expressed in the same play, having that kind of opportunity to.

I think one of the reasons The Laramie Project resonates is that kids get to really drill into how they feel about some social issues in a way that is very personal and thought-provoking. I think taking their emotional life really seriously is one of the great things about devising.

LINDSAY: Absolutely. Absolutely. Sorry, I’m just sitting here, listening, and I’m like, “Yes!” and my podcast fist is in the air and all that kind of stuff.

Thank you so much for taking your time and just sharing your experiences. I really appreciate it and I know our listeners do as well.

BARBARA: Sure! If people have more questions, they can go to tectonictheaterproject.org.

LINDSAY: We are going to put that in the show notes. We will make sure that we have a link right there for people to follow.

Thank you so much, Barb!

BARBARA: You bet! Thanks, Lindsay!

LINDSAY: Thank you, Barb!

I just want to remind everyone that any links for this podcast you can find in the show notes – Theatrefolk.com/episode182.

Before we go, let’s do some THEATREFOLK NEWS.

So, if this conversation got your spidey senses tingling and you’ve started thinking about devising, I want to make sure you know about the devising resources we have here at Theatrefolk – the Drama Teacher Resource Company. (Ah, like how I snuck that in? Oh, it was like it was planned or something!)

Through the education arm of Theatrefolk, we’ve got our Drama Teacher Academy. In there, we not only have a professional development course that takes you step-by-step through creating a project with your students which is called 21st Skills Through Devising. We also have a devising unit which includes twelve lesson plans.

Devising is, of course, just one topic covered in the DTA and you can learn more by going to DramaTeacherAcademy.com – that’s all one word – or you can click the link for the Drama Teacher Academy in the show notes – Theatrefolk.com/episode182.

Before I go, listen! Listen. Are you doing one of our plays? Are you doing one of our plays? We want to know about it. We want to hear about it. We want a picture! Send us a picture!

If you’ve got thirty seconds of rehearsal video or a bit of your show, show us what you’re doing – in rehearsal, in the classroom, onstage. We want to brag about you. We want to put together a production feature on you.

We want to share what you’re doing. We want to show everybody what you’re doing.

You know, it’s such a great way to let other people get a window into a show. If you’ve tried something really cool with Shuddersome, for example, there’s so many teachers out there who would be like, “Oh! That’s a cool idea! I’d like to try something like that! I’d like to start there!” or “Oh, someone else did this show? Oh, I can do this show!” Sometimes, that’s all we need, right? We just need to know we can do it. You can do it. I’m telling you, you can do it!

What do you do? Just send the information to help@theatrefolk.com.

Finally, where, oh, where can you find this podcast? We post new episodes every second Tuesday at theatrefolk.com and on our Facebook page and Twitter. You can find us on youtube.com/theatrefolk and on the Stitcher app. You can subscribe to The Drama Teacher Podcast on iTunes.

Okay. So, that’s where we’re going to end. Take care, my friends. Take care.

Music credit:”Ave” by Alex (feat. Morusque) is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

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Facilitating a student led production
Production Case Study: The Laramie Project
Production Case Study: The Laramie Project

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