The RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) has a great resource for theatre teachers, or for any teacher teaching Shakespeare in the classroom. It’s a website called Stand Up for Shakespeare.

The site features resources for anyone teaching Shakespeare for the first time, including lesson plans for elementary schools, high schools, and even for families teaching Shakespeare in the home.

Enjoy!

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I don’t have anything else to say really. I just want to make sure you’re all aware how awesome student writers are. Student playwrights rock.

At the Waterloo district Sears Drama Festival this past weekend there were three student written works. I taught two workshops adding up to around 50 participants. I ran out of paper. They wrote their fingers off. A number of students wanted to know more, more more about how to avoid writer’s block, how to make a living as a writer, would I read their play (you bet I would).

Oh yeah, and I met the student who directed a production of Alice and another who’s directing an upcoming production of The Bright Blue Mailbox Suicide Note.

Student directors rock too.

That is all.

This week we spread the Love for Camel Dung and Cloves by Dara Murphy.

Click here if you can’t see the video above.

Transcript

Welcome to this week’s Spread the Love. This week we are talking about Camel Dung and Cloves by Dara Murphy. The play takes place in a teenage girl’s bedroom. Where, for some unknown reason, the main character is setting out a tea service and for some unknown reason has paid someone to come and drink tea with her and the tea may or may not contain the ingredients camel dung and cloves.

Now if that sounds really weird to you, that’s because it is. The play is really really weird; the characters are weird, the story is weird, and the twist ending is very, very weird. And that’s what we love it and that’s why it’s in our catalogue.

Because it’s important to support the weird. Not everyone wants a vignette play, not everyone wants a Shakespeare spoof, and not everybody wants an intense period drama. Sometimes you want to read something weird because you know what? There are some weird teenagers out there. I was totally a weird teenager and I would have loved to have read this play and have been in it. There are girls out there who don’t want to play cheerleaders and ballerinas. They want weird. So, that’s why we love this play. Craig what do you love about Camel Dung and Cloves?

Well, what I love about Camel Dung and Cloves is….. it’s weird.

That’s it for Spread the Love.

Looking for a quick improv activity to start or end a class? I am absolutely obsessed with a website called Awkward Family Photos. Awkward Family Photos is a blog that publishes… well… awkward family photos. The photo above was the current one as I was writing this post.

Every single photo on this website is a gem and ripe for use in your class!

Pull up the photo of the day and divide the class into groups of however many people are in the photos.  Give them a few minutes to sketch out a short background for each person in the photo. Who are they? What is their relationship to the others in the photo? Then have the students:

• Improv the moment before the photo was taken.
• Improv the moment after the photo was taken.
• Improv a typical family dinner for these people.
• Improv Christmas morning at their house.

You could also use the same website as a writing exercise.

• Create character backgrounds for each character.
• Write out a scene leading up to the taking of the photo.
• Write a scene where they find their photo on this website.

Can you think of any other fun activities to base around the photos? Leave your ideas below.

Have fun!

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.  - Oscar Wilde

Today I’m teaching playwriting workshops at a district event of the Sears Drama Festival.  In my experience, the best way to introduce playwriting is in sections and steps: today we work on the character step, then conflict, and then maybe tomorrow some dialogue. If you approach playwriting with a capital “P” and in big letters – PLAYWRITING – it can get overwhelming.  The big picture is always overwhelming, isn’t it? And being overwhelmed can lead a young writer just starting out into thinking they suck, have no talent, and should never write again. My job is to try and circumvent those kind of thoughts. Sections and steps.

Whatever step I happen to be teaching, I always try to throw in the concept of audience. The audience is what makes theatre unique. The audience is part of the theatrical experience.  Playwrights must always consider the audience when they write. Playwright must be able to answer the question: “What do I want the audience to take away from my play?”

Most young writers never consider the audience. They’re getting out their feelings, their thoughts, it’s a one-to-one experience. Which is completely valid. For awhile.

By A Magill

I tell students that the theatre experience is a circle. Human beings sharing what it’s like to be a human being –  round and round it goes. Your play goes out in the audience, the audience reacts sending their energy back onto the stage, which gets picked up by the actors who in turn continue to send their energy out into the audience. And so on. Sounds rather ooky-spooky, artsy-fartsy, to be sure, but it’s true. It’s what defines theatre. It’s what makes me love theatre more than any other form. It’s what makes me hate theatre when the audience doesn’t respond.

If you are writing, what’s your answer to the question? What do you want the audience to take away from your play?

I first discovered Seth Rudetsky as the host of what seems like 99% of the programming day on the Sirius/XM Broadway channel.

Rudetsky is a multi-talented and tireless Broadway fanatic. You might remember him as a vocal coach on that MTV reality show to find a new Elle for Legally Blonde.

Seth Rudetsky Deconstructs Broadway is an insightful (and usually hilarious) web series where he plays pieces of Broadway recordings and analyzes just what makes them so great. This is an excellent resource for anyone studying musical theatre. Going beyond “this sounds cool,” he talks about what the singer is doing technically. You’ll never listen to a Broadway recording the same way again.

Here is an example where he deconstructs Idina Menzel.

Like it? Want more? He has a YouTube Channel filled with great stuff like this.

Also check out his official website.

Working on the final proof for a new play coming out very shortly, Stupid is Just 4 2day. The process goes like this:

• The  play is ready to be published. Hooray!
• The play is formatted. Other wise known as making it look pretty. Craig is our super duper desk-top publishing guru. He’s tried to explain Indesign to me.  But it’s kind of like when Linus hears his teacher talking in the Charlie Brown specials.
• The play is printed (on recycled paper of course) so we can check for errors.
• We (Craig and Lindsay) read the play at least twice each. We’re not looking at the content of the play. We’re looking for errors. Spelling errors, typographical errors, missing words.
• Craig and Lindsay marvel at how many times one can read a proof and still find errors. The brain is a tricky piece of work my friends – if the brain knows a word is missing, it’ll just fill it in for you. If the brain knows how a word is supposed to be spelled, it will tell the eye the word is spelled correctly even though it isn’t. (During a recent workshop the actors said the word ’sacred’ correctly over and over again in a scene, even though it was written as ’scared.’ None of us caught the error.)
• The proof is passed on to the author. Who, more often that not finds another error.
• Craig and Lindsay marvel again at how many times it takes to review a proof.
• If necessary, Craig and Lindsay review the proof again, send it back to the author again until it’s right.

Finding an error is sometimes like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s easy to focus on the content of a play rather than the typography. But it’s such an important part of presenting the finished play. A sloppy proof makes people think that there’s something wrong with the content. And we certainly don’t want that!

Today I found the mother of mistakes! A character name from a previous version of the play which doesn’t exist in this version. I love correcting proof errors, but even at the end of the process I’m always left wondering if there’s one still in there…. one left behind that no one caught…. waiting to spring out at us once the plays gone to print…. waiting…. waiting….