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Spotlight! E-news from Theatrefolk

Issue 10 - Creation and Adaptation, May 2006

Welcome!

Welcome to our tenth newsletter, with a look at Creation and Adaptation.

Maybe you're tired of looking for the perfect play for your students. Maybe the work you really want to do isn't in play form yet. Maybe you have a group that doesn't fit the play you want to do. Maybe you have a hyper-creative group and you want to capitalize on it.

This newsletter looks at two forms of writing that may address the above problems: Creation and Adaptation. Write your own works with your students, or take a text from another genre and turn it into a play.

In this issue:

SCRIPTING ORIGINAL PLAYS WITH STUDENTS: THE WORKSHOP PROCESS - Part one of a two part article by John Minigan.
TURNING BAH HUMBUG INTO HUMBUG HIGH - How do you take a dense classic novel and turn it into a lively modern production?
ADAPTATION WORKSHEET - Go through the process with your students.
BOOK REVIEWS - Three books that look at the process of adaptation.
DEAL OF THE MONTH - Spotlight Readers get 25% off all scripts ordered in May. See below for details.
DOWNLOAD OF THE MONTH - Read a sample of Humbug High , our modern adaptation of Charles Dickens'A Christmas Carol.
HOT OFF THE PRESS - Announcing the long-awaited release of Allison Williams' latest play, Drop Dead Juliet!
CONFERENCE ALERT - Meet us in person.
IN THE NEXT ISSUE - What you can expect next.
STAY IN TOUCH - Contact info/Read our blog.

SCRIPTING ORIGINAL PLAYS WITH STUDENTS: The Workshop Process

John Minigan is an expert in both Creation and Adaptation - he's adapted Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night for our catalogue withAs You Like It, or What You Will coming out in the fall. This article is divided into two parts with Part Two coming up in our June newsletter.

I’ve been developing original plays with high school students for nearly twenty years, but the past five have been the most rewarding. Although adapting material by authors as diverse as Ovid, Gozzi, Plautus and Poe had rewards for me and for my students, creating new, original works has challenged us in unexpected ways and taught us all more about the structure of drama than any textbook or seminar could offer. Along the way, my students have forged powerful bonds through intense collaboration and learned to give and take feedback selflessly as we craft plays that grow from a shared vision rather than an outside story-source.

THE WORKSHOP PROCESS

I was introduced to the “workshop” creation process by two of its masters: Iain Ryrie and Steve Bogart, both high school teachers in Massachusetts. I’d seen and admired their work for years, so, when they offered a full-day seminar on their process, I jumped at the chance to study with them. What follows is the process I have developed for work with my students, based on their model, and I intend what follows to be a series of suggestions to be adapted by specific teachers to fit their own style, vision and preferences.

AUDITIONS

I cast an acting/writing ensemble of 16 to 18 actors based on their work in two sessions of auditions. In each session, I divide students randomly into groups of four to six and ask each group to develop scenes with specific starting points and structures selected arbitrarily. A typical scene set-up might be as follows:

Create a scene about a surprise. There must be two entrances and two exits during the scene, and one character must exhibit a physical signal of distress.

Students have fifteen minutes to develop their scenes. During the development, I wander from group to group, eavesdropping, listening for students who are particularly adept at building on the suggestions of their peers. Students who are silent in the process, who dominate discussion or who have a hard time letting go of their own “brilliant idea” will prove tough to work with. Kids who generate a lot of ideas (even if less-than-brilliant) and allow them to be adapted are terrific, as are the kids who can latch on to an idea and take it to a new level—the way good improvisers use the “Yes, and…” principle to build moments from their partners’ offers.

I also pay attention, when kids share the scenes they’ve created, to students who play a range of characters with equal enthusiasm and skill, as the self-scripting process will call on students to portray a wide array of characters.

After an initial scene-sharing for the whole group, I often ask students to base new scenes on the pieces presented by peers or ask them to replay their own scenes with variations. Typical sets of instructions for second audition scenes might be as follows:

You saw two entrances and two exit in the scenes. Now pick a scene someone else did and show me the scene in the next room—the room the characters entered from or exited to. Who else is there? And the scene must be in gibberish (or silent).

or

Replay your scene in a different style, leave only one actor onstage at the end, and no one may play the same character.

Near the end of the audition days, I use an Iain Ryrie exercise called “Vox Pop.” Groups of four to six actors stand in a line facing the rest of the group. I give a topic or a prompt (“lost,” “I forgot,” “tension,” etc). One student steps forward to speak about his or her experience with the topic (“When I was six, I got lost in the grocery store and my mother had me paged. I didn’t answer the page because I thought that would mean talking to strangers, which I was not supposed to do…”) As soon as another student has an idea, he or she steps forward to speak and the previous student steps back. The exercise continues for four to five minutes, depending on the group size. During the exercise, I look for students who step forward quickly to speak and who are clearly inspired by the ideas of others. I sometimes follow Vox Pop by asking pairs of students to quickly create 30-second scenes based on the Vox Pop stories, just to assess the actors’ flexibility and willingness to commit to an idea quickly.

The goal of the two-day audition process is to field the 16 to 18 actors who represent the best combination of idea generation, idea development, clarity in acting choices, character range and joy in the process. I look to create the strongest group, but sometimes will add in a “gender factor,” looking to keep the group from becoming imbalanced by gender, which could make casting the final play challenging.

The first time I did the workshop process, I was hard-pressed to find more than 10 kids I thought would be strong enough for it out of more than forty who auditioned, but I forced myself to cast 18. Year-by-year, as more kids have gained “workshop” experience, it’s been challenging to limit the cast size to 18. But 16 to18 is the optimal size. Fewer actors means that the range of ideas generated will be limited; a larger cast makes it difficult to focus discussion productively or come to decisions.

THE STARTING POINT - Day One

I choose my starting point or concept for the process before the audition begins but never tell my students until the first rehearsal. I don’t want actors at the audition to get distracted trying to “psych out” the process.

A starting point can be simple or complex, but the simplest ideas can lead to the greatest range of response from students. In 2004, we began with “balance/imbalance.” Scenework and discussion led us to our play The UncertainTea Principle, about fraternal twins who lose their close connection and lead separate but parallel lives, reuniting and coming back into “balance” only after personal tragedy.

One of Steve Bogart’s students’ finest pieces used a painting of a sea-monster as a starting point. The final piece, Myth, genuinely had the power of a myth, taking the audience on a journey through a rich, complex story with a logic and emotional resonance all its own.

But the starting point can be more complex, as well. Our 2005 piece began with the assembled cast reading Euripides’ Alcestis on the first day of rehearsal and the prompt that our final play would be somehow connected to the classical text without being an adaptation. Our final piece, Escaping Alcestis, was the story of a classics professor who believes she will suffer Alcestis’ fate — to die for her husband. After inadvertently causing her own death, she travels to a darkly comic underworld, returning to save her husband from the fate she suffered.

The starting point can be a theme or structure that reweaves into the story or it can simply be the impetus for student ideas. Our most recent piece, Chairs, started with “Lost and Found” and lost track of that initial concept for quite a while before finding the story element of a miscarriage and the structure that tragic loss ultimately allowed a family to find itself.

EXPLORATORY REHEARSALS — The First 12-15 Sessions

The exploratory rehearsals tend to be some of the most enjoyable. The rehearsals are structured in much the same way as auditions. Students are divided into groups of various sizes and sent out for periods of 15-20 minutes to create scenes based, at first, on the starting point, and later on discussion-generated ideas. Groups then come in to present their scenes for discussion. Our group generally has all scenes perform first, then we discuss all — sometimes scene-by-scene and sometimes holistically, looking for moments/characters/elements/ideas that stand out or connect. It is important to emphasize, especially for group members less experienced in the process, that the rehearsal is not an audition. They should do their best, of course, but they should not worry about being evaluated for their performances. The goal, especially of the exploratory rehearsals, is to generate ideas — most of which will be useful for being rejected! An idea rejected is very useful because it helps focus the group on what it actually does want and therefore helps to move the process forward.

I keep notes during the discussion, looking for key ideas or even phrases that seem interesting to explore further. This part of the process is really instinct-based. The teacher-director has to look and listen for what the students are connecting with and use those connections as the basis for the next set of scenes.

An important motto in our process is “It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done.” Students can waste time fine-tuning performances of these improv- and discussion-generated scenes. What matters most are the ideas generated. The goal is to discover what ideas generated by the starting point and discussions are at the core of the group’s process. What stands out? What ideas are the most engaging, discussion-provoking, thought-provoking? Even ideas that are controversial within the group are important to stay focused on — if “heat” is generated, the group is working with good fuel. Students ultimately learn that we are not judging their scenework — we’re just waiting for big ideas to pop out at us.

At the end of each week’s exploration, we generate a list of “Keepers” and “Coming Attractions.” The lists are not exclusive (or always all-inclusive, either), but they are ideas that we want to keep exploring and possibilities that are worth looking at next. Sometimes, we’ll also generate two lists: What We Know (about what direction we’re moving in or even what we know about the story) and What We Want to Know.

Also, in this stage or in the next, a Key Scene or scenes may emerge. Sometimes, a group will present a scene that all immediately recognize as central to the process and worth exploring further. In the development of The UncertainTea Principal, four students staged a reunion scene between a woman, her husband, a “long lost cousin” and the child the cousin was traveling with. We didn’t know why the cousin had been separated from the woman, why the husband was so angry or why the child was with the cousin, but we were riveted. We all wanted to learn more about the characters and the relationships. Eventually, the cousins became fraternal twins and the husband disappeared, but we all knew as soon as it happened that the scene and its concerns would be central to the play. In developing Chairs, eight students staged a very abstract scene in which highly agitated nonsense-speaking characters were controlled and sedated by the banging of chairs. Again, we didn’t know why we were so captivated, but the climactic scene of the eventual play was strikingly similar: a young girl’s psychosis grows out of control, and the visual metaphor is that characters who grow from her parents’ unresolved issues become increasingly agitated and begin tipping over all the chairs in the set as she scrambles to try to keep the chairs upright.

The most important thing is that there is no need to make decisions at this stage—decisions come next. Less experienced cast members will be eager to look at a scene or an idea and say, “That’s what our play should be” as early as the first week. They may end up being right, but it’s worth holding off for a while to see where the group’s creativity takes them. Often, groups will begin focusing on a specific type of scene or a group of characters without any prompting. Given time, each group will develop its own vocabulary and sense of style—a kind of “collective unconscious” out of which they will generate a wealth of unexpected ideas.

The last hour of the last day of the Exploratory Rehearsals is generally a discussion pointing us toward a story and character. There is no need to decide yet, but kids should leave the rehearsal with a sense of possible directions, so they can come at the next phase in a focused way.

Part Two of this article will appear in our June newsletter. It follows Story and Character, Hitting the Wall, Casting, Scripting and Production.

From Bah Humbug to Humbug High

You have a favourite book. Maybe it's a classic, maybe it's the latest thing in prose. You know as soon as you put it down that it would make a great play and you'd love to do it with your students. But how?

A Christmas Carol is one of my favourite books and I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to adapt it for Theatrefolk. Ten years ago I adapted a one-man version which was a lot of fun. Dickens' novels really lend themselves to the theatre because the characters and stories are inherently dramatic. What are the steps to take a dense work of fiction and turn it into a lively modern stage play? Here are a few suggestions:

Copyright: If what you want to adapt on is in the public domain, then you are able to adapt the work without obtaining permission. Make sure though, just because an author is deceased doesn’t mean that their work is free reign. And if the novel is from the twentieth century onwards, you should assume you need to acquire permission.
Have a Thesis: What do you want to do? The first questions you have to ask yourself are, “What do I want to do with the original? What do I want the final play to show to an audience?” Knowing what you want as a final product is important as it will affect your approach. Think about genre, structure, and style for your thesis. Are you doing a straight adaptation? Abstract? Changing the form (e.g. turning a drama into a comedy)? Changing the era? What do you want the audience to experience with your version?

Right off the start I knew I didn’t want to do a straight page-to-stage adaptation as this has been done many times before with A Christmas Carol. I wanted to turn Scrooge into a 17-year-old and make the situations take place in a modern high school. When I began working with the original text, everything was geared to that thesis.
When to be faithful: If you’re dealing with something that is familiar with your audience, you want to be sure to give them their familiarity. You don’t want the audience to be taken out of the world of the play as they wonder, “What about this part? Or this line?” In the case of A Christmas Carol I knew the first line was a must. And even though the main character was seventeen, I knew I had to find a way for him to say “Bah Humbug,” even if only once. There had to be the ghosts of Past, Present and Future and even though the moments within each ghost section have changed from the original, they maintain the intention of the original.
When to change: There’s little point in doing a word-for-word move from book to stage. What works in one medium will not always work in another. And what will definitely not work is having characters standing still delivering page after page of exposition! What you change also depends heavily on your thesis. For example, because the play is set in modern times with modern characters, all the settings and situations have to change to reflect this. For example, I knew that in my version, Bob Cratchit would become a girl (Bonnie), and though she works for Scrooge and it’s important, it’s not the be-all-end-all that it is for Bob in the original. These points alone necessitate changes in the relationship between Scrooge and Bonnie.
What to Keep, What to Throw: You have to become an expert on the original work. Read through it. More than once. More than twice. Keep reading until you know it like the back of your hand. Be acutely aware of the stories and characters.

Highlight everything and anything that catches your eye. Be it a particularly descriptive passage or something that made you laugh or cry. One of my favourite passages in A Christmas Carol is the description of the how Scrooge’s room had changed with the appearance of the Second ghost:

...Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam...

I just love this description and wanted to try and work it into the play.

Secondly, in a different coloured highlighter, highlight important plot points. These are things the audience must absolutely know to follow the story.

In a third colour, highlight all dialogue.

Finally, in pencil (so you can change your mind!), cross out any passages that aren’t necessary to the plot. A good example of this is follows the above description as Scrooge leaves his room with the second ghost. There is a lengthy detail of what the ghost and Scrooge see as they move through the streets of London as different people prepare for Christmas. A good read, but not necessary to the story. Most adaptations take the two straight into Bob CrCratchit house.
To Narrate or Not to Narrate: When going from prose to play form it’s very tempting to throw in a narrator to get in extra plot points and description. I am not immune: Humbug Highdoes have a narrator. But if you’re going to use one, it can’t just be because you can’t think of a way to tell your story. They must serve a purpose in the play. They must have a character (and a name!). They must have a point beyond giving information to the audience. The reason I used a narrator is that I feel the narrator of A Christmas Carol is so passionate and tells the story with such glee at times and with such horror at others that I wanted that “person” on stage. I created a narrator who is obsessed with the story and loves the story. That gives her a purpose. It also gives her a chance to act when the other characters don’t act the way they are supposed to!
On the plus side of using a narrator, books have the advantage of glorious rich settings that live in the mind’s eye. A narrator can be useful to create those same images in the minds of the audience, without having to build lavish sets.
Write the Play:Finally, you have to write! That’s what all this work is leading up to - the actual writing of the play. Above all else, remember, this is a play. Plays depend on action and the action of the characters. There should be no characters spouting pages of text just standing around! I think that adaptations are a lot of fun to write and can really illuminate the original work. It’s always interesting to look at a piece of literature from a different point of view or perspective.

Have a look at my Adaptation Worksheet to see how you can use this process in your classroom. Also this month’s download is the first act of Humbug High: A Contemporary Christmas Carol . Grab a copy of the original to see how I followed the above steps to create my adaptation.

Adaptation Worksheet

Download this worksheet to try out the adaptation process with your students. I've provided a section from A Christmas Carol to use, but any text will do. You could even use this assignment with a book you're working on in English class.

I've included two versions of the text section: a blank one to use as a handout, but also a marked up version to show you how what I would cut, what I determined as dialogue and what details caught my eye

Download it here:
http://www.theatrefolk.com/spotlight/download/14

Book Reviews

Frontline Drama 4: Adapting Classics
Methuen Drama
London 1996

This book offers play adaptations of four classic novels: Emma by Jane Austin, The Life and Times of Fanny Hillby John Cleland, Great Expectations,by Charles Dickens, The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot.

The introduction by Michael Fry, who also adapted Emma, is quite a worthwhile read as he discusses the pros and cons of adaptation. One interesting thing Mr. Fry notes is that it’s important to know what type of audience you’re writing for:

Those who know the book well.
Those who haven’t read it but might afterwards
Those who haven’t and probably never will but want to be entertained

(page xii)

He also discusses the differences between novel and play (a novel is a “private experience” where a play is a “communal experience.”)

Each adaptation gives great examples of how to turn a massive book into theatre. I especially like the version of Emma. Five young adults decide to act out a play in the attic of one of their houses. Thus, they play all the parts and the settings and props are things that would naturally be found in an attic. The convention sets up the audience for a specific world and it’s easy to follow.

Theatre For Children: A Guide to Writing, Adapting, Directing and Acting
David Wood with Janet Grant
Faber and Faber
London 1997

This book offers one chapter on adaptation. While it is geared toward adapting children’s books I think the process outlined is extremely useful. A practical guide for looking at the original text, developing a story, solving problems and writing a detailed outline. I most enjoyed the checklist provided of things to look for in a text you’re considering. It moves beyond the typical story and character questions to things like life and death situations, magic within the plot, Language and silence. (page 128)

Again, even though it’s geared for children, I think the process is easily transferable.

How to Adapt Anything Into A Screenplay
Richard Krevolin
John Wiley and Sons
New York 2003

Even though it’s not about playwriting, I had to look through this book - the title was so intriguing! And honestly, it offers quite a few tips and deals with all the same problems: when to be faithful, when to change and so on.

The author lays out a five step process for adaptation. I particularly like step number 3 which has a detailed list of character questions which are relevant to any adaptation regardless of the genre:

Who is the main character?
What does he/she want?
What keeps him/her from getting what he/she wants?

(page 16)

Each chapter has a case study. Some of the movies discussed are Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Shawshank Redemption, Glengarry Glen Ross. The above character questions are answered for each screenplay. That alone makes it an interesting read - it’s a good way to see how to move works from one genre to another and how to ask/answer questions along the way.

Deal of the Month

Spotlight Readers (yes, that includes you!) get25% off of all scripts ordered during the month of May, 2006.

To get the discount, enter coupon code "NEWS25" on the order payment page.

Applies to online orders only.

Download of the Month

Newsletter Exclusive

Intrigued by Lindsay's adaptation of A Christmas Carol? Download the first act of Humbug High: A Contemporary Christmas Carol today.

http://www.theatrefolk.com/spotlight/download/15

Hot Off the Press

At long last, Allison Williams' latest Shakespeare spoof is available.

Drop Dead, Juliet! by Allison Williams
4 Men, 13 Women, 30 Minutes

Juliet has had enough! Enough with the poison, enough with the stabbing, and especially enough with the dying. She wants a new story and she wants it now. More parts for girls! More romance! Less death! "Romeo and Juliet" will never be the same - or will it? Not everyone's so keen on the changes. And why is Romeo sneaking off with Rosaline?

Get it today at: http://www.theatrefolk.com/store/play/87

Conference Alert

Here's our upcoming conference schedule. If you're attending, please drop by and say hi!

In the Next Issue

Due Out in July - Creation and Adaptation II
John Minigan continues his excellent article on creating work with students from source material.

Also, we'll put together some of our favourite articles from the past year.

Stay in Touch

Future issues will be guided by your suggestions. Email stories, tips, suggestions, and questions to us by visiting: http://www.theatrefolk.com/contact . This newsletter belongs to you!

Some of our playwrights post to the Theatrefolk Blog . Check it out for insights into what's happening with Theatrefolk.