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Spotlight! E-news from Theatrefolk

Issue 9 - New Releases, April 2006

Welcome!

Welcome to our ninth newsletter, with a look at our latest releases.

In this issue:

THE SCRIPT BANK- Our innovative new licensing program is now on-line!
NEW RELEASES- What's new with Theatrefolk?
AUTHOR TALK- Our Girl Talk authors let us in on the inspirations for their plays.
KRISTA BOEHNERT- An interview with the author of Have You Heard?
BOOK REPORT- Around the World in 21 Plays
DOWNLOAD OF THE MONTH- Drop Dead, Juliet!, a sneak peek at the latest play by Allison Williams. Newsletter Exclusive!
CONFERENCE ALERT - Meet us in person.
IN THE NEXT ISSUE - What you can expect next.
STAY IN TOUCH - Contact info/Read our blog.

The Script Bank

The Script Bank is a revolutionary new concept in play licensing. One license gives you unlimited access to over 40 one-act plays, giving you the right to print, photocopy, and perform to your heart's content.

What's Included?

A Full Year of Access

Access to the members-only area of our website 24/7 for a full year.

Scripts Included

Download PDF files of 43 one act plays. Print or photocopy as many copies as you need.

Performance Royalties

Produce any Script Bank play for an unlimited number of performances during your license period.

Dozens of Uses

You are free to use the scripts for performances, festivals, competitions, individual events, fundraisers, student-directed work, class work, etc.

Total School Coverage

The license applies to the entire school, not just an individual class or director.

Instant Access

Once your account is set up, you'll be downloading plays in no time. It's an end to waiting for the mail or applying for a performance license.

All the Help You Need

Have questions? Fast, friendly help is just a mouse-click away!

Great Scripts

The Script Bank features our most popular plays and is frequently updated.

Exclusive Discounts

You also get exclusive discounts on printed scripts, even ones not in the Script Bank.

Try it for 30 days

It costs nothing to start a trial account. Peruse all the scripts in the Script Bank for 30 days. If you decide not to become a full member then you owe us nothing.

See it for yourself

http://scriptbank.theatrefolk.com

New Releases

It's New Releases time! What's new for Theatrefolk? A great mix of new material, classical adaptations, not-so-classical adaptations and a new short play collection:

Girl Talk: Ten Short Plays for Young Women offers plays for the theatre teacher's never-ending search for plays with girl-heavy casts. There's something here for everyone: broad comedy, intense drama, bridesmaid dresses and animal costumes.
For our Shakespeare in An Hourseries, we're proud to announce the addition of John Minigan 's Twelfth Night, or What You Will . John has provided two different lengths within the adaptation: 45 minutes and an hour. (Pssst - He also has As You Like Itcoming out in the fall!)
Krista Boehnert , author of Puzzle Pieces , has written a brilliant new monologue-based play called Have You Heard? Five characters explore what happens when secrets and lies take over a school.
It wouldn't be spring without a Christmas Play . Humbug High: A Contemporary Christmas Carol takes Dickens' classic tale, turning Ebenezer into Eddie, a seventeen-year-old version of the original.

All scripts are available now .

Author Talk

There's a special art to writing a 10 minute play - you have to create instant characters and vivid stories. There's no time for meandering through a plot! The authors in Girl Talk: Ten Short Plays for Young Women share the inspiration for their plays.

Pig Patter, by Linda Eisenstein

Writing is a mysterious process. It's amazing how accepting constraints can sometimes lead to creative ideas. Pig Patter started from a writing exercise - a prompt limiting me to using words of only one syllable.

As a writer who uses long phrases and multi-syllable words, it was a huge challenge. Experimenting with those spiky, percussive rhythms suddenly led me straight to these three teenage girls. The diction seemed to bring them to life: the way they hurled their slang around, beat around the bush, tussled over boys, their own friendship, and things too hard to talk about. "Hearing" them talk in my head also brought my own teen years barrelling right back at me with a vengeance - including a memory of being teased in a humiliating way. Pig Patteris the result.

Swimming With Sins, by Lindsay Price

A few years ago, there was a company searching for short plays about the Seven Deadly Sins and I started to do some research. One of the interesting concepts about Envy is that the punishment for being envious is to be plunged into freezing water. I instantly got the image of the character of Envy standing on a beach in her green old-fashioned bathing costume and went from there. I also liked the idea of a vice wanting to switch sides to become a virtue, which of course doesn't work out.

The Twisting-Turning Death Machine, by Alan Haehnel

How did this duet come about? Well. How about alchemy? For, truthfully, when I try to trace the history of any of my scripts, that's what I come to - some form of transformational magic that takes a swirl of disconnected bits and turns them, finally, into a neat little package with a title. I'm constantly amazed by the final product and wonder how it came into being. So, I will tell you of the disconnected bits that were a part of the creation of The Twisting-Turning Death Machine, but don't ask me about the glue that bound them all. For that, look up a Muse.

First, the requirements: The editor at Brooklyn Publishers told me that a successful duet needs to challenge the actors, physically and emotionally; to have a clear conflict; to have a complete beginning, middle and end in about ten pages; and to be able to be performed without costumes or a set beyond a couple of chairs. So, those constraints influenced me.

Also, I have a teen-aged daughter, Kaitlin, and, at the time I wrote the duet, she had a close friend, Jesse, with whom she was always hanging around. They both enjoyed acting, and I wondered if I might be able to come up with a comic piece that could involve the two of them. The image of these two often giggling, sometimes fighting girls was floating around in my cranium, along with the constraints I mentioned earlier.

Add to those two elements my fascination with amusement parks. Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not a roller-coaster fanatic who travels to every country in the world looking for the best metal man-made rush on the planet. In fact, I don't particularly like amusement park rides. No, it's the people who amaze me - how they squabble and sweat and wait and gripe all in the name of having fun. And then, what form does that "fun" take? In the case of many rides, the goal seems to abject fear. What a strange lot we humans are.

So, those are the main components of the mix. At some point, a vision of Kaitlin and Jesse standing next to a roller-coaster came to me. Then I went into a writing trance. When I awoke, the duet had been born.

The Prodigal Cow, by Mark Harvey Levine

I'm Jewish, but my wife is Catholic. I was sitting in church with her one day, and Father Farrell was giving a homily about the Prodigal Son. He asked who do we identify with - the Good Son, who feels overlooked, or the Prodigal Son, who is forgiven? His answer was we should identify with the Dad, who does the forgiving. But I suddenly realized I was identifying with someone else entirely: The poor Fatted Calf, who has no idea what's about to happen, or why...

Sally Sees The Light, by Babs Lindsay

I wrote Sally Sees the Lightin the early '90's after having a very Sally-esque moment myself. I believe at the moment of the play's inception, I was writing a check for something or other. I suddenly had an involuntary flash of insight: this check was just a piece of paper. It had no real, inherent, intrinsic value whatsoever. It was simply a symbol. My mind began reeling backward through all the monetary symbols we are accustomed to in the modern world, trying very hard to find something of real value. I realized all our monetary symbols are meant to represent our supposed value in and to the community. "I work this hard, I get paid this much, so I am worth this much. And I can trade with you some of what I am worth in exchange for something of worth of yours or for some service you provide me, which has a rather arbitrarily assigned value." And then, just as Sally does, I began seeing through other social conventions, such as clothes and sex. Everything I thought I knew about the world just blasted apart in a way that permanently changed my perspective. The whole episode took about 5 seconds.

The play has been produced 7 times so far. Audience reaction depends entirely on the performances. When the actress playing Sally really lets loose and cartwheels out into the cosmos, and when the actress playing Jennifer really does battle with what seems to her a monster of awesome proportions, the play works and people in the audience fall all over themselves laughing and hollering. When the actresses play nice or are reasonable, the thing just lays there on the floor like a dead St. Bernard. I've seen both. I have no idea if the play has the effect I would like it to have, which is to permanently change the perspective of every person in the audience. I suppose I ought to be thankful and satisfied if I just offer them a few moments of enjoyable theater. But if I knew how, I would give everyone on the planet a Sally-esque moment.

Sandy is an Eggplant Shannon is a Pretty Girl, by Lindsay Price

None of the events in the play have ever happened in my life, but I have certainly in the past felt about my sister as Sandy does. I have this one vivid memory of being at a dance, never having had a boyfriend and my 13-year-old sister was the belle of the ball. Now of course everything's great between us, but that doesn't make good theatre! I love that Sandy goes completely over-the-top in her obsession and what's better than going over-the-top in an ugly bridesmaid dress that your sister looks good in? I had a friend who had a closet full of the worst bridesmaid dresses ever. I see a particular one in my mind with poofy sleeves in a very shiny purple satin fabric.

Miss Kentucky, by Allison Williams

Miss Kentuckyis both a love letter to the people of Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and an apology to my mother. Back in 1998 and '99, I directed at the Jenny Wiley Music Theatre in eastern Kentucky. The theatre was an outdoor space on the edge of a state park, and I kept whining to my friends back home "We're so far into the boonies we have to drive 30 minutes to get to Wal-mart!"

Everyone on staff was from somewhere else, but the young actors in the show were local, some of whom drove two hours to be at rehearsals. One day, three little girls with sponge rollers in their hair came up to me and said they had to leave rehearsal early to be in a parade. I asked them what they were going to do in the parade, and one said, "We have titles." At first clueless, I finally determined that one of them was Little Miss Prestonsburg, one was Junior Miss Prestonsburg, and one was Young Miss Prestonsburg, and heaven help anyone who got the "titles" confused. I thought about all the cliches I've heard about pageant moms and little girls in too much makeup and clothes older than their age, but these three little girls were thrilled to death to be part of something that took them out of Appalachia - "If we make finals, we get to go to Lexington!"

When I finally wrote the play in 2004, I was also inspired by my relationship with my own mother - I had just written a play that was very much about my relationship with my father, and my mom seemed a little hurt to be left out, even though she was really supportive of the play in general. Mom herself was a beauty queen (runner-up two years in a row for Miss Canada in the 60's), and my favorite picture shows her receiving a minor local title as part of a campaign to get people to fix up their homes in the winter instead of waiting for spring. Wearing a parka and a hard hat perched on top of her beehive hairdo and carrying a shovel, Mom is surrounded by workmen admiring the banner across her chest that names her "Miss Do-It-Now."

Crystal and Shay, by Sherry Bishop

I happened to see a young pregnant woman smoking. Knowing what we now know about the hazards of smoking, and especially the risks to unborn children, I couldn't get that image out of my head. That was the original inspiration for Crystal and Shay. I started with that image and then the play just took on a life of its own.

Bottle Baby, by Lindsay Price

The image I started with was two characters sitting at a table staring at a bottle of tequila in the middle of the kitchen table. Initially this play was about a mother and a daughter, both trying to recover from drinking problems and for whatever reason, unable to take a drink and at the same time unable to look away from it. To make the play suitable for Theatrefolk I knew I had to modify the ages, which turned the two into sisters. I always like turning stereotypes on their ear which is why the play starts out as a "good" sister, "bad" sister confrontation but then takes a turn.

The Battle of Image Versus Girl, by Johanna Skoreyko

I recently revisited The Battle of Image Verses Girlwhen I edited it for re-publication, and it was startling to realize that I couldn't write about those issues now with the honesty that I did when I was seventeen. To read the play now, it seems too intense, too crazy. But it really was that intense and that crazy. I just didn't realize it as a teenager because it was sort of normal.

A girl's body changes in high school, no matter what she does to try to control it - hips widen, stomachs soften - it's a lot for a sixteen year old girl to deal with, and it is so easy for weight issues to get out of hand, especially with the images that girls get from popular media (which are not a scape-goat, but to a large extent the true culprit).

When I wrote the play, I had just returned from a year as an exchange student in Germany, where my host-sister Fran had been severely anorexic. The year before, when Fran lived with us in Canada, I had been a bit obsessive about running, and once, after a long talk, Fran had posted a sign above my bed: "I don't want to be a skeleton; I just want to be free to be myself!" The next year, when Fran was eating nothing but some lettuce dipped in mustard, I wrote the same thing on a piece of loose-leaf, snuck into her room and taped it to her ceiling. It become our hopeful mantra, and later the play's refrain. This is also why it sounds a little ESL. Fran wrote the sign for me, and I wrote the play for Fran.

With the second editing, however, I did change it in order to make it for all teenage girls. I hope that seeing these concerns amplified on stage will highlight how dangerous they are, as well as how a preoccupation with weight is clearly a form of mental illness, albeit a conquerable one.

Krista Boehnert and Have You Heard?

We're so pleased to have another script by Krista in our catalogue. She plays so well with the monologue form; she knows how to use monologues to their best effect to show character and story.

Have You Heard? looks at the how the lives of five high school students are affected when a lie told by an unseen character spins out of control. (Sample pages available here ) I asked Krista to talk about her writing process.

Why did you write this play?

I wanted to explore a situation that on the surface appears really black and white but actually has a lot of underlying shades of grey. I was also intrigued about writing a play where secrets and gossip impact the lives of ordinary people in many different ways. Words and stories are so powerful and the characters in the play learn that sometimes they can take on a life of their own.

Where did the idea come from?

Honestly? When I was in high school a student accused a teacher of sexual assault and the rumour mill started churning out all kinds of scenarios about the situation. That, coupled with several recent news stories about similar incidents got me thinking about all the secrets and rumours that float around in the halls of high schools everyday.

You have a knack for writing in monologues. What draws you to this form?

As an audience member, I really respond to that style. Most of my favourite plays are monologue-based, so I think it just became a natural transition for me to start writing in this format. Monologues give me the opportunity to peel away all the layers of the character and present their essence to the audience. Characters are frank, and feel safe to reveal their innermost thoughts without the fear of being judged by the other characters. The audience also plays a critical role in my plays as they, more often than not, find themselves sitting in a confessional with my characters; so there is a level of intimacy and trust created between the characters and the audience. I think it's that character-audience interaction that truly draws me to this form.

Talk about your process - Do you start with characters? The idea?

I usually get the idea first, then the characters follow. I will know the overall storyline of the play, but I don't write in sequence. I write what comes to me at the time until the entire story is told. Then I'll piece it together into its proper running order.

Were there any difficulties or blocks during the writing process?

The biggest hurdle with Have you Heard?was to strike a balance between how much to reveal to the audience and how much to leave to imagination. I struggled with this at the character level with Zak, and the overall Josh/Mr. Pender storyline. With Zak, I knew a lot of his back story and motivation, but in the initial drafts, I wasn't communicating it effectively enough with the audience. In the Josh/Mr. Pender storyline I wanted to leave the audience room to form their own opinion on what happened, but to also supply them with enough information to do so.

How was this play different for you than Puzzle Pieces ?

Have you Heard?came to me very quickly and I scrambled to get it all down on paper before my mind lost it! One very deliberate choice I made at the outset was that the central characters in the sexual assault storyline would not physically appear in the play. Aside from the first and last scene, this play is entirely comprised of monologues ( Puzzle Pieceshas more ensemble scenes) and so I had to rely on the characters to tell both their own stories, as well as that of Josh and Mr. Pender without using any dialogue.

What makes a good monologue?

There are so many things! A unique voice for the character is important. Especially in a monologue-based play, it is critical that each character has his own distinct voice. The character also has to be believable and authentic so that the audience can relate to, and connect with, him. That doesn't mean that the character has to be likeable, but it's critical that the character is developed fully so that the audience believes what he's saying.

Book Report

Around the World in 21 Plays: Theatre for Young Audiences
Edited by Lowell Swartzell
Applause Books, New York, 1997

Every publisher has the short play collection in their cannon, we're no different! Since we have Girl Talk coming out, I thought I would look around my library to see what else is out there. One thing for sure, there's a lot: collections from new playwrights, award-winning plays, plays for young people, the best new plays and so on.

Around the World in 21 Playscaught my eye. It offers two sections of plays: Plays from the Past, and then Plays by Contemporary Artists for Today. The theory is that this is an international collection but I have to say I was disappointed in the "international" aspect of the Contemporary section. Most are from the US. My interest lies in the Past section.

The Past section offers a great selection of early theatre to use in the classroom. All but two of the plays were written before 1900 and the majority were completely new to me. That in itself was exciting! Furthermore, none of the plays were hard to read or boring: all are appropriate for students.

Having said that, readers should know that some of the older scripts have been "freely adapted" by the editor. I'm not sure what that means exactly nor is it clear how much they've changed from the original. Granted, half the plays were originally written in another language, but it's something to be aware of.

Four of the plays in the Past collection that caught my eye were Jack Juggler(England), The Flying Doctor(France), The Love of Three Oranges(Italy), and Soul Gone Home(USA).

Jack Juggleris from the 1500's and is reported to be "the first play written for young audiences to act in as well as see." It has a Punch and Judy style - there's a lot of violence with masters frequently beating their servants. But in the context of its time period it's a fun little play and made me want to search out the original.

The Flying Doctor(1648) is a wonderful introduction to farce, Moliere and his writing. A lot of energy and fun. There's even a pee joke which every student will love and every principal will not!

I had never heard of the Italian fairy tale The Love of Three Oranges(1761) but Carlo Gozzi's version is a wonderfully expansive story which never moves in a straight line. A sad prince must be made to laugh but when he does, a curse is placed on him. He falls in love with three oranges and the curse won't be lifted till he finds them. The story is not written in a traditional play format, but as beat scenario, where each action point is described. The play was originally performed by comedia dell'arte companies, who would improvise dialogue. If you have a comedia unit, I would strongly suggest searching this book out!

My favourite play in the section is Soul Gone Home(1937) by Langston Hughes. It's a mean, raw, and extremely poetic look at the relationship between a mother and her unwanted child. While the play is written in a specific voice, I think the relationship is sadly quite current.

Other plays in the past section include one by August Strindberg ( Lucky Peter's Journey), Gertrude Stein ( Three Sisters Who are not Sisters) a Punch and Judyand an interesting play by Stanislaw Witkiewicz called Childhood Plays. It involves very, very short scenes that are almost like photos. Might be something to use with beginning actors.

Download of the Month

Newsletter Exclusive

Coming soon - a new play by our resident Shakespeare spoofer Allison Williams . Drop Dead, Juliet!looks at what happens when Juliet decides she's had enough of stabbing herself - she wants a new story and she wants it now!

This play will not be available until the end of April, but we have a sample to whet your whistle. Enjoy!

http://www.theatrefolk.com/spotlight/download/13

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 May- Creation and Adaptation
John Minigan offers up what it's like to create work with his students from source material and Lindsay will write about how A Christmas Carolturned into Humbug High .

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.