Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Laughing at Yourself

Laughing at Yourself

I often laugh at my material….it might be hubris, I don’t know…all I know is that my own stuff makes me chuckle. Anyway like I touched on earlier, I'm writing this Playwright Course. There is an academic level and a role playing level….The way it will work is that the lesson will be provided as an attachment E-Mail from the role playing publisher, Matty Rosen.

The students are playing serial romance writers between assignments….The Publishing house has this contract to write some High School Dramas and Matty has asked some of his stable writers to help out with the project. Anyway after I write each lesson plan, I explain to the student (Novelist) through the cynical prose of Matty, the nuances of writing a play and how it differs from a novel and how this will be unfamiliar ground but I know they can do it.

There have been three lessons completed and the reward for this somewhat uninspiring and mundane task is to write the explanatory (forwarding) letter. This is where the fun comes in. It is in a sense a clash between expectation and reality which is often the germ of humor which I insist in the letters must be a component of the play….These are after all going to be comedies. So as I write to a student, pretending they are a novelist, pointing out the differences.... the humor begins to bubble up beneath the lines….it is pure Percy Goodfellow cornball type humor….(the type that makes my wife and daughters groan) of an editor exhorting novel writers to help him out by getting them to write one of these twenty-two (22) one act plays.

Traditionally playwrights came to drama from a literary background. Perhaps they were first intrigued by seeing a play performed or excited by the potential thay saw in one of their classes. If they were really interested they went home and tried to write one and those with the talent and persistence eventually got good enough to be offered a production opportunity. This was hit and miss and there wasn’t a lot of good material coming out of the pipeline back in the 40’s and the record abounds with discovering in rehearsals flawed workmanship and frantic scurrying behind the scenes to remedy it often the night before the curtain was scheduled to rise.

As a consequence workshops and readings were developed as tools to help school writers in the art of producing an integrated and stage worthy production. This is where things stand today…A writer begins by writing a play and it gets work shopped, read and marketed. The key is to give the writer enough substance to get started and have them start pushing the pencil or pounding the keys. The first couple of times through the process are going to be rough but learning to write plays is a solitary and immersion type experience for a writer. That is what this course will be about. Matty will be hammering the writer to get through the process while concurrently providing them with the big ticket items that have to be included and integrated… Monologues, dialogues, ascending action, climax and trailing action as well as devices, like humor, asides, repetition, resonance and a host of others that will keep recurring. Early on a first draft will be completed (By week 3 of Eight) but only after a comprehensive outline is expanded from a given one and the Character sketches are written…Then the student will write the “Straw Man” and the remainder of the lessons will look at how the whole thing is getting pinned together. Sounds like fun doesn’t it. Not a classroom exercise but a mandate to “Just Do It,” with a little adult supervision and encouragement.