Zoe's Play: "I Eye The Sky"
Dear Zoe,
Your work confirmed something that impressed me during the brief week that we spent at our workshop: although you are a sweet, quiet girl, your energy is distinctly masculine.
The play you submitted is most unusual because:
--it requires at least three soccer players to act the roles onstage--or three boys who can act like soccer players at any rate
--it is a battery of case studies that showcase Singaporean sociology
--it uses the soccer game as a metaphor for survival.
Your background in theater, particularly as a director, helped a lot in enabling you to visualize the stage and the action.
Know what the producers might think: that it is a wonderful play but a frightfully expensive one to stage, what with all the audiovisuals and lighting effects that you indicate.
Here are my comments and suggestions:
1. Get a group of friends to read the play. Trim the dialogue. Most of it is superfluous.
2. Allow your characters longer passages of reflection.
3. Work on the speech patterns and rhythms of each character. As it is, they all sound alike.
4. Consider re-conceiving the boys as Chinese, Malay, and Indian rather than only Malay.
5. Give each boy a speech idiosyncrasy, not necessarily blatant, that will characterize him and distinguish him from the others.
6. Omit the audience participation and acknowledgement that you suggest as optional. These break the illusion of the play and take it down to the level of community theater, unless that is what you mean it to be.
I hope that this is helpful to you.
Please, send me your revised script by e-mail as a Word document attachment.
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Writing from The Heart
Design and execution by Meeko Marasigan
3 comments:
Thank you for comments.
I started playing roles of another ethnicity in community theatre some years ago. I played it so well that audience loved HER. I asked to quit and stopped playing the role of HER because at that time, I realised I don’t know who I was anymore. Will people like me as I really am?
Such is the duality of identities or multiple masks we wear everyday just to be accepted and ‘survive’. The person I presented at work is accepted. I was reminded to look ‘girl’. What happened to ‘woman’? I also masked my assertiveness in the way I get work done – efficiently – Hahaha.
Likewise are the struggles the characters in this play have to go through. I am expressing my existential angst through these characters. I also have seen these ‘characters’ and I want to give them a voice.
This is one play that elucidated dormant and incubated feelings and thoughts that were harboured somewhere in my body, causing aches and pains, that I finally have to let it break the dam to come through. I write from the heart. As it is said:
One is driven to write. One writes because one will just die if one doesn't write. One writes because it is as necessary as breathing and drinking and eating.
Despite their different ethnicities and cultures, they are the same when they appear in Court.
Perhaps by playing up their differences in ethnicities and cultures, the statement that they are all in the same boat of predicament could become stronger. It will also allow the multi-ethnic audience identify with the characters.
Thanks for reminding me that I already have a group of multi-ethnic friends who could show me a rope or two.
I appreciate your comment about thinking from a producer’s hat. The requirements could be trimmed for the minimal budget – I just need to be creative a bit more. I could make two versions for the play. One for version is for the paying audience.
The other version would be as vignettes for community theatre and audience engagement is a key objective. Community theatre is powerful. Even though the characters could be scripted as conventional, the references could move people to tears because they recollected their pain as they watch the characters struggle. There is hope that healing comes about at the end when that pain is re-visited, in a safe and positive manner, and as a celebration of people’s tenacity to outlast difficulties. Imagine drama happening at both ends – on the stage and in the audience’s virtual drama.
Playback Theatre is one such format but its tedious but stupendously deep.
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