Writing from The Heart: Dramaturgy for Theatreworks Singapore

Writing from The Heart

"Writing from The Heart" is a workshop on creative writing, creative drawing, and creative drama. There are three available versions of this workshop: one for beginners on the secondary, tertiary, and graduate levels, and another for practitioners. A third version of this workshop is designed as an outreach program to disadvantaged and underserved audiences such as the disabled, the poor and the marginalized, victims of human trafficking, battered women and abused children, drug rehabilitation center residents, child combatants, children in conflict with the law, prisoners, and gang leaders. This third version incorporates creativity and problem awareness, conflict resolution, crisis intervention, trauma therapy, and peacemaking.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Dramaturgy for Theatreworks Singapore

Li Shan's Play: "My Father and Myself: Conversations with My Father"

Dear Li Shan,

You have written a very powerful play. I am curious to know whether you wrote this after I gave you an emotional truth exercise or whether this is something you'd written long before you met me.

I want you to stick to your guns with this play. It is what producers would call a "risk". If staged successfully, however, it will give birth to:

--a new dimension of acting
--a new form of directing
--possible re-definitions of what a play is or is not as a result of your authoring a dramatic conversation as opposed to a "proper" play.

Your play requires superb actors to pull it off because of the violent and vibrant emotional movements beneath an apparently static situation--quite daunting, but I know that Theatreworks can help you there.

Here are the steps you should take from here:

1. Your title "My Father and Myself: Conversations with My Father" has redundancy. Why not go simply with "Conversations with My Father"? It would underscore the simplicity of your title vis-a-vis the complexity of your work.

2. Take a man and a woman, preferably an actor and an actress who are willing to help you, and get together for an informal reading. Do not get a man and a woman who personally know you.

This reading will help you see which passages can be trimmed or done away with. Your play may run too long for the kind of form you have chosen. As you already know emotions can be very stressful and draining.

Your play is a coiled snake. It addresses father-daughter relationships, Chinese customs and traditions, and your deep, philosophical insights on life, death, and suffering.

Let us see what happens when the snake awakens and uncoils.

Please, send me your revised or updated manuscript to my e-mail address as a Word document attachment.