Hello Clara!
You did a wonderful job doing work and polishing your play after our session in Singapore. Your biggest advantage as a playwright is that you have unusually keen powers of observation, and are able to translate the information acquired by your senses to vivid poetry.
Here are my comments:
--Your work is not so much a play as a dramatic essay. Keep that genre in mind as you proceed to prepare it for reading.
--Always be mindful of the spoken word as opposed to the written word. Read your play aloud, audiotape yourself, and listen. For example, in Act 1 Scene 1, Page 1, Line 5, you have a line that goes "I'd stated that I was right". Delete "that" so that the line reads "I'd stated I was right". Say those two lines aloud. Isn't the second easier to project and to listen to?
--Act 2, Scene 1, Page 24 is set in an airport, and your character is on a travellator. Your producer will not spend money to construct a travellator onstage just for this one, transitory scene. Avoid cinematic visualizing. Be kind to your director and your production designer; make their jobs as easy for them as possible. Directors and production designers do not like working on problems the playwright creates for them--rather, they like taking a playwright's simple, straightforward work and challenging themselves by creating complex problems off it.
--Act 2, Scene 2, Page 33, Michael's entrance is contrived and seems out of a TV sitcom. The sound of a flushing toilet that precedes his entrance will only elicit laughter from the audience. Michael is only one man in a play filled with a bevy of women. I suggest that you cut him out and reveal his affair with Leng via exposition--either in a monologue or in dialogue between Sabine and her mother. As written in this play, Michael is a mere prop or cardboard cut-out. If you can't give a performer a substantial role, don't even write it. I have the same comment for the children Aiden and Isaac, who appear in only one scene and will only incur the production two additional talent fees. If you MUST have children there, though, change them to girls, thereby giving your play an all-female cast.
--All monologues: Study them carefully. A monologue isn't just a long-drawn speech to be delivered onstage. EVERY monologue must have a premise (conforming to the premise of the entire play), rising action, a climax, and a denouement. Note that any monologue that does not have these will tend to be boring and can actually be deleted--because anything that does not push the premise of the play forward should be deleted.
--Your wrap-up and ending are effective. However this will work only if, from the beginning of the play to the very end, ALL characters are seated in a circle round the main playing area. As such, there will be no entrances and no exits.
Overall, great work, and congratulations! This is a play that should be watched not only by every woman in Singapore but by every woman in the world.
You did a wonderful job doing work and polishing your play after our session in Singapore. Your biggest advantage as a playwright is that you have unusually keen powers of observation, and are able to translate the information acquired by your senses to vivid poetry.
Here are my comments:
--Your work is not so much a play as a dramatic essay. Keep that genre in mind as you proceed to prepare it for reading.
--Always be mindful of the spoken word as opposed to the written word. Read your play aloud, audiotape yourself, and listen. For example, in Act 1 Scene 1, Page 1, Line 5, you have a line that goes "I'd stated that I was right". Delete "that" so that the line reads "I'd stated I was right". Say those two lines aloud. Isn't the second easier to project and to listen to?
--Act 2, Scene 1, Page 24 is set in an airport, and your character is on a travellator. Your producer will not spend money to construct a travellator onstage just for this one, transitory scene. Avoid cinematic visualizing. Be kind to your director and your production designer; make their jobs as easy for them as possible. Directors and production designers do not like working on problems the playwright creates for them--rather, they like taking a playwright's simple, straightforward work and challenging themselves by creating complex problems off it.
--Act 2, Scene 2, Page 33, Michael's entrance is contrived and seems out of a TV sitcom. The sound of a flushing toilet that precedes his entrance will only elicit laughter from the audience. Michael is only one man in a play filled with a bevy of women. I suggest that you cut him out and reveal his affair with Leng via exposition--either in a monologue or in dialogue between Sabine and her mother. As written in this play, Michael is a mere prop or cardboard cut-out. If you can't give a performer a substantial role, don't even write it. I have the same comment for the children Aiden and Isaac, who appear in only one scene and will only incur the production two additional talent fees. If you MUST have children there, though, change them to girls, thereby giving your play an all-female cast.
--All monologues: Study them carefully. A monologue isn't just a long-drawn speech to be delivered onstage. EVERY monologue must have a premise (conforming to the premise of the entire play), rising action, a climax, and a denouement. Note that any monologue that does not have these will tend to be boring and can actually be deleted--because anything that does not push the premise of the play forward should be deleted.
--Your wrap-up and ending are effective. However this will work only if, from the beginning of the play to the very end, ALL characters are seated in a circle round the main playing area. As such, there will be no entrances and no exits.
Overall, great work, and congratulations! This is a play that should be watched not only by every woman in Singapore but by every woman in the world.
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