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Writing from The Heart

Writing from The Heart
Design and execution by Meeko Marasigan

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.
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Thursday, May 31, 2018

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks Singapore: _The Fundamentalist Father_ by Helmi

Hello Helmi!

I remember the first few pages of your draft for this play, which you read to us in last year's workshop. This is a delightful addition to your last two plays, and they bring you to the fore as a social activist playwright commenting on current issues the way Oscar Wilde did in his Mannerist plays. Try to get this and the previous play on stage. If no producer will take them due to the controversial subject matter, stage them in houses with invitational audiences. You can then come up with definitive versions of the play and try to have them published in another country. Barring that, post them in cyberspace, where I have been publishing my works for more than ten years now.

We discussed the disadvantage of casting children, but I can see adults performing the role of the children in this play.

Scene 3 is cinematic and underwritten, but it will work because all it requires is a lighting change.

There is a passage of years after Scene 6 and after Scene 11. Try to make this more evident than by means of passing remarks and references.

Proofread your work. In many sentences you have missing verbs and prepositions.

Is the painting of portraits and landscapes acceptable to a fundamentalist Muslim? My understanding is that Islamic artists are allowed to paint abstractions and patterns only, but this could not be the case in your community.

Toward the end of the play the father becomes more a representation of bigotry rather than fundamentalism, and those two are not the same. You might want to rethink your title, which blatantly announces what the audience will expect, or change more of the issues being addressed in the play to religious ones.

I am looking forward to how you will decide to end this play. It is the premise, of course, that will tell you how.

When you resubmit your work, kindly highlight the passages you changed or added, in a bright color. If nothing is highlighted, I will assume that you did nothing to change the work.

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