Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks: _Malavika_ by Nanda

Hello Nanda!

This is a good, first draft not only of your play but also of your projected trilogy as we discussed it the last time we met.

1) First, read Agatha Christie's The Secret of Chimneys--not that it has anything to do with your play but because of her expert handling of presenting clues and masking identities.

2) Your mysterious showcasing of the character Malavika is commendable. Ensure, however, that she is spiritually present even when she is physically absent in scenes.

3) Is the character Ira necessary? How does she embody the premise? Her presence in the first scene might lead the audience to believe that the play is all about her. Remember that your play is about being a man and being a husband, not being a parent.

4) In the TV scene and the birthday scene, which you tend to overdevelop by making everyone talk of trivialities, your story stops moving forward. Be aware that your genre is poetic realism, not realism.

5) Eliminate unnecessary subplots. Your focus is Agni-Malavika.

6) In a mystery play (not in the medieval sense), a playwright will always allow his audience to be ten steps ahead of the storyteller. No surprises should be sprung.

7) No matter what the subject matter, begin your play as close to the climax as possible.

Take a rest and mull over your play before rewriting it.

Diagram your trilogy on a piece of paper and write, under each play title, what you need to achieve in each play. You will find that the less characters you have, the more substantial your work will be.

You may not be able to rewrite this draft in time for my arrival in Singapore. However, I will be happy to meet you anyway, to discuss what difficulties you may be having. 

Singaporean playwrights: I instructed all of you to resubmit your manuscripts and highlight your changes, additions, and revisions in a distinct color. If there are no highlighted passages I will assume that no changes were made, and I will not bother to reread your manuscripts.

The ten Chinese hells await us in Haw Par Villa, where I am conducting two short workshops for beginners on top of the main workshop for TheatreWorks Singapore. I can't wait to see these, they remind me so much of scenes from my favorite Judge Dee books.

Haw Par Villa is the venue for Singapore's 2018 24-Hour Playwriting Competition.

Premise: You begin a play with a protagonist in conflict with an antagonist over something BIG that is AT STAKE. The play ends with the protagonist not where he has always been but in a completely different position, as far away from his original position as possible. That is the ONLY meaning of dramatic change.

You may begin a movie or a teleplay with someone setting a kettle of water on a lit stove.

But, in theatre, you begin a play with the water already boiling.

Point of attack: Grip your audience by the balls as soon as the curtain rises, and don't let go until the curtain falls. That is why you need to begin your play as close to the climax as possible.

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks Singapore: "Home" by Ivan

Hello Ivan!

Interesting play--since it will have a niche audience, I see it being performed in a bar, a living room, or backstage of a theatre with an invitational audience seated at small tables and in chairs and having drinks and light snacks. There are no exits for the performers; they simply sit with the audience until their next cue, a la Grotowski. Everything can then be filmed at the same time with multiple cameras.

The play you have chosen to submit is not "drama" by the definition we discussed in the workshop, in the sense that nothing "big" is at stake. It is, however, an interesting vignette and commentary, although the subject matter is not something that has never been addressed before. Its success rests greatly on ingenious staging.

Proofread and polish your manuscript. Cast your friends as characters. Let us have a reading when we meet.   

Singaporean Playwrights: Are you able to electronically resubmit your complete plays to me by June 15, 2018? If possible, in our next meeting, your manuscripts should be read, casting your friends as the characters, so that we become engaged with your plays as enunciated and as heard, and no longer as written.

Please pass to those who are not in my Friends and Followers Lists.

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks Singapore: _Two Halves Make a Whole_ by Danial

Hello Danial!

Very good work on your play. A question, though: Your manuscript title is Two Halves Make a Hole, but your file name is Two Halves Make a Whole. Which is which? (Both actually make sense to me.)

It's quite wonderful that you changed the protagonists' race to Malay from Chinese. It means, to me, that you have become emboldened to come closer to Truth. As I told everyone in the workshop, writing a play is an emotionally violent act on the self. Truth causes pain--but then again so does resistance to truth.

Your play is a wonderful example of a story being told purely through the spoken word. It is verbose but effective because of your adept handling of language. You are actually so good at it because of two things: 1) your dialogue creates excellent acting vehicles, and 2) the story is so clearly told through dialogue that it can be performed against only a backdrop of a solid color with no sets.

To answer the questions you posed to me in the middle of your manuscript:

--To an adolescent, examples of power symbols are cars, weapons such as guns and swords, implements of extreme sports, and the like.
--Broken power symbols, therefore, would be crashed cars, and dismantled or damaged weapons and implements of extreme sports.
--Power symbols change depending on the developmental stage one is in. To an older male, these would include bags of money, alcohol, seductive women, et cetera.

It is all right to add all of those scenes you are planning to write in, keeping in mind that every scene must be a clear demonstration of the premise. Do not worry about whether your play will be too long--the director will trim and cut where necessary.

Proofread your work. A lot of pronouns keep getting inserted in the wrong places because you may have misused the "Find and Replace" function.

The second slap in Act III, Scene 1 might elicit laughter from the audience.

Finish and polish your play now. As it is, it is almost reading-ready.

Dramaturgy for TheatreWorks Singapore: _Folie a Trois_ by Sarah

Hello Sarah!

The most remarkable thing about your manuscript is that, although incomplete, it has all the elements that we discussed in our workshop: specifically a clear premise, the right point of attack, and conflict. Your dialogue is crisp and economical. The action is as swift as the action in the Gospel of Mark. The drama is unfolding properly. The play promises to be a wonderful case study of incest. Strangely, it is also Brechtian in treatment.

Please continue to work on and complete this play. Be sensitive to cultural references--for example, is the Wheel of Fortune game within the collective unconscious of Singaporeans, or is there a Chinese game of a similar nature that we can connect more comfortably not only with the protagonist but also with her father?

Like Rae, you have a good ear for dialogue, but give more texture to the other characters' speech (except for the father, whose dialogue is properly Singlese) to avoid making them sound like one another.

Your management of time is clever, but the changes should be made clearer to the audience.

On the whole, good work. Keep it going. I hope you can do more pages, if not the entire play, in time for my arrival in Singapore. Write at least two hours a day--whether on this manuscript or not. Just write.

When you re-submit 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.