Go GREEN. Read from THE SCREEN.

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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Friday, June 1, 2018

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.

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