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I have a big confession for you guys, something I'll likely be lambasted for... I loathe improv. Loathe it. Yes, even "Who's Line." After doing it for a few years, I'm finally confident enough to be able to say it. In my mind, the humor comes from the sheer awkwardness and "randomness" of the situations. I distinctly remember as an improv exercise, we were all given a scenario or trait and told to act it out. I was given "Your hand is covered in ants and you're terrified of ants." I just don't understand how actors, or an audience, can enjoy this. The only answer that makes sense is awkwardly writhing around the stage shrieking and generally looking foolish. This is coming from someone who will do many shameless things in the name of humor. I guess my problem with improv is the lack of polish, of shine that makes me love theater so much. Yes, it may be spontaneous and wacky, but the only word I can use to describe it personally is "bombardment." So, yeah, rant over. Luckily I can write, and write I shall! This group may be hooked on the cheap opium of comedy improv, but I will wane them from it! Now, off to the writer's board...
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Sep 16, 2011 01:07
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Improv is a game of logic. If you listen carefully and go with your instincts, -while keeping a logical structure-, you can arrive in some great places. Human conversation is improv, outside of formal negotiations and spelling bees.
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Sep 16, 2011 02:22
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I went to opening night for God's Ear tonight. One of the companies I used to work with is doing a 3 week run of it. This is the first of Jenny Schwartz works I have seen and I really enjoy her writing style and use of language. Anyone that hasn't read or seen her work should really check it out.
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Sep 17, 2011 03:56
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Golden Bee posted:Play got purchased AGAIN, this time by an Australian theater. I am officially an international playwright. This owns, congrats! Named Ashamed posted:Anyone have any suggestions on good summer programs or internships for Playwriting (primary interest) or Direction (close second)? Or, any really solid internships in general for theatre? The best directing summer program is probably Williamstown. I don't speak from personal experience, just reputation.
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Sep 20, 2011 04:13
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Thanks dude. By the way, I'm directing two adaptations I wrote and have been given the copyright permissions to direct them myself at college. I need some advice from costume or makeup designers. You see, I need two things. I need two prosthetic hook hands that look like they're old enough or at least technologically advanced as the late 70's. I also need to make an actor's eyes appear to be blind, bloodshot and slightly off kilter. I'm not entirely sure how to get the first cheaply unless I find a cheap rental or are given a donation by a hospital. The other item is more difficult. All the cosmetic contacts that are sold online for Halloween are all "vampire," "zombie," and "rave." There are some blind contacts, but they actually blind the actor as well and I think that may be unsafe given only a month of rehearsals. My main concern is making my actor's eyes appear blind, without endangering them or paying out the rear end.
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Sep 21, 2011 02:04
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Hey Named Ashamed! I'm in make-up class right now and I whipped out my guide on how to do make-up for blindness. Here is the section on blindness: "The actor can usually suggest blindness by keeping the eyes nearly closed. For blindness involving disfigurement of the orbital area, you might cast a blind eye and make a molded latex, gelatin, or silicon piece from it." Then it goes on to say paint the cast of the eye and apply false eyelashes. Cut a hole in the cast of the eye for the actor to see through. But this will severely limit the peripheral vision of the actor. I'm playing someone blind right now and my cast mates lead me around, and I stare at the knees of the actors. People who are new-blind can usually still make eye contact because of years of muscle memory. My friends who are blind from birth often stare down and keep their head tilted slightly down. It is safer to suggest blindness unless you have a talented make-up crew.
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Sep 21, 2011 13:45
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MixMasterGriff posted:I have a big confession for you guys, something I'll likely be lambasted for... Where did you study improv? This sounds like a short form exercise. Long form improv involves creating scenes with a partner and exploring the relationship between the two characters you create. It's not "now do a scene from a superhero movie". Don't get me wrong, I do have problems with improv; plenty of people phone in performances or do a show with a wink and a nudge, getting an entire troupe together is like herding cats, and there really is no polish when folks can show up in ratty sneakers and jeans on a performance night. However, improv is still great because experienced performers like "TJ and Dave" are consistently entertaining and long form itself lends really well to the organic writing of any kind of story. I guess I'm just saying don't knock it until you get to work with awesome players. That said, is anyone going to be in Atlanta for the Black Box Theatre Festival? My troupe Maybe Sherman is performing next Friday night and it would be great if anyone wanted to say howdy. We're also doing the Chicago Improvathon next week.
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Sep 21, 2011 15:53
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I don't really find improv that funny either. I don't think I would pay to go see it, but I think it is a really good warm-up and cast bonding tool. I have been in a couple of improv camps, and I took an improv course in college. While there are always people over acting and killing the scenes because of nerves/adrenaline/narcissism, I have found that the watch-a-bility has really improved with more experienced actors. Learning that focusing on the other actor was probably the most important thing I have learned from improv, and it has made me a much better actor.
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Sep 21, 2011 20:20
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RebBrownies posted:Learning that focusing on the other actor was probably the most important thing I have learned from improv, and it has made me a much better actor. Exactly. Good improvisers (and better actors) are always looking for cues from their partners.
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Sep 21, 2011 21:52
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The problem is that improv has become synonymous with comedy. An awful lot of good has come from that but plenty of bad too.
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Sep 21, 2011 22:52
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So I just read The Birthday Party again and I want to be in it or direct it so badly. Such a loving powerhouse of a play.
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Sep 27, 2011 21:20
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Get British actors for it.
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Sep 29, 2011 20:51
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A little something Merrily for y'all Sondheim fans. So anyone here do much scenic design? I took a class on it in the spring but it's been a major interest for me for a few years now.
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Oct 10, 2011 09:38
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You know, since we were talking of broken musicals in the past, I'd like to express my affection for two of them in particular. One I think everyone knows is broken, and the other one might just be one that I think is broken and I lament that fact. Chess is one I find perplexing. I've never seen it live, but I have tracked down as many different recordings of it as I could find. I think it's one of those shows that people undertake because they love it and they're sure they can be the one to fix it but no one ever can. Even now I'm sitting here trying to think of what to write on "what's wrong with Chess" and I'm stumped. The director in me wants to point to the number of different versions and all the permutations of the story. If the story is that malleable, that suggests that there's stuff in there that's non-essential and might benefit from an edit. The other one is Aspects of Love. I think the score is potentially ALW's best (I should add that I have absolutely no music theory chops, so any analysis I can do is purely "Oooh, pretty!"). I find a few of the characters off-putting, but I think some of the main love stories ring very true. Here's where I think it's broken. If you clock it, the average scene length comes in at under two minutes. It's something like a scene change every minute and forty eight seconds. That boggles my mind. The only way I was ever able to conceive of handling that involves doing every scene on so small a scale as to render each location meaningless. Those are the two that spring to mind when the topic is broken musicals I love.
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Oct 10, 2011 14:17
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I've never seen Chess but I have a number of friends that are massive fans. One of them has a rook tattooed on her ankle even. I'd love the chance to see it but it's so rarely produced.
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Oct 10, 2011 14:37
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Finished the first draft of another play (Old New Kid). It's been on my mind a while, and skirts the line between children's theater (low running time, low complexity) and something a bit more advanced. I've sent it out to a few people and will post a link to the second draft here. Also finished a draft of a webseries...this week will be about writing specs. I've always liked the songs from Chess, but I've never seen the entire thing.
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Oct 10, 2011 19:11
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Golden Bee posted:Also finished a draft of a webseries...this week will be about writing specs. Oh, such is the road to heartbreak, at least if you're me. My project is about to turn three and despite having a cast and an eight episode season, I can't get a production team to save my life.
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Oct 10, 2011 19:20
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Where are you at? I met most of the people I work with in college, on reddit, or at pool party film shoots. Some I met as extra other projects.
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Oct 10, 2011 19:25
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Chicago. I've pretty much exhausted all my filmmaker contacts at this point, though I haven't gone the Craigslist or Linkedin routes. Getting people on board for a (currently) zero-budget project is even more difficult than it sounds 
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Oct 10, 2011 19:33
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Alaemon posted:Chess and Aspects of Love I've had this exact same conversation I don't even know how many times, but I can't manage to get the people I like discussing these things with to give them a listen. It usually boils down to me mentioning Chess and them saying, "Oh, God! You mean the one with One Night In Bangkok!?" To me this is a positive, but apparently for everyone I know it's a negative. It's amazingly 1980's, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? Aspects of Love has me recounting the plot and everyone losing interest when Alex gets the hots for his underage cousin. If I wasn't about 6 or 7 hours away from Chicago and had any free time I would happily help out with a film project or two but I don't have any cash to make a trip there myself to even entertain the idea of volunteering. Good luck finding your cast and crew, rantmo.
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Oct 10, 2011 20:17
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Raymond Carver's widow Tess Gallagher is coming to my college to come talk to me and my cast about the adaptations of Carver's short stories that I'm doing. Aside from having her chat with me and the cast, and showing her some excerpts from the week and a half of rehearsals we've had so far, I'm not entirely sure what else I should do to host her. I've never been visited by literary figures / affiliated writers to my productions before.
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Oct 11, 2011 21:56
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^^^ I don't know what else to do for a visit this early on in the process, but are you hosting talkbacks after any of your performances? If you are, you should invite his widow to be a part of the talkbacks, it would be really cool. If you aren't hosting talkbacks, you should host talkbacks after one of the performances and invite her to be a part of them cause that would be really cool.
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Oct 12, 2011 00:42
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Welp, after two years of thinking about it, I'm going to apply to a few acting graduate programs. Nothing I have any real chance of getting into (NYU, Yale, UCSD, USD/Old Globe) but you never know if you don't try, plus the challenge of having four awesome monologues and 16 bars of song ready to go by the beginning of February (after being in two shows in a row now) will really kick my rear end and get me motivated for the next year.
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Oct 13, 2011 14:46
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Break legs O'Sheaman! I have a friend in The New School right now and another that got into CalArts if you are interested in either of those. Both friends are enjoying the program so far.
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Oct 13, 2011 17:59
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I just read this review of ThreePenny Operathat is really harsh towards Robert Wilson's design. I have heard similar criticisms of him before. Jennifer Tipton worked as an ALD for him and said he always does the same thing/uses the same approach to a production so once she learned that approach she had to move on. I have not studied his design style in that much depth though. Does anyone with more knowledge of his work agree or disagree with the criticisms of the article? The little bit I have seen of his work I enjoyed so I am not sure if the criticisms are valid or not.
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Oct 25, 2011 17:54
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Burger Crime posted:I just read this review of ThreePenny Operathat is really harsh towards Robert Wilson's design. I have heard similar criticisms of him before. Jennifer Tipton worked as an ALD for him and said he always does the same thing/uses the same approach to a production so once she learned that approach she had to move on. I have not studied his design style in that much depth though. Does anyone with more knowledge of his work agree or disagree with the criticisms of the article? The little bit I have seen of his work I enjoyed so I am not sure if the criticisms are valid or not. I don't know much about Wilson but I have to say that review kind of sounds like a guy who doesn't really understand Brecht's artistic philosophy. I mean it's entirely possible the director leaned too hard and squashed all the life out of the show (it happens all too easily with Brecht) but the critic here seems to be pining for a sort of theatricality that was anathema to Brecht.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:52
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I went to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream tonight. The production was censored by the theatre after opening night. They wanted to go to massive extremes like cutting Oberon's line "And thou look meet me ere the first cock crow" because of the use of the word cock. They did not go that far thankfully but I am really pissed off that they were allowed to cut anything at all. Does anyone else have experience with their productions being censored either at the university or professional level? This is the first time I have ever experienced it first hand and am really pissed off.
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Nov 6, 2011 05:28
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I think we had this argument a few pages ago. It started when I was surprised "Into the Woods" had an Act 2 (having only seen it at summer camp). Anyway, most playwrights will demand you inform the publishers if you want to make cuts, and for good reason; I wouldn't want my name on something truncated for content. In other news, I have a new play I'd love looked at. It's set on the half day of school before Thanksgiving Break. http://www.box.net/shared/djmm1344u82hlmq96fhx
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Nov 6, 2011 06:50
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Burger Crime posted:I went to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream tonight. The production was censored by the theatre after opening night. They wanted to go to massive extremes like cutting Oberon's line "And thou look meet me ere the first cock crow" because of the use of the word cock. They did not go that far thankfully but I am really pissed off that they were allowed to cut anything at all. Does anyone else have experience with their productions being censored either at the university or professional level? This is the first time I have ever experienced it first hand and am really pissed off. It's not text-editing censorship. But MSU was doing a production of Suburbia, and then 9/11 happened. The Powers That Be at the university level informed the Theatre Department that instead of a two-week run, they could have one performance or none at all. Because apparently any more than that would run the risk of inciting a racial incident on campus. Not that any of the administration bothered to read or see the play, mind you.
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Nov 6, 2011 16:59
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Golden Bee posted:I think we had this argument a few pages ago. It started when I was surprised "Into the Woods" had an Act 2 (having only seen it at summer camp). I actually think it was in the "bad theater thread" in GBS. I came across as an anti-creativity rear end in a top hat because I said it was bullshit to change the text and pointed out that it was against the deal you sign with the publisher. Mostly because most changes are censorship like what's being discussed or people who think they're better writers than the playwrite (they're not) screwing with things. Not that it never works, just that in the majority of cases it's a bad idea and stupid. Now, either fortunately or unfortunately Shakespeare is no longer under copywright law. This means no one owns the rights and anyone who does it can do whatever they want with it. There are some awesome examples of edited or re-imagined Shakespeare (several of them are in this thread) and this is just another story of the opposite.
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Nov 7, 2011 15:38
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drat, I miss improv. Started 8 years ago and haven't performed in 4 or 5 years. It sucks. I don't know how to start it back up again. The only thing I can think of is starting something at my school, but thats... impossible for me.
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Nov 7, 2011 21:49
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Theater! Theatre. Whatever. I'm just starting to get involved in the scene myself. I'm not really an actor, just a tech-head and rigger mostly, so I've just been running sound (lights the once, and a bit of stage managing) for a company in the town where I live---five productions, a little over a year real-time. The company's two directors have threatened to cast me in something, though, so gently caress if I know. It's good times! All getting out of the house and having a good time and such.
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Nov 8, 2011 06:05
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Why can't you start a troupe, Theo?
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Nov 8, 2011 06:53
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Golden Bee posted:Why can't you start a troupe, Theo? I dunno, when I first tried I was trying to find the perfect people. Well, there is no one perfect. On top of that, you have to find people willing to commit. You have to have rehearsals to practice stuff and teach stuff to people to who are new.
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Nov 8, 2011 15:47
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Yeah, but those people become your friends and give you opportunities down the road.
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Nov 8, 2011 23:35
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To all the scenic designers out there, a plea for help: Does anyone know of any good resources for teaching yourself about scale drawing and making White Models for scale set models? I'm in a design course right now and the prof essentially threw us into the water to see if we'd sink or swim. There's been nearly zero instruction on anything we've been tasked with working on. I need to use Vectorworks to design a floorplan of a text and then use the floorplan to make a scale model of the set using our tiny little workshop. It's all a little daunting, so I'm trying to break it all down into steps. So if there are any simple beginners online resources for me to teach myself the concepts of scale, measuring scale with a Staedtler STD9871831 Scale ruler, and working with Vectorworks you'd be saving my life. Thanks.
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Nov 9, 2011 17:35
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Scale is easy to learn. You are most likely working in 1/4" or 1/8" as those are the most common. I recommend 1/4" though as it's usually easier to work with. So 1/4"=1'0 So if your theoretical space is a proscenium with an 18 ft arch the arch would be 4'1/2" tall in 1/4" scale. If you want a back wall that is 10 ft tall in 1/4" scale it would be 3ft tall. Just stick to whole numbers for your heights and lengths of the objects and you will be fine with scale. As for Vectorworks tutorials, your professor is a dick if he expects you to teach yourself that program but this is a good resource for starting out. It was written for VW2009 but not much has changed since then If you have any specific questions feel free to PM me.
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Nov 9, 2011 17:55
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Thanks so much! It's not so much that this all escapes me, it's that I'm so overwhelmed by being thrown in over my head. I've put every task into small incremental steps and I'll be taking it all piece by piece. I'm sure that I'll end up with Vectorworks and White Model questions later tonight, so I'll PM if that happens. Luckily I should be able to slowly teach myself if I take it slow. Thanks. I'll keep in touch.
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Nov 9, 2011 22:53
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Is there something that says that sound designers can't use simple effects like fading in and the guy/gal at the sound board can't use limiters and compressors? Are they allowed to listen/watch the play with their music or is it set it and forget it? I saw "Pardon My Invasion" at Plays and Players in Philly and I realized that I've yet to see a play (outside of really pro places like the Kimmel Center/and sometimes the Wilma) where the sound cues weren't dropped on the stage like a cinder block and then were loud enough to take away from the scene. Probably the best was the music for the montage of the end of "My Wonderful Day". Probably the only time I've seen a play where the music was integrated well enough that it actually made the scene.
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Nov 15, 2011 15:24
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Sounds like a case of incredibly lovely sound design. There's no reason at all for that sort of thing.
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Nov 15, 2011 15:36
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