First, a note... It's not too late to enter my
Three Postcards Food Contest! Come on, you might as well enter. Just for fun. I know you want to. :)
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The week after classes ended in April, all the 1st-year actors participated in the Playwrights Festival.
The main campus of our university has a graduate program in "Professional Writing" (which is part playwriting, part screenwriting). The 6 students in that program had just come back from London where they'd written 10-minute plays. We were their workshop casts.
I was cast in two of the plays. In the first, I played a 50-year-old preacher. In the second, I played a 60-year-old crippled Taiwanese-American woman. Clearly, type-casting was not a factor for this festival.
Rehearsals were in rotation on Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. The festival performances were on Wednesday.
After each rehearsal, as the playwrights saw how we were working with their texts, they often went home and rewrote things. So the next day, we'd have new scripts (sometimes the draft changes were more slight than others). We weren't supposed to memorize the texts in order to better facilitate the re-writes. I think that both of the plays I worked on were far stronger by the end of the workshop than they were when we started.
The readings were really interesting to watch. They weren't fully staged productions, of course (and I'm hardly Taiwanese... and neither are Wifey or Newbie, who played my family members in that one), but I do think that they helped the playwrights to see what they'd written (in comparison to what they THOUGHT they'd written... it's not always easy to recognize until you see it).
Sadly, I don't think I have any pictures from it... If I find any, I'll post them.
