Experiment 3
Proposal
For my third experiment, I plan on transforming my original piece, a single line, into a play. Although I was originally thinking about making a short film for my final experiment, I was very inspired to write a play because of my involvement in a recent theater festival on campus called Wall-to-Wall, in which eleven twenty-five minute shows were performed on a loop in the Walgreen Drama Center. The work that I was involved in was called “The Sun, the Sea, Icarus, and the Space Between.” It was a twist on the story of Icarus, in which the sun and sea are personified and Icarus is dating the sun but the sea is in love with Icarus. In the show, Icarus talks about how she believes every relationship is made up of three people: the two lovers and the space between. My role in the play was to be the physical representation of the space between. This meant that I had a non-speaking role, and I was able to watch a lot of the show because my character was introduced toward the end of the play.
I want to explore writing a play because normally when I am onstage I do not communicate or perform using my voice. As a dancer, I am used to telling stories with movement. I am interested in what it means to write dialogue that is meant to be spoken and not read. Each of the three characters in the show had pretty extended monologues, and I was struck by the power of each of those monologues. For most of the twenty-five minute work, actually, the story was told in monologues. Because of this show, I want to explore what it might mean to write a one-person show. I am interested in what it means to have a narrative told by only one person, and what it might mean to have an unreliable narrator.
Genre Analysis
Theater as an art form has been developing over the last 2,500 years. Although there is no record of how theater really began, it is believed to have grown out of religious rituals being performed. Theater grew and developed with each culture across the globe, from the influential Greek theaters to Roman theater to Japanese performing arts.
On person shows are kind of a sub-genre of theatrical performances. They can encompass anything from one-person plays to stand up comedy. Like the rest of the genre of theater, one person shows are assumed to have started with individuals that told stories to their communities to pass down history. Examples of these people include the Greek Monologists and French Troubadors. In the united states, one person shows found great popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century, otherwise known as the golden age of platform performance.
A trait of solo shows is that they generally include a lack of a fourth wall between the audience and the performer. However, other than there only being one performer in the show, a solo performance is much like any other: there are be directors, writers, composers, and other crew members involved in the performance as well.
One of my models for this experiment is Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. I first read the play in high school but watched a recorded version of it for an English class I took last year. I am especially interested in how the playwright chose to not acknowledge the audience during the show. I also love the use of the tapes in the play—although the main character is the one that recorded them, because each tape was recorded at different stages of his life, each voice and narrative seems like a different character. I think that it is a very effective method of conveying a narrative and transformation in the character. As Krapp is listening to the tape, he becomes a quasi-audience member, and we are able to see how much he has grown and changed through the years while also learning about his past through his reactions to the tapes he recorded. I’m also interested in this play as a model because it deals with the idea of forgetting parts of yourself and not being able to recognize your own memories, which are some of the themes I was exploring in my second experiment.
My second model for this experiment is Trevor Noah’s stand up show “Afraid of the Dark.” I chose this stand-up set as a model for my experiment because many of Noah’s performances are very narrative based; he sets the groundwork for many of the jokes he tells by giving the audience background about himself. A lot of his jokes land because he is able to provide a context and background for them so well. Additionally, his relationship to the audience is completely different than that of Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape. His show works so well because he is able to make every audience member in person and through the screen feel as though he is talking to them. I would hope to convey this kind of warm energy in this play.
Sketch Draft:
Title: Greatest
Setting: Laura’s Kitchen
Run Time (Approx.): 25 minutes
Synopsis: Laura is making pancakes for breakfast by herself while listening to the radio. She associates each song that comes on with a different landmark moment in her life: when she got married, when her mom passed away, when she got a dog, when she got her first job out of college, when she decided to go back to school to pursue a different profession. With each song she relives each moment in her life as a way of comprehending the fact that she must now come to terms with her and her husband getting a divorce.
Scene 1: Laura stumbling into kitchen, starts making breakfast, turns radio on
Scene 2/ Event 1: “The Way You Make Me Feel” by Michael Jackson/Laura’s marriage
Scene 3/Event 2: “Blackbird” by the Beatles/ Laura’s mom’s death
Scene 4/ Event 3: “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison/ Getting a dog
Scene 5/Event 4: “Good Feeling” by Nina Simone/ First job out of college
Scene 6/ Event 5: “Who’s Lovin’ You” by the Jackson Five/ realization of divorce
Sample:
Excerpt from Scene 6
(monologue)
I blame you for my coffee addiction. Before I met you, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a latte and an Americano, or what a pour over was, or why using freshly ground coffee beans instead of previously ground ones made the coffee taste better. Before I met you, I hardly drank more than one cup of coffee every two or three days. Now, I drink two or three cups of coffee in a single day.
You made me want to be more awake, more alive. I didn’t want to miss anything when I was with you. I wanted to make sure I heard every note of every concerto you played, every word that you said to me, every giggle and sneeze and hiccup; I wanted to remember it all. So I started drinking coffee. Who needs adenosine if you’re in love, am I right? For a while, that was all that I needed. One cup, black, in the morning, and I was good to go.
When I found out about her, I thought maybe I wasn’t alive enough for you. That if I was funnier, smarter, more interesting, you wouldn’t have cheated. That if I had been more observant, more alert, I would have seen that something was wrong. I stayed up many a night with a new pot of coffee by my side, wondering where I had gone wrong because really when I found out about her, I thought maybe I wasn’t alive enough at all.
It was golden hour the moment I knew. The sun was setting, shining through the trees. There were people passing me on the sidewalk: running, walking their dogs, playing with their kids. Cars, rushing past, hurrying home to families and dinners and movies while I just stood there with my third coffee of the day, staring blankly into traffic. You know when you hold a piping hot cup of coffee in the middle of winter because you think it’ll warm your hands, but it burns your fingers instead? How you really want to throw it away because God knows you don’t need more caffeine that day but you just spent like five dollars on a latte and you’ll hate yourself if you do? How you think that maybe drinking it will make you feel better, but the heat of it makes you feel like swearing and the extra caffeine makes you feel more tired than ever before? That was the moment I knew. The moment I realized that pain is exhausting no matter how masochistic you are, the moment I knew that I had convinced myself I loved being exhausted so that I could love you.
Reflection:
Trying to write this play was really difficult! I enjoyed the process of attempting to use only spoken dialogue to tell a story, although I’m not sure how well it succeeded. I definitely am interested in exploring this genre more, although I don’t think I’m going to do so for the final project. Writing for only one character was quite difficult, and I understand why so many one-person shows are so personal to the playwright; it’s much easier and more authentic to write from a place that’s familiar, especially if there’s only one person onstage. I think what makes successful one-person shows work well is the vulnerability in the writing and the willingness of the actor to be that vulnerable. That being said, I think that vulnerability in writing is something I can work on in the future.