Work you will and won't see

 

In the Spring 2020 term, when the College was scrambling to convert to classes via Zoom 10 days after the world (or at least our corner of it) went into lockdown, I took Playwriting Workshop.

I was a little nervous for the class, as I am not much of a theatre-goer and I was uneasy using the medium to its fullest potential. But I ended up loving the professor, the class, the plays we read, and writing a few plays of my own. 

Our first assignment was to write a short play (a page or so) utilizing an element difficult to use on stage. I chose a stream and running water. Nothing special there, except it was a good warm up.

The next assignment was to write a 10-minute play. Here I turned to a stalled comics project. I had drawn a page of a short story, of a Roman soldier and a shepherd, with the general premise, but as I mentioned, I was stalled. Shifting gears, I developed "The Roman Road" as a 10-minute play, and I was very glad for it. The story (I think) worked well relying on dialogue. Set in Britannia 400 AD, it's a story of the oppressor and the oppressed, and finding a common ground as a starting place.

The centerpiece of the class was to write a one-act play. I dug up an idea I had in my head for a very long time, which felt somewhat relevant to the moment. I wrote "Radio K.N.O.W." as a metaphor for people's reaction to change associated with the pandemic. I read about common reactions to change, both of people, as well as organizations (not quite the same thing). I had hoped to keep the character set more contained than it ended up being, but, I didn't really want to leave a common response out. I wanted people to see themselves and others they knew in the play. The central question, "what are you going to do?" calls the characters and I hope an audience to manage their reaction, response, and actions against adversity as a choice to make (of course, we're imperfect beings, and even our good decisions and choices can be difficult to adhere to, as the main character Sharon experiences along the way). I re-read my draft at least twice a day, editing and tweaking it. I was living and breathing it. I'm not sure I've ever been as invested in a group of characters as I was this set. It's a relatively straight-forward play, but I loved writing it, and reading it. An added treat: a group of former colleagues of mine, including two with a little acting experience, did a table read of an early draft. I wish I recorded it! It'll never be a comic... but I hope you can experience it somehow, someday.

After the course ended, I wrote "On the Roman Road" as a comic short, drew it, and colored it for submission to the graduate school peer-revue journal Clamantis. You can read the whole story on the journal's site. It was a very strange experience re-creating the story as a comic. It's definitely a bit different, since a comic can't lean on dialogue lest it become a "talking heads" comic but there was an easier avenue to introduce a bit more action than the stage might easily allow.