Today was hip-hop aesthetics day in Idris’s class, and it was kee-razy. We spent a lot of time discussing the categories we use to judge hip-hop music, the history behind it, the future of hip-hop, and, of course, hip-hop as a form of theatre. That’s right, hip-hop theatre. We read an essay by a performer …
Category Archives: Block 6
Framework Narrative
We read a play today called The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones. It was near-perfect: a tasteful mix of awkward Mormon comedy and painful identity-crisis drama. One of the most interesting aspects of the play, though, wasn’t the fact that the title character is a robot, or that the protagonist has OCD. …
It’s done!
And all it took was putting my nose to the grindstone. You know what came out of it? Definitely not anything I expected. But I think it’s something worth being proud of. And that is exactly what I wanted. The Attic Play. It’s about a raccoon breaking up a marriage. And it’s totally worth it. …
Albee Fine
When I started writing what I’m now affectionately referring to as “The Attic Play,” I was worried I was just reproducing Edward Albee’s bizarre, hilarious masterpiece “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” The danger in this was that Idris is way more well-read than I am, so if I was thinking it, he definitely would …
Audience as Orchestra
I’m in a play right now that my good friend James wrote. It’s called Masturbating While Lonely, and no, it’s not a performance piece where you watch me masturbate for an hour. That tends to be the most common question we get. My friend Holly and I are the only two actors in it, it …
Real Life
It’s difficult to write a play. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I think the thing I’m scared to do is write about things I don’t know. It’s infinitely easier for me to write if there’s some element of autobiography in what I’m writing, because I live very much in my head and …
The Legend of the Morning Off, Netflix and the Couch
A great thing about this class is that we have Fridays off because we have occasional night classes. Ideally I shouldn’t be blogging right now–we have a 6-8 page play due on Monday, and I have no idea what I’m going to write about. So far my ideas have included the tale of a man …
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Now, I Don’t Want to Be Prescriptive…
Taking a theatre class is very similar to how I imagine group therapy. Almost every class I’ve ever taken as a theatre major has begun with a little spiel about how we’re now in an “open environment,” how we’re trying new things and we all need to be sensitive to how vulnerable we’re becoming. In …
Idris Goodwin’s Five Absolutes for Writing
After three days of performances in Armstrong Theater, we were all ready to start Spring Break. Idris dropped some wisdom on us before we went on our merry way, to encourage us to keep writing, revising, throw it in the air, and repeat. For those of us who are lucky enough to be in Old …
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Coconut Coated
As I promised in an earlier post, here is a recording of Xander Fehsenfeld’s “Coconut Coated”. Sweet brilliance. When we hit the road and made our class debut at Atlas Prep Middle School, the 7th and 8th graders melted into the chocolatey goodness of Xander’s words, and Sunday night was no different. The crowd of …
