Excerpt from: Pioneer Drama Around the Globe
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| November 12, 2007 | | Staging a new play lets a playwright see what works. | | Well, tomorrow is the final dress rehearsal for my new play The Prince and the Slacker. The play tells the story of two characters who look just alike and accidentally trade places. One is the head of a major media corporation; the other lives in his parents' basement and is practicing for a video-game competition. When the show opens on Wednesday, I'll find out if it's funny, but for now it's all about costumes, props, memorizing those last few lines, getting the light and sound cues straight—just like any other play.
But there is one difference between rehearsing a published play and rehearsing a newly written play with the playwright in the room. Since The Prince and the Slacker has never been staged, I don't know what works and what doesn't until I see the play on its feet. Crucial in the process of testing the new play are both the actors and the director (who happens to be my wife Janice).
With actors in the 8th and 9th grades, I have the opportunity to let students tell me when a line is not working. Janice, also, will tell me if a scene isn't playing or needs to be reworked. I love it when the kids come up with variations on lines that are funnier than what I originally wrote and we often incoporate such changes into our performance. Sometimes a scene needs enough work that we just play it as written and then I rewrite it after the production is over—after all, it's not fair to ask students to learn a whole new set of lines with only a few days until opening.
Staging a new show with a talented director and a group of student actors, and performing the play in front of audiences are important steps towards publication. The scripts of my plays that are available from Pioneer are not identical to the original productions. Seeing the plays on stage and watching how the audiences respond lets me hone the scripts before I submit them for publication.
So here's hoping the actors and audiences at Summit School this week have a great time with The Prince and the Slacker. If so, it might be available from Pioneer some day . . . but only after a rewrite. | | |
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