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        <Summary>Meet Charlie Lovett</Summary>
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&lt;P&gt;&lt;FONT face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2&gt;Charlie Lovett is a 
noted expert and author on the subject of Lewis Carroll.&amp;nbsp; More recently he 
has turned toward writing children's plays. He is Writer-in-Residence at Summit 
School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.&lt;/FONT&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;FONT face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2&gt;&amp;ldquo;My philosophy of 
drama for children has developed over many years&amp;hellip; Rather than assuming that 
children are incapable of understanding certain words and ideas and that they 
are broadly divided into &amp;lsquo;stars&amp;rsquo; and those who can&amp;rsquo;t act, I assume that 
children&amp;rsquo;s performances will rise to meet the level of the material they are 
given and that at the elementary level, all children should be given equal 
opportunities on stage. My plays for elementary students, therefore, tend to 
have a fairly even distribution of parts and are filled with humor and cultural 
allusions that provide learning opportunities for the students and fun for the 
parents and teachers.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/FONT&gt; 
&lt;P&gt;&lt;FONT face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2&gt;Check back 
frequently as Charlie blogs about children's theatre, playwriting and anything 
else that crosses is mind.&amp;nbsp; You can also learn more about him at his 
website, &lt;/FONT&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.charlielovett.com/newindex.html"&gt;&lt;U&gt;&lt;FONT 
face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color=#0000ff 
size=2&gt;CharlieLovett.com&lt;/FONT&gt;&lt;/U&gt;&lt;/A&gt;&lt;FONT 
face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2&gt;. &lt;/FONT&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</Description>
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         <Summary>Staging a new play lets a playwright see what works.</Summary>
         <Description>&lt;span class="Apple-style-span"&gt;Well, tomorrow is the final dress rehearsal for my new play &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "&gt;The Prince and the Slacker&lt;/span&gt;. 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&amp;mdash;just like any other play.

&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;span class="Apple-style-span"&gt;But there is one difference between rehearsing a published play and rehearsing a newly written play with the playwright in the room. Since &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "&gt;The Prince and the Slacker &lt;/span&gt;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).&amp;nbsp;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;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&amp;mdash;after all, it's not fair to ask students to learn a whole new set of lines with only a few days until opening.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;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.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;span class="Apple-style-span"&gt;So here's hoping the actors and audiences at Summit School this week have a great time with &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "&gt;The Prince and the Slacker&lt;/span&gt;. If so, it might be available from Pioneer some day . . . but only after a rewrite.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/span&gt;</Description>
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         <Summary>Reading Play Aloud Involves Teachers, Excites Students</Summary>
         <Description>Today is one of my favorite days of the year. As writer in residence at Summit School in Winston-Salem, NC, one of my jobs is to write a play for the third grade to perform each year. Starting early in the school year I am bombarded with questions every time I see a group of third graders&amp;mdash;&amp;quot;What is our play about?&amp;quot; they all want to know. Today they found out.&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;I wrote the new play, &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"&gt;Little Miss Gingerbread&lt;/span&gt; back in October/November and have been honing it since then. In this effort my wife, Janice, who is also the director, has been indispensable. We like to introduce the third graders to their play by reading it aloud to them and this morning was that first reading. Before today, only Janice and I had ever laid eyes (or ears) on &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"&gt;Little Miss Gingerbread&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;For the reading the entire third grade (50+ students) gathered in our screening room while eight faculty members split up the roles. The reading started at 8:45, so we had to wake up the kids &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="TEXT-DECORATION: underline"&gt;and&lt;/span&gt; keep their interest. &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"&gt;Little Miss Gingerbread&lt;/span&gt; seems to have done both. Once the kids (and the adults) started to laugh, I knew I had written a play they were going to enjoy performing. The kids sat still, listened, laughed, and applauded when it was all over&amp;mdash;all leading to a huge sigh of relief from the playwright.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Not only is the reading a good way to introduce the kids to the story and the characters (especially since they will be auditioning in the next few days) but it also serves to get lots of teachers involved and excited about the project. The students see their teachers reading the play, and they know that those teachers will support them throughout the project.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;In three months what was just a group of unrehearsed teachers doing a read-through will become a full-blown production in the theatre with costumes, sets, lights, and well-rehearsed third graders singing, dancing, and acting away. Watching students perform a new play in front of an audience for the first time . . . that's a pretty good day too!&lt;/div&gt;</Description>
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         <Summary>Getting a New Play Ready for Submission</Summary>
         <Description>Well, it's been about three months since an intrepid group of eighth and ninth graders at Summit School performed my new play, &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"&gt;The Prince and the Slacker&lt;/span&gt;, so I thought it was time to think about submitting the play to Pioneer. A first production of a play is a great way to find out what works and what doesn't, and I always find it's good to get a little distance before revising.&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;The first thing I did was pop in the DVD of the play and read through the script as it was playing. During rehearsals we had changed a few lines, added a couple of jokes, and put in some new business, so I marked my script as I watched the DVD. This also gave me a chance to remind myself what didn't work. One scene in particular I marked for a major rewrite.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;I spent the better part of a day getting the script cleaned up and up to the standards of our production. Next was to think about how I could make it as flexible as possible. Our group had been mostly boys, but I knew before I wrote the play that many drama groups have more girls than boys. I had kept this in mind when originally writing the play, so now I changed many of the parts to &amp;quot;flexible&amp;quot; roles, meaning they could be played by either a girl or a boy. This meant rewriting lines to remove &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; and taking out other references to gender. I also gave all these characters names that could work for either a male or female. In the end, &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"&gt;The Prince and the Slacker&lt;/span&gt; will have at least 11 flexible parts.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Some parts, like the spoiled brat movie star Vegas Marriott, just have to be played by a girl; while others, like the frustrated French businessman Jean Claude Jean-Claude, will work best when played by a boy, but more than half the roles will be flexible&amp;mdash;I think that's pretty good.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Finally I made one last pass, checking that all the stage directions were clear, writing a description of the set, and consolidating some scenes (my wife, Janice, who directed the original production, likes to divide the play into short scenes for rehearsal purposes).&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;So, &lt;span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-STYLE: italic"&gt;The Prince and the Slacker&lt;/span&gt; is almost ready for submission. I'll let it sit for a couple of days and then read it over one more time before sending it off to Pioneer. If I'm lucky, in a few months you'll have a chance to perform it at your school. If you do, I can't wait to see what Vegas Marriott's costume looks like.&lt;/div&gt;</Description>
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