189480 Resource 105337 166872 166872 1194922398017 1194922398017 Controlled Final Dress

Staging a new play lets a playwright see what works.

<span class="Apple-style-span">Well, tomorrow is the final dress rehearsal for my new play <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">The Prince and the Slacker</span>. 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&mdash;just like any other play. <div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">But there is one difference between rehearsing a published play and rehearsing a newly written play with the playwright in the room. Since <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">The Prince and the Slacker </span>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).&nbsp;</span></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /></div><div>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&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.</div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /></div><div>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.</div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">So here's hoping the actors and audiences at Summit School this week have a great time with <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">The Prince and the Slacker</span>. If so, it might be available from Pioneer some day . . . but only after a rewrite.</span></div></span> 10 application/xml false children's plays drama dress rehearsal playwright publication rewrite Summit School Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 clovett 75.183.25.170 false true false false true 105337 blog blogsite/PioneerDrama/web