Fiddler on the Roof

Please look at Mr. Craddock's blog for today's agenda.

Man of La Mancha

We're going to continue reading Man of La Mancha today in class. We're going to try to get as close to the end as possible.

Your one-act plays are due today.

Characteristics of Effective Dialogue

CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE DIALOGUE

Adapted from The Elements of Playwriting by Louis E. Catron  

Tensions and Actions:

Strong dialogue often delivers a sense of tension, demonstrating conflict, characters’ emotional involvement in issues highly important to them (a.k.a their motives), and crucial disagreements. Building tension is an excellent way to hook your audience because if done with effective dialogue, they’ll be eager to arrive at the resolution.

Dialogue is Action:

Active dialogue will progress your play forward as much as strong character development and plot. For example, characters engaged in a heated argument which ultimately develops plot, characters, or themes can be considered active dialogue.

Dialogue Makes an Emotional Appeal:

Dialogue puts forth characters’ emotions, awakening comparable feelings in the audience. It’s a way of affirming the way an audience is reacting to a play, and the piece becomes all the more powerful because of such "acknowledgment"—kind of like being rewarded for investing your time and thoughts into the lives of the characters on stage.

Dialogue Expresses Playwright’s Belief:

Quite simply, dialogue can serve as the vehicle that expresses the author's personal beliefs that initiated the composition of the play.

Dialogue Implies Theme:

Although it’s not a good idea to explicitly state your themes, dialogue is used to imply the message and deeper ideas of the play.

Dialogue Shows the Play’s Tone:

Is the language playful? Complex? Dark? Serious? Warm?

Dialogue Makes Characters Unique and Easily Recognizable:

You want to characterize and develop characters with your dialogue. Think about how dialogue creates unique, dynamic characters. You never want someone to read / see your play and remark, “The characters all speak with the same tongue.” How does each character use language differently?

Progressing Forward With Your One Act

Good morning everyone. You are to spend this class writing your one-act play. All research and brainstorming should be done. As a reminder, a one-act play is longer than a 10 minutes play. At the very minimum, your play should be 15 pages long. For those who are more ambitious, please, no longer than 30 pages.

By the end of class you should have at least 10 pages completed. Check out this play formatting link for any of those types of issues because you may have written more (or less) than you think.

Composing Your One-Act Play: Some Tips

As you begin writing your one-act play, you should bear in mind several key (maybe obvious?) characteristics of writing these shorter, snapshot-like works of drama:

1. You need a conflict. Your plot is propelled forward by a creative conflict that will implicitly develop the themes of your play. Your conflict should express meaning. Remember that an intriguing conflict is that includes opposing forces with equal  strenghts. It's not very satisfying in the end if a conflict is resolved too easily because one character has a visible advantage over whatever is opposing them.

2. One Incident: One-acts aim to dramatize a single incident or action. The brevity of a one-act doesn't allow you the space to develop other incidents and their resolutions effectively.

3. Time Lock: What makes the action of your play urgent? Why must it be resolved now?

4. Number of Characters: Keep your cast of characters relatively low (2-4). Too many characters for a one-act will result in flat characters. The brevity doesn't allow the playwright to do in-depth characterizations,

5. Remember the Unities-  Maintain unity of action, place, and time. Remember, your single incident requires urgency for whatever reason. Therefore, keep the action in a single location at one time. If you notice that there are many breaks in your play, reconsider the conflict and its level of tension. The tension should be great enough so that prolonging its resolution would seem senseless, or, at the very least, awkward.

Our Town and Your Future

Although we will not be going over Our Town in great depth, having read this play will greatly benefit you on the ELA Regents exam since it is considered a classic. Consider the following themes for possible critical lens questions:

1. The Importance of Interpersonal Relationships (“The Ties That Bond” is played during George and Emily’s first conversation, their wedding, and Emily’s funeral)

2. Ordinary as Powerful

3. Life Flies By -note the many references to time, the stage manager frequently checking his watch. Life flies by because we establish rhythms and often do not realize the subtle beauty in life.

4. Everyone Shares in a Common Humanity; Universality of Human Experience- The play lacks a definite set so that the audience must interact with the play to create the setting. Of course, the play’s meaning does not alter, indicating the play’s timelessness and universal appeal.

5. The Beauty of Simplicity

FOR FUN:

On your own time, listen to The Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby” and compare it to the characters and themes of “Our Town.”

Researching a Setting / Brainstorming for your new Assignment

We're going to take a short quiz on Our Town by Thornton Wilder, which you read over break. Then you're going to get back to writing some plays!

We've been discussing the impact that setting can have on our understanding of a play (or any text for that matter). After having read Our Town and The Piano Lesson, two plays in which the setting significantly contributes to theme and deeper meaning, you are going to tackle the task of using time and place to build the plot componements of your play. In other words, you will be researching a time period and place of your choosing, and you will subsequently construct a play whose theme / conflict / and characters somehow reflect the setting you've researched.

LAB WORK: Please complete the Researched Setting Questionnaire handout by the end of class. Not only will it keep you focused, but it will help me be able to work with you during the writing process.

***Helpful exercise:

If you're stuck, try this out:

Write about a theme that is important to you (ex. AIDS, racism, the cost of living in modern America, etc.) and that you'd like to make the core of a play. Describe it in one or two pages. Why does it interest you? What makes it important? Define what the theme means to you.

After you've finished describing the theme, try to connect it to a time period and place where this theme is relevant. Write details about the people who live or lived in this time and how they might have dealt with your theme. What do their lives and actions look like because of your theme? Now you've moved on to possibly building central characters, their motives and the situations / conflicts they may find themselves in.

Wrapping Up The Piano Lesson

After your test today, we're going to have a little "round table" discussion about the play. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and reactions.

Aside from the test and discussion, you will be picking up the next play on our agenda, Our Town by Thorton Wilder.  Please check out the biographical information on Thorton Wilder from the link.

I hope everyone has a relaxing Thanksgiving break. If you partake in the satanic Black Friday ritual, please remember, especially while driving through parking lots, that by not rushing, you actually save time.

HOMEWORK: Please read Our Town over break.

The Piano Lesson Test

On Monday of next week, you will be taking a little test (more of a "quest"- combination of quiz and test) on The Piano Lesson. What will I need to know, you might ask? I would know the following plawriting terms and how they apply to The Piano Lesson:

                                     -MDQ (major dramatic question)
                                     -Time lock
                                     -Enlightenment
                                     -Dark moment
                                     -Sarcey's Principle of Offstage Action
                                     -Catharsis


You will also be asked to identify the speaker of several dialogue excerpts. In order for you to be successful at this task, be sure to know the motives or ultimate goal of the following characters: Doaker, Berniece, Boy William, Avery, and Lymon.

Finally, there will be a short response question on how setting influences the motives of Berniece and Boy Willie. Compare/contrast their interpretations of what it means to be a black American in the 1930's, and how that interpretation ultimately reflects their separate motives.

Aside from the "quest", here is a really interesting interview of August Wilson with Bill Moyers from 1988. Compare Wilson's feelings toward how blacks are depicted in 80's pop culture, with how he depicts the black experience in The Piano Lesson. AUGUST WILSON INTERVIEW

Continuing The Piano Lesson

Today, we're briefly going to look at few more elements of setting in The Piano Lesson. We're first going to discuss Parchman Farm and how it relates to the motives of Boy Willie and Lymon.

We're also going to listen to "Parchman Farm Blues," and "Early in the Morning"  to get a greater sense of what Parchman Farm represented to Southern blacks in the 1930's.

After discussing these elements of setting and how they help develop characters, theme, and conflict, you will resume reading the play in your groups. You should get through Scene 1 of Act 2 by the end of class. If you do not get there by the end of class, whatever you have left to get up to that point must be read for homework.

Please leave yourself 5-10 minutes at the end of class to complete the exit ticket.

Introduction to Setting of The Piano Lesson

We are about to read The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. Yet, before we can begin reading, it will be highly beneficial for you to immerse yourself in the atmosphere in which this drama takes place:

America: 1930's

The setting in any given work of literature is, like the plot, one of the most essential structural components. Quite simply, setting  is when and where a narrative takes place. Sometimes, however, the setting includes the political or cultural background that comes with a place and time. In this case, understanding the setting can be essential to our understanding of a work.

As writers, you should always evaluate the significance of setting while reading literature and of course while writing your own stories. Now, some writers will often have their stories take place near areas where they live for no other reason than the convenience of familiarity. For example, New York writers, such as Woody Allen, may only use New York locations such as Manhattan as their setting. In this case, we don't have to really bother with analyzing the setting.  

You have to ask yourself: how much culture, whether its pop culture or historical events, are you going to infuse in your work, and to what degree is setting going to help you establish that. The more you understand how setting works, the better you will be able to convey the meaning that is attached to the setting.

* some information taken from A Practical Introduction to Literary Study (Brown and Yarbrough)