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.
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