I'm entering week three of my second semester at SFSU! This semester I'm taking three classes and they are: Playcrafting and Dramaturgy, MFA Playwriting Workshop, and Fringe. Fringe is a mostly student driven force that produces plays by students at SFSU. This coming May my play Much Ado About Mathletes will be produced, and once the dates have been decided I will shout it from the roof tops. I'm excited that this play was selected, it is a one-act comedy that takes place at a High School, and it may be one of my only plays without copious amounts of swearing. So be sure and keep an eye out for that.
The workshop I've signed up so far has been very informative, we're looking at theatricality and what makes a script essentially theatrical. This week we're either writing a brand new scene with a theatrical entrance in it, or rewriting a scene to include a theatrical entrance in it. I've reworked the opening scene of The Red House Monster, my play inspired by the Monster Geryon, and I'm very excited about the changes. This whole script is very different from anything that I've ever written and I always find it fun to push into those uncharted territories and see what's hiding there.
And lastly, by far my most demanding class (and maybe most fun, because it is so demanding) is my Playcrafting and Dramaturgy class. Last week, for our first assignment we were to read by Hamlet and Buried Child, select one, cut it down to 100 minutes, and then write a paper about our choices. I selected to cut Hamlet, and got most of my cuts by deleting Ophelia from the play. This week we're reading Lysistrata, A Doll's House, and Uncle Vanya. After reading all three we select one and find two additional translations of the script to read. We then write a paper about which translation is best and then try our hand at translating and translate the first few pages using the three different scripts as our guide. And every week is like that, read a lot, work a lot, learn a lot. Eventually we'll developing our own piece of theater for our final project, and I'm very excited about the possibilities!
More later, I've got to get back to my homework.