#1
Posted: 4/10/06 at 1:27am
It was an original play for a senior thesis...
At the beginning of the play, the main character and two secondary characters tell a poem. Then, the main character says "let me tell you from the beginning" but he wasn't speaking to the audience, he was writing in his journal.
Well, a lot of **** happens. Here comes the amazing part...
First, let me describe the set...it is a bare, simple set. Stage right is a bed for a bedroom, center stage is a couch for a living room, and stage left is a steel fence which is the balcony of his apartment.
So it is the end of the play, and this guy has started this journal after meeting a girl. He has never written a journal before, but after meeting her, he began one. And his relationship just ended.
He enters his apartment...very distrought...and stands in the doorway and doesn't move. He sees his journal on the couch and stares at it. Then he quickly moves to it and picks it up, then runs to the balcony and CHUCKS IT INTO THE AUDIENCE as if he were on the tenth story and were chucking it into the street or across the street onto the roof of the opposite building.
And I mean he CHUCKED IT. RIGHT into the audience! It zoomed over my head and I turned around and someone house right caught it. A couple pages ripped out and floated down to other audience members.
The lights dim, and the main character again says the poem he recited in the beginning of the play, this time extremely angry. Blackout.
It was very effective and unexpected. I have never felt so taken aback in that way before. It surpassed the boundries of a play. In a play, you DON'T break the fourth wall. And if you do, it is typically how the play is and the actors recognize it. But in this instance...the character was never aware of the audience. It was still a fourth wall. The audience felt the fourth wall break, but the actors never did, and it was still very believeable.
Amazing.
At the beginning of the play, the main character and two secondary characters tell a poem. Then, the main character says "let me tell you from the beginning" but he wasn't speaking to the audience, he was writing in his journal.
Well, a lot of **** happens. Here comes the amazing part...
First, let me describe the set...it is a bare, simple set. Stage right is a bed for a bedroom, center stage is a couch for a living room, and stage left is a steel fence which is the balcony of his apartment.
So it is the end of the play, and this guy has started this journal after meeting a girl. He has never written a journal before, but after meeting her, he began one. And his relationship just ended.
He enters his apartment...very distrought...and stands in the doorway and doesn't move. He sees his journal on the couch and stares at it. Then he quickly moves to it and picks it up, then runs to the balcony and CHUCKS IT INTO THE AUDIENCE as if he were on the tenth story and were chucking it into the street or across the street onto the roof of the opposite building.
And I mean he CHUCKED IT. RIGHT into the audience! It zoomed over my head and I turned around and someone house right caught it. A couple pages ripped out and floated down to other audience members.
The lights dim, and the main character again says the poem he recited in the beginning of the play, this time extremely angry. Blackout.
It was very effective and unexpected. I have never felt so taken aback in that way before. It surpassed the boundries of a play. In a play, you DON'T break the fourth wall. And if you do, it is typically how the play is and the actors recognize it. But in this instance...the character was never aware of the audience. It was still a fourth wall. The audience felt the fourth wall break, but the actors never did, and it was still very believeable.
Amazing.
"The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet."
--Aristotle
--Aristotle
