making it real
A Playgoers' Companion
Since last time, everyone should have been thinking about, and some people have been posting about, what sort of thing it would be helpful for a playgoer to know as she goes into a production of Buried Child. What I want to do is give everyone a chance to think concretely about how to do that, if you were constrained by some real considerations -- for instance, you have to say what you want to say to that person in no more than 1000 words, and do it in a limited amount of time. Len Falkenstein, the director of the upcoming production, has said he'd love to have a Playgoer's Guide for it, and I think we have a chance to get something together.
I'll spend a few minutes showing you some of the Guides we've done over the past few years; there are some links to examples from the main course page. I've set up five groups, each of which will have the rest of the time this morning, and until Sunday night if they'd like to organize to continue, to produce an actual text of a potential Playgoer's Guide, using a wiki site to assemble it.
Each group will have their own wiki site. Your job is to create, in it, about 1000 words of text that you think would help an audience better appreciate and understand a production of Buried Child.
You'll need to do this as soon as you can. My guess is that you should be pretty well done by the end of class. In fact, though, you have till Sunday night if you want to continue. If you want to arrange for a group meeting or two, or to consult on email or instant message about it, you'll need to arrange that now. I will set up an email list for each group which you can use if you find it helpful.
On Monday morning I'll assess the wikis and decide whether one or more of them can be used as the basis of a Playgoers' Guide that I'd be comfortable printing and distributing, and we'll discuss the result in class on Wednesday morning. If we're lucky, there will be printed copies to get down to Memorial Hall before the play opens that night.
The wiki sites are accessible from the course Moodle page; click on Proposed Playgoers' Guides . If you don't know about wikis, one of the main things to remember is that they save everything that's been done, so that if you delete something by mistake, or change your mind, you can always go back and restore it.
Here are the groups, as I've set them up. If you want to change groups,
you need to find someone to swap with you, and tell me via email before
10:00, which is when I'll begin creating the email list for each group.
| Group 1
Amber Carroll Katie Dow Alexander Brown Vanessa Whittaker Sara Garrett Randall Umali |
Group 2
Emily Cochrane Jilly Hanson Juliana Duque Megan Wilson Brandon Thibodeau Valerie Chisholm |
Group 3
Matt Goodwin Elyse Bernais Georgia Priestley- Brown Jesse Middleton Josie Blackmore Erin Pollock |
Group 4
Andrea Peters Kirsten Graham John Russell Ashley MacDonald Luke Tucker Kenneth Noble |
Group 5
Nigel Bone Erica Betts Lisa Schellenberg Adam Washburn Lucas Martin |
As you work, you'll want to start with the proposals and suggestions the members of your group posted on the Forum, although most of them are pretty perfunctory and unlikely to be a lot of help. I've printed out the ones that were there as of last night; you can pick yours up from the front table.
Although you can probably do some of this by literally cutting and pasting, or marking sections to be kept and editing, I suggest you work, at least part of the time, at a computer, in the lab or on someone's laptop. Remember that you're not limited to what you already have on hand in the printed proposals; you can use anything anyone reported on the Reading About forum, or anything else you can find on line or in print.
If a member of your group isn't here this morning, you're welcome to invite her to participate via email (she'll be on the list), but because this is real -- I need the proposals before Monday morning so that I can use them to try to assemble a final draft for Wednesday morning -- you need to get the work done regardless. If a member of the group is no help, don't let that interfere with getting the work done (and don't feel responsible: people have reasons. The aim here is to get the best draft text, using the skills and knowledge of the folks involved as best you can. And learn as much as you can while doing it.
Preferences about plays to work on
We need to be planning for who is going to work on research on which plays. The list is still tentative, but we can make some decisions and let people get started reading scripts. Between now and next Tuesday night, send me (again, at this address, exactly: Russell.Hunt@stu.ca ) an email listing in order the plays you'd prefer to work on, either to do the research as part of a task force, or assembling the draft guide as part of an editorial team. Right now, the plays include: