What sort of thing is a "Playgoers' Companion"?

Working from the recommendations people made last time, and then doing some fairly extensive editing, I was able, Wednesday afternoon, to put together a Playgoer's Companion for Buried Child. If you've attended the production, you should already have seen it; if not, I'll have some copies this morning (actually, I'll have 200, and I'll ask you to fold them while we discuss them). I also have a few copies of the proposed texts, so if you want to do some comparing, you can do that, too.

I'd like to make clear some of the choices I made, and invite you to think about why I might have made them. It's worth thinking about what a text like this actually might do, in the real world, and what kinds of choices are likely to help it do that better. We're thinking, in this course, about audiences -- what do audiences do, what do they contribute to the experience of going to the theatre, and how can that experience be made better?

The Task Forces working on plays

Based on what I listed last time, and including a couple of requests for changes,  here are the six Task Force (research groups) for each of the six plays we have available. If there's a mistake, please let me know as soon as possible. I'll be setting up editorial teams in the next week or so, and I'll ask you, again, for preferences. Our next set of productions open on February 23, so the folks in the first three groups will need to begin reading and researching as soon as possible.
 

Perfect Pie Emily Cochrane Juliana Duque Ashley MacDonald Randall Umali Elyse  Bernais

Heart's Desire Katie Dow Alexander Brown Megan Wilson Lucas Martin Kenneth Noble

Inspector Hound Adam Washburn Amber Carroll Erica Betts Vanessa Whittaker Luke Tucker

Black Comedy  Andréa Peters Jilly Hanson Jesse Middleton Lisa Schellenberg Georgia Priestley-Brown

TBA Nigel Bone Kirsten Graham John Russell Sara Garrett Erin Pollock

Autobahn Matt Goodwin Brandon Thibodeau Josie Blackmore Valerie  Chisholm

Scripts for all these plays will be available as soon as possible. I said in the last prompt I hoped that would be by the end of this week -- which, it turns out, isn't going to be today. I would suggest that beginning to see what is available (via one of the three strategies -- MLA, ASP, or the stacks -- I suggested for finding work on Buried Child). You can begin saving anything you find on your page in the wiki for your play (I've created the spaces on the Moodle site, and they're linked from the titles above, if you read this prompt on line).

Learning Journals

Now that a number of people have posted learning journals, I've created a page of links to them, which you can reach from the main course page. You can also get to them from the main Moodle page, but in my opinion it's harder to see who has postings and keep track of them. It will be useful to you to read a number of them before you compose your next entry. There are some very good, thoughtful entries; make your own judgment about which they are, and make yours like them.

Copenhagen

I haven't heard from anybody with an interest in reading and attending Copenhagen, so I'm assuming I don't need to arrange for people to get access to the script.