PROMPT SCRIPT

• title page
• key
• legend
• cast list - name/character/name/address/phone number
• crew list - “” “” “” “” “”
• props list
• rehearsal schedule
• costume list
• set list
• NEAT AND ORGANIZED
• ground plan with definition of placements
• colour coding is awesome

stage management:

number the moves, not the lines on the ground plan

number each character’s movements individually

WT page 85-115

critical/rhetorical analyses are written to determine how and why forms of communication are effective/persuasive or not

1. the introduction

1. identify the subject of analysis
2. state/imply the purpose of your analysis
3. state your thesis (overall evaluation) including topic points (e.g. “this text was not persuasive because…” (LAST SENTENCE)
4. provide background information
5. telling your reader the importance of the subject

2. the body

1. argue for your critical claims
2. begin each paragraph with a topic sentence
3. use transitions within and between paragraphs
4. wrap up what you’ve said in each paragraph

3. the conclusion

1. restate thesis idea (NOT OPTIONAL)
2. pg 98***
3. can talk about what you revealed
4. can talk about rhetorical context
5. can talk about importance
6. can talk about the future of this topic/strategy

inquiring: highlighting uses of proofs

1. pathos
2. ethos
3. logos

*windows or ways of beginning any rhetorical evaluation of a text

PATHOS: appealing to emotions (mccoy) relying on emotion, personal experience, guilt, pathetic, etc

ETHOS: appealing to authority/ethics (kirk) relying on the authoritative information and tone, has to do with the person, the embodiment of authority, someone who has the power to say these things, assumption on the audience based on what you know about the target, says something about ethical character

LOGOS: appealing to logic (spock) reason, logic, common sense, if/then statements, examples

example:

[[Wolves have been a maligned animal, frequently portrayed as cunning, vicious, bloodthirsty brutes. Marjory Smith, a biologist from UBC, disagrees; she has spent her career studying wolves. In 1995 she published a groundbreaking article based on her years of research that presents a very different animal. In “Wolves: Forest Gentleman of the Pacific Northwest,” Smith argues that wolves are, for the most part, vegetarians and goes so far as to say that they would make wonderful pets.]] However, Smith’s article is flawed by a number of weaknesses: she admits that she lacks an academic degree in animal behaviour, appeals to reader’s sympathy for endangered species, and draws some illogical conclusions about wolf behaviour.

background information is important

in an academic paper be very careful about using pathos because academics use hard evidence and credentials

induce pathos with ethos and logos rather than using pure pathos, principally ethos or logos

pathos is the most powerful proof that anyone can use because humans are emotional creatures, but emotion is subjective

arguments should be driven by logos

pathos can be used as a grabber, to pull them into the argument, using an emphatic statement

prelim before seeing a play:

• reviews of the play, either of the same showing or a previous one
• historical factors (setting/source text)
• the script
• the story
• the company putting on the performance
• advertising
• visual imagery
• style/genre (abstract/realistic, comedy/tragedy)
• casting

Penelope is a 2010 tragicomedy play written by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The play concerns the attempts of four men seeking to win over Penelope in the absence of her warrior husband, Odysseus, who has been away for the previous twenty years fighting the Trojan wars.

The play opens with the four men, Fitz, Burns, Dunne and Quinn, in an empty swimming pool, going about their daily lives with only Burns seemingly at odds with his environment. There is a blood stain on the wall which we learn was caused by the suicide of a fifth man, Murray, only the day before. Burns attempts to scrub away the blood to no avail. A barbecue stands towards the rear of the pool, it has never been lit and is the source of great curiosity and some fear by the men. In a shared dream they see it lighting heralding their death at the hands of Odysseus. Penelope, separated from the men, stands on a platform above and unseen from the pool. A television screen relays the successive addresses by the men for her perusal in a contemporaneous nod to reality television formats. Each man hopes to win her affections through their monologues. But as the day wears on signs and premonitions of Odysseus’ return grow more ominous and they formulate a plan to work together in order that one of them may succeed in winning Penelope, thus saving the others from Odysseus’ revenge.

In a final sequence Quinn performs a quick-change cabaret routine to the music of ‘Spanish Flea’ and ‘A Taste of Honey’ by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass as the others aid his performance. Variously Quinn costumes himself as male and female lovers of exceptional note —such as Napoleon and Josephine and Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara— it is when he strips down to his toga, as Eros the Greek God of Love, that he is stabbed by Burns. Dunne and Fitz take part in the stabbing and Quinn is killed. Burns makes a final address to Penelope in which he argues for their collective redemption through love and human affection. Burns concludes his speech with the words “love is saved”^[1]and at this moment “the barbecue goes up in flames. As their dream predicted, it begins from its legs and quickly spreads to the rest of the frame and grill” thus signalling the deaths of the men as above them Penelope withdraws from the stage “and into her new future”.

As Stephen Drover(Artistic Director of Rumble Theatre) articulated in his interview last week, the play is an “exciting intersection of the work of Samuel Beckett, the narratives of Greek mythology, and reality TV tropes like The Bachelorette and Big Brother.”

Rumble Theatre

Penelope is a 2010 tragicomedy play written by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The play concerns the attempts of four men seeking to win over Penelope in the absence of her warrior husband, Odysseus, who has been away for the previous twenty years fighting the Trojan wars.

Enda Walsh

-man
-irish, has an accent
-lots of awards incl. a tony

Four men: Fitz, Burns, Quinn, Dunne
+Penelope

Modern set/costumes

Possibility of near nudity

This show contains an open flame, gunshots, strong language, violence, and revealing swimwear.

Described as a Tragicomedy

Characters are ‘every day guys’

Odysseus’s wife (Based on the Odyssey)

-trying to get home after the trojan war

Rumble mandate - modern adaptations of classics

Written in 2010

**note canadian equiv types of theatre (as opposed to broadway)

biggest division - professional vs amateur

professional means that the people are paid

amateur means that most if not all people are not paid

professional:

• profit vs nonprofit (commercial/non promit)

• commercial usually funds through investment from companies
• mervish - biggest company in canada (toronto)
• commercial theatre is expensive - budgets in millions/tens of
• commercial only in a few cities (toronto, nyc, london, paris)

• nonprofit - theatre itself is making no money
• might have grants/private donations
• money coming in is usually public sector funding or from box office
• everyone is paid, nobody is making money beyond salary

2 types of nonprofit: regional vs ‘alternative’

capitals of each province have regional theatre centers - tend to have their own building attached to the company, tend to have broader types of plays

alternative is meant to be an alternative to regional, funded project to project rather than for years at a time, tend to have more specific mandates, more likely to have more risk taking/etc

alternative have two tiers: stable, supported, typically housed ones, and newer, unhoused ones

amateur companies: educational vs community

educational - high schools and college/universities, goal is usually to serve the students enrolled in that program, then to engage the community, might own a theatre space, usually get their money from the students/tuition, box office, gov’t funding, donations in kind (not money, given things), fundraising when needed, pvt donations

community - created to serve a particular community’s needs, goal is whatever that company decides, might own a theatre space, get their money from commissions, possibly grants from community, fundraising campaigns, box office usually pays for most of the costs

fuckyeahcharacterdevelopment:

Okay so a few people have asked about these and I can mostly only find fantasy ones on the first check but here are some links:

• http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/
• http://www.larseighner.com/world_builder/
• [this one has a lot of links] http://www.eclecticco.net/Worldbuilding.htm
• http://yamuses.blogspot.com/2011/12/world-building-checklist.html
• http://arcadia.net/Cruinne/DnD/Articles/dnd.worldbuilding.shtml

Hope this helped!

-Covert

fuckyeahcharacterdevelopment:

First of all, don’t stress too much about the ‘Mary Sue’ thing. It’s too elastic a term and has more than one definition depending on who you’re asking about it.

Here are some alternatives to orphaning your main(s):

• One or both parents being MIA;
• Single parenting;
• Parent(s) working long hours or working abroad;
• Neglectful parent(s);
• Main(s) being unaware of their parentage.

That way, you can put your character in the care of another who matters to the story without having to kill off their parents (which often has to be explained somehow). Sometimes, parent characters aren’t within your cast allowance; you need to decide whether you need them or not and how to get rid of them in a way that is realistic to your setting.

So if you’re writing a world that is a literal battleground where no one family goes without losing someone, then it would make sense to have most of your characters orphans or suffering the loss of a major family member.

Also, accept that some characters just have awfully tragic pasts. It’s true to life; some people survive through some of the most difficult situations and hit bad experience after bad experience… Your character isn’t a Mary Sue for having a problematic childhood.

It’s how they deal with such a past that can turn a reader on or off. You might notice me referencing Wuthering Heights a lot, but Heathcliff, to me, is the perfect example for this. His childhood is abhorrent but it isn’t horrific in every aspect. There are moments of happiness there that counteract the unhappy times. Heathcliff also attempts to alleviate his own suffering; he makes his own choices and is motivated.

So long as there are reasons for your character being orphaned then you don’t have to explain your choices to anybody. Write what you want and write it well - show us why the character being orphaned matters to the story. Don’t let other people stress you out about what is and isn’t acceptable for you to write, okay?

- enlee.

thewritersarchive:

writing-questions-answered:

I’m writing a series that will have around eight books, and I have it generally outlined, but I keep wondering how to end each one of the individual books. That is, I want to have each book have its own sort of conclusion and resolution, but I also want people to go and buy the next book when they’re done. I guess what I’m asking is how exactly is a good way to end a book in a series? Are cliff-hangers good or bad? Are cliff-hangers okay but only to a certain extent? Thank you! —anon

Some people love cliffhangers and some people loathe them, but there are different kinds of cliffhangers and some rules that make them okay.

A classic cliffhanger ending is one in which the story ends abruptly, before the story’s central conflict is resolved. So, imagine if Jurassic Park ended as the velociraptors were jiggling the handle of the kitchen door, or if The Wizard of Oz had ended when the flying monkeys capture Dorothy and Toto. We’d be left without answers to the dramatic questions posed by each story’s central conflict. Will Dr. Grant and company escape Jurassic Park? Will Dorothy defeat the wicked witch and make it home to Kansas? The promise of discovering the answer to those questions kept our eyes glued to the screen, and when the story ends without giving us those answers, we tend to feel shortchanged.

A soft cliffhanger ending, on the other hand, is one that occurs after the central conflict of the story has been resolved. After the character has reached their main goal. After the answer to the dramatic question has been revealed. The soft cliffhanger hints at more trouble to come—the trouble that will be the central conflict of the next book. In the first Harry Potter book, for example, we want to know if Harry will succeed in thwarting the evil Lord Voldemort’s attempt to return. He does, and we are satisfied because we have that answer. But because Voldemort escapes and we know he is likely to try again, this gives us a new conflict to look forward to—something to entice us to read the next book.

Since you have your series planned out, you can look at the central conflict in the next book and find a way to use it as the soft cliffhanger for the previous book. Let’s say in book one, your protagonist quashes an alien invasion, but in book two, a bigger wave of aliens attack. You could have your protagonist and her buddies sitting pretty, reveling in their triumph, when she looks skyward and sees not dozens, but thousands of alien ships twinkling against the night sky. Or perhaps her father is a military general, and she’s there when he gets a phone call from the government: NORAD has been tracking a second, bigger wave of ships arriving. This will leave them satisfied but curious about what will happen next.

 

Resources:

• Writing Series: The Cliffhanger Dilemma
• Talking Cliffhangers and Unspoken with [Author] Sara Rees Brennan
• Cliffhangers via Critically Yours
• Cliffhangers via Karen Woodward
• Eleven Cliffhangers for Your Serial Fiction

bookgeekconfessions:

Requested by Anonymous

How do you come to know your characters? We’re all well aware that in order to develop well-rounded, convincing characters that make a story come alive and jump right off the page … well, we just have to know them. We have to know what makes them tick, what their goals are, what they love and what they hate.

To come to this, many writers use character sketches, or fill out brief questionnaires designed to help them dig into who their character is at the deepest level. It’s a useful - often vital - strategy.

Here’s a good question, though. Does that one slot asking “parents’ names” say much about the people who formed your character’s earliest nature?

Parental Influence

Each of us are who we are, in part, because of our parents. The relationship we have with our parents influences the people we become, and how we continue to live in our world.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I get frustrated with the whole “blame it on your parents” mentality. However, there is a truth to it that can’t be ignored. Unfortunately, most of the statistics gather information on the ways that parental influence can harm. Children of alcoholics, for example, are significantly more likely to initiate drinking during adolescence and to develop alcoholism themselves. On the flip side of that, though, children of parents who discipline and consistently set clear expectations drink less and have fewer alcohol-related problems.

There’s also a tie-in for younger siblings, but we’re going to stick with the issue at hand, here.

The point is a simple one, but deeply important: in order to be as real-to-life as we want our characters to be, they’ve had a past that was strongly influenced by their family ties.

Okay so here’s a warning - don’t think you’re going to slip away with the whole “Oh, their parents left them” idea. Even if your characters weren’t raised by their natural parents, they were raised by someone … or something. They might have been raised by a pack of wolves but whoever or whatever raised them left an imprint. A deep one.

Considering Characters’ Relationship to Parents

So … we’ve got the idea now. Characters can’t be real if they didn’t have some sort of background. And we’re talking about a background that goes deeper than when they met that guy last year who turned out to be a total sleeze and ruined them on the dating scene. What if it just so happens that the character’s father was also a total sleeze, married to several other women unbeknownst to the character’s mother? Aha! Depth.

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