Selecting A Script
One successful strategy to maintain equal access to the class and equal familiarity with the material is to select a single play around which nearly all assignments can be built. How do you select a script?
- Look for a play with a small number of characters so students do not get overwhelmed by the character/scene breakdown assignment.
- Look for scenes or character traits that invite discussion of using outside experts during the rehearsal process. This might be a fight director, an intimacy director, or a vocal/dialect coach.
- Choose a play for which you have a scenic design, or at least a ground plan. This facilitates class projects like taping out the set, blocking, and props paperwork. The design could come from a show your school produced in the past, or it could be an unrealized project by a design student or colleague.
- Try to avoid scripts that would require significant dramaturgical work to understand, or one which features characters out of reach for the students causing “acting” assignments to become awkward.
My most recent choice has been Richard Greenburg’s Three Days of Rain. Why? The play features three actors each playing two different characters. The cast size makes the character/scene breakdown feel manageable, but the differences in the characters open the door for many conversations about supporting actors during rehearsals. One character speaks with an accent, and another stutters. The play’s French scenes are manageable in length, making it easy to block a scene during class time to learn how to record movement, and to run another scene later in the semester allowing students to call a few cues. From a design perspective, the script is also quite useful. The play is set in a single location, ideal for a focused discussion of rehearsal needs and taping out the groundplan. But because the acts take place thirty-five years apart, there is a significant change in props at intermission—providing material for crew paperwork and conversations about detail and specificity. The characters have some specific costume requirements, along with a few necessary presets. And the rain itself is a fun discussion point.
THIS IS NOT THE ONLY SCRIPT that fits these parameters! I share my thoughts to aid your own script choice.
In-Class Activities
Be sure to make time in the classroom for hands-on activities. Below is a selection of projects large and small I have used over the past few years.
- Calling Cast Members. This is a structured improvisation where the stage manager calls actors to welcome them to the cast of the play. The “actors” work from script outlines prompting a range of reactions from joy to fear and peppered with questions for the SM. The exercise is followed with a discussion about sharing information, calming fears, and anticipating situations both good and bad that could arise in the rehearsal room.
- Setting Up the Rehearsal Room. A benefit of having a groundplan for your script is that class activities can include both learning to evaluate and measure it, taping it out. If you have the chance to work in a neutral space rather than a theatre, the students can evaluate the placement of doors, pillars, electrical outlets, and the like. Take time to identify the best place for tables and chairs and assess the flow in and out of the room before taping out the set. Typically I divide the groundplan into three sections and have students work in teams to tape out their zones.
Class Groundplan Download
- Blocking and Cue Calling. Stage a short scene from your script. Students must enlarge the script page, use a backing sheet, and place it all in a small binder. Run the scene multiple times so that you can rotate which students are the “actors” and which are taking blocking. Often I serve as the director for the project—though it is a good opportunity for an older student or a TA if you have one. You can repeat this setup later in the semester to give students a chance to call cues. I recommend asking students to prepare the prompt script pages as a homework assignment but creating an in-class work day for them to book the cues. They will benefit from being able to ask questions and learn from one another. You can facilitate cue calling on a very low-tech scale. Use simple pieces of furniture to create your set, and you only need a speaker, laptop, and collection of sound cues to create an interactive experience. It will be just fine for the light cues to be theoretical if the sound cues are not!
- Observing Detail. A simple but effective classroom activity borrows a few “spot the difference” puzzles from magazines. Students first evaluate a pair of drawings printed out, and then a pair projected on a screen in front of the room. This leads to good discussions about observing detail, and the differences between noticing things on the page (when taking line notes, for example) and on the stage (when watching a blocking review).
- Create a Shift Plot. If your script does not lend itself to scene shifts, you can still create a class activity. I set up three simple furniture configurations: a bedroom, a dining room, and an office. Students are broken into three groups and tasked with planning how to strike one “room” and set another as efficiently as possible. And while I don’t want to spoil the fun for future students of my own who might be reading this, there might be a twist in executing the shifts which takes place when I hand back the plots after quickly collecting them to make sure none of the furniture pieces were left out.
Shift Plot Configurations and a sample form Download
Reinforcing Class Learning
Although my introductory course does include a few exams throughout the semester to test for retention of terms and application of concepts, the most comprehensive evaluation of learning comes from a production-long observation paper. Each student is asked to choose one of the shows performing that semester and attend a rehearsal, a tech rehearsal, and a performance to see the stage management team in action. The assignment prompt poses a series of questions for each visit, asking the students both to observe the process and to evaluate those observations as the show progresses. In early iterations of the assignment, I cautioned students not to attend the final day of any phase because of the tendency to make it as much like the next phase as possible. (For example, we all hope that the final tech rehearsal will proceed without stops and close to “show conditions.”) Because new students did not necessarily understand that caution, I have since revised the assignment, ending the window to visit a rehearsal or tech rehearsal a day or two before the end of that part of the schedule. I still find it difficult at times to help students realize that attending rehearsal on a day when the cast is working a small collection of scenes can be as valuable—if not more—than a full run of the show, but cutting off the end of that phase has helped provide students with important things to see and trace throughout the rest of the production.
On the day the paper is due, I invite the stage managers to come to class for a Q&A session with the students.