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At the time of this post, my final play for EN2271 has yet to be properly titled.
The last one. The big one. The 30-minute one. The thirty-page-play?!? My mind blanked when Mr Sulaiman said each page of our script roughly corresponds to a minute when acted out, which in retrospect is rather true.
I had expressed interest in writing something that dealt with issues more close to heart, like teenage death and how it cuts short of everything and affects the people around the deceased. The first revision was angsty and melodramatic. In colloquial terms, “emo”. Then I figured the plot was going nowhere even though the stage directions had all been planned out. In short, scrape that initial interest.
Some classmates mentioned going back to that initial submission that got them into this class, and hoping to tweak it to bring their point of view across. I kind of balked at idea of going back to my supernatural plot at first. But then it dawned upon me, “Why not?”.
For the lesson’s read, I had completed Act 1 which consisted of 4 Scenes. The plot… Drumroll please… is a whudunnit mystery. Been-there-many-times genre, yes but it’s not about doing something unique but doing something with your individual style in it. 1 death, 5 suspects and clues slowly dropped along the way as the 4 scenes played out. I haven’t quite figured out how all the clues fit into the plot or who the murderer is, save the gender is probably a “she”. Limited furniture as the set and plenty of movement around coupled with monologues.
The initial response was good. I didn’t put anyone off, I hope. Then I found myself criticising the play, saying I should try to bring forth some sort of individuality to each character like give them quirks. That surprised me. I never knew I could critiqued myself like that!
Looking forward to more plays by my fellow classmates for the upcoming lesson. I shall refrain from commenting on them till we’ve all found our footing in what we want to write.
Oneiros
Oneiros – In Greek Mythology, the sons of Hypnos, the god of sleep, are collectively known as the Oneiroi, gods of dreams. Oneiros is a singular term. The most famous of the Oneiroi would perhaps be Morpheus, who has been referenced many times in pop culture.
Imagine that your dreams are actually staged. That they have gone through rehearsals and script reading. That perhaps a dreamwright, much like a playwright, wrote and directed your dream. That the characters in your dreams, while subjected to your fantasies and dreamwright’s directions, have voices and grouses of their own. That every night, in your mind, plays are actually behind rehearsed and staged…
This week’s lesson was a blast and may just possibly be the most interesting one I’ve ever had in my all years in NUS. We had red wine and pizza while we had class, because as Mr Sulaiman said, food and drinks go well with comedy! Eight of us (Sulastri was absent) with 3 pizzas and a bottle of wine.
Though it was Comedy Week, that didn’t stop Faith from coming up with a play that had dark undertones. That girl is amazing. Kudos to her writing talent! Marcus’ outbursts at the funny lines was utterly hilarious that we all had to just stop and laugh our hearts out. Haza wrote a very touching piece which doesn’t quite work as comedy but worked on all other levels in terms of emotions and character development. We dined, drank and laughed. I think Haza got a little too high on wine at the end of the lesson, on the wine! This module is really making leaving NUS very very hard, haha.
Since I am on the topic of people in our class, I think Mr Sulaiman deserves some mention as well because he read some of the lines in our play really superbly. The “feel”, tone and accent along with the play-acting was all there. I was truly in awe and still am.
Now, to start on that 30-minute play…
PS: The name of the dreamwright in my play is Meng, which is the hanyu-pinyin of the Mandarin word for "dream".
Corpus
An effort of collaborations with Huilin which turned out well =) Well, I don’t know how she feels but I thought we got along pretty dandy, haha.
Our initially title-less play talks about the body in that there is an external self that we portray and an inner feeling we keep hidden from the world. One thing I realised after having heard the plays written for the week was that we all kind of put the theme “body” as somewhat secondary to whatever agenda we had written. Ours well, kind of fell along that line too I felt. Perhaps only Alissa and Marcus’ dark comedy got it right this time.
Another thing I realised, naming of characters is not just a random thing. Well, Huilin and I named ours Mann and Propp, never thinking they could also be mistaken as references to Thomas Mann or Vladimir Propp. Well I’ve heard of the latter from NM classes but I never made the connection till Mr Sulaiman mentioned his name.
The end-of-class exercise was pretty perplexing as in we had to brainstorm ideas for our final play. I had absolutely no inspiration then so I said something pretty generic for my inspiration. I mean, isn’t every other play about love, death and sex, haha? I so got to buck up on that one.
Comedy next. I think this is going to be a tough one since it is the second time a genre is imposed (Previously we had political theatre) and I can’t imagine how to make my class laugh (Comedies have to be funny, duh!) without the use of stage directions (Yes, this was also a requirement)… Good luck to me =)
