Director's Chair

Lately, Meadowdale High's Drama Club has seen an extraordinary amount of creativity.

This, not without a certain amount of trepidation.  In fact, there has been a wagon's load of confusion.

You see, I explained to the students that I believed that they could create their own poignant, entertaining stories.  High school students?  Am I crazy?  Am I dreaming too far?

A large number of them certainly thought so.

Yet, to their credit, they kept at it.  

Past readers of this column know that I believe the most creative results .  Far from it, I believe it far better to hand them an outline and ask them to fill in the details.  

In this case, I designed a new exercise called "Director's Chair" by way of giving the students an outline.

In the exercise - a competition - I assign directors and give each 1) a cast, 2) a situation and 3) 20 minutes to develop a short play with a climax.  

The director creates a story on the fly, typically in collaboration with the team, and rehearses their play in the time allowed.  

Finally, they pit their performance against the others with the Drama Club as a whole choosing the best work.

Oh, and there are two conditions:  If the director leaves the chair for any reason or loses patience and starts yelling at the cast for any reason, the director is replaced.

(Full disclosure: At first the Club chafed at the conditions, secretly wondering if I was masochistic. Over time, they realized that the conditions forced them to direct with their minds and their voices rather than getting up, grabbing an actor and saying, "No, do it this way!")

The situations handed out can be loopy, such as "something got into Edmonds' water supply and now everyone is lame in their left leg."  They can also be quite serious, such as "one friend betrays another."

Eventually, they grew to love the challenge.  Indeed, they grew to create increasingly ornate and complex, even heart-rending short plays.

For example, one situation recently assigned was "a brother is killed fighting in Afghanistan."  Sydney directed her cast to create a really moving play she called  A Soldier's Brother.

A Soldier's Brother features two parts.  

The first part is performed in "silent film" pantomime:  two brothers playing football, a mother remonstrating them, the older brother showing a letter to his girlfriend, the family's tear-stained departing as he salutes and leaves, the younger brother pacing to show time passing, the military chaplain arriving, the family's tears of disbelief.

The second part, which left most of the Drama Club in its own tears, is acted normally: the younger brother is sleeping as the older brother enters and sits, caresses the hair of his younger brother, says "I love you," gets up to leave then turns, says, "Good-bye" and exits.

Quite the work.  By the way, Sydney, the director?  She's a ninth-grader.

I've known them only four months.  Where do we go from here?  

I can barely tell you.  

One thing is certain.  It's bound to be interesting.