Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Holy Cats!

So next season, I'm directing a play for the local regional theatre, Eastern Oregon Regional Theatre. The theatre was started by my high school director, Lynne (who is now retired), along with another gal who graduated from Baker high school. And I'm so totally pumped to be directing again! Lynne gave me two plays to choose from, and I ended up choosing the one that I expected to like the least.

But here's the thing...the play is written for as many as 35 characters!!!! HA HA HA HA! Right. Baker doesn't hold that many actors. In fact, it's next to impossible to get any male actors. So tonight, I spent a good chunk of my shift tonight condencing a play written for 35 characters down to something playable by 8 people! 4 men, 4 women. It took over 4 hours, a very cramped back, several revisions, a small forest worth of paper, two pencil erasers, and one Word program to get it done, but get it done I did!

The coolest part about this play is that there are several times when a voice will come over a speaker from backstage, as if over a radio. See, this play (entitled 'Seek') is about a boy who has never met his father, who is a radio DJ. So the boy becomes obsessed with building and listening to radios, gradually increading his bandwidth to be able to hear radio stations all over the world, in order to search for his father. And yet, as he grows older, he realizes that his need to search for his father diminishes, until the day when is father calls and the boy tells him that he is nothing more than a ghost to him. Pretty powerful. Anyway, I'm super excited to direct it, it's going to take a lot of imagination and will stretched me, especially since I haven't directed in almost 3 years.

YAY!

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