SPECTRUM DRAFT 1

December 13, 2018

Written primarily through playwrighting assignments as a part of Professor Abhishek Majumdar's Fundamentals of Playwrighting course at NYUAD, this draft was centered on themes taken from Amazing Fantasy issue #15, and inspired by the ideas of Adrienne Maree Brown's Emergent Strategy and Caryll Churchill's A Mouthful of Birds.  The work of these two authors, inspired the structuring of this draft as five, separate vignettes so as to attempt exploring alternative dramaturgical models to linear, narrative driven forms of storytelling. The vignettes were divided according to the themes of accountability and power, geek masculinity and self- inflicted trauma based on discussions during rehearsals. Each vignette was intended to stand as a separate world, according to the central theme, in an effort to attempt to resist the idea of a cohesive, linear narrative common to traditionally male- authored stories. This draft helped to provide an understanding as to how play structure might be shaped to reflect the themes of a play, instead of fitting a prescribed model, such as the three act structure of a 'the well made play.' 

This draft was also influenced by Ōta Shōgo's The Water Station (Mizu no eki), in terms of the formatting of the text into 'Stage Images' and 'Actor's text.' In thinking about alternative modes of playwrighting, I used this play as an example in order to think about how design and choreography might be integrated into play text, and serve as the driving force for story or narrative. The major challenge this format of writing presented were both a lack of clarity from collaborators in terms of what is happening in the text as well as a lack of space for imagination and interpretation of the text. This draft also helped to plant the seed for what would eventually develop in future drafts as consideration of text and white space of the page itself as a form of image to convey story or action, as in the case of comic book writing. Additionally,  while only partially implemented during the final week of open rehearsals, the idea to separate spoken text from performer's bodies was informed by this draft's separation of design from choreography. This choice helped to further distinguish this script as a synthesis of play and comic book, in which dialogue and picture exist side by side as separate entities, a choice that will be developed in further iterations of this script.

This draft existed largely independent to rehearsal laboratories. Rehearsals during this time were only employed in the writing process in order to explore the ways in which power might be portrayed onstage through theatre by way of movement, lighting and sound. Rehearsals were not used as a moment to attempt staging the text itself, develop character through acting exercises or problem solve the structuring of action of the text. This separation between script and rehearsal created a gap between these two areas of the capstone process, which became increasingly difficult to reconcile over time, and provided one of the main challenges of this capstone. Working in this way would eventually result in my making directorial decisions about the script in order to evade problems within the text, which further widened the gap between script and rehearsal.