Final Thoughts

The audience for our read-through was smaller than I would have liked, but I’m glad we had the opportunity to get at least a little feedback. I think it did all of us some real good in the sense that it reminded us that we’re going to be creating something that people are going to watch and we really want them to enjoy. For me, that strong reminder that I was creating for an audience caused me to take a step back from my own contributions and find the strength to cut my own excesses. For example, I had included a speech in the “Support” realm that was a transcription of my own conversation with Jake Hassler. It was an idea that I had gotten “married” to, but wasn’t serving the script as a whole, and I finally found it in me to “divorce” myself from that idea.

I can’t wait to see how this project will continue to grow. I think our biggest challenge will be refining the script, and once we’ve gotten it to a happy place, our collective creativity will bring it to life in an exciting way. One thing in particular I want us to focus on is the “craft” element, as Dr. Vandenbroucke would term it. I would like to see the pace of the show become much faster and quite exciting, like plays in a sporting event, so that when we do slow it down with a longer speech, it’s really attention-grabbing, and is better able to drive a point home than, to paraphrase one of our audience members at the read-through, beating an idea over the audience’s head.

I had a playwriting professor once who, with every assignment, would ask the writer, “What’s your favourite line?” and them make them cut that line out. It was a harsh, but effective way of teaching us to step back from our own work and remain objective rather than loosing ourselves in what we perceived as the beauty of our own language and falling short of something we could be proud of in the long run. I’m not suggesting we do that with the script for the sports project, but it’s something I’d like us all to keep in mind as we enter this next step of the process - revising and refining. I hope we are all objective enough to ask ourselves, “Does this serve to accomplish the goal we as a group are striving to achieve, or am I indulging my own whims?”

I hope this is going to be something we can all be proud of. I think it will. Fingers crossed!

-Lauren