10-Minute Play Project & Black History Month

1. Please read the article on play formatting. Your 10-minute play script should be written in the standard play script format. Please note that the plays we have read were NOT in this format, because they were published scripts from a publisher, not a script meant to be used by actors or theaters. Please follow the format outlined in the article given to you today in class.

2. From last class you should have a premise (an idea about what you want your play to be about and the message that you want to share with the world), 2-5 characters, and a basic plot outline.

Today in class, please begin writing your script. A 10-Minute play script is usually about 5-10 pages in length (in proper playwriting format, see handout). The action of your script should start just before the climax of the story because we are condensing a long plot into something that will take about 10 minutes to perform (this is not a full-length script...)

If a plot event is impractical or difficult to perform on stage allow it to occur OFF STAGE. Characters in plays talk (dialogue). So a difficult to stage plot event can be TALKED about, without having to stage it. Refer back to the advice given to you in the articles you should have read on writing play scripts. Avoid cinematic writing. You are writing for the stage, not the screen.

3. If you need a break, please move on to the extra credit Black History poem project. It is detailed here:

The Creative Writing department has been commissioned to participate in the SOTA Black History month performance on Feb. 5. The music department (Mr. Gabriel) is looking for UPLIFTING, POSITIVE, and G-Rated original poems celebrating Black History. You might write about an important historical character/person, or overcoming obstacles successfully in a difficult world, or about the importance of hope and freedom and achieving your dreams. Before you write anything, spend some time today reading some examples of the form.

Please read this essay first: Jazz as Communication (essay by Langston Hughes). The poems selected will be accompanied by jazz music.

Here are a few examples:

• Homage to My Hips
• I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra
• Still I Rise 
• Name Calling 
• The Gospel of Barbeque
• Kin
• Mother to Son
• American Income
• Won't you Celebrate with Me?

Start with an idea. What do you want to communicate as a human truth? Write down your message in your journal. If you could say something important to people who need to hear something important about succeeding in life or dealing with daily problems or social issues, what would it be? Write down as many messages as you can think of. You will be able to pick from these after you brainstorm a little.

Choose one message and consider WHO might speak this message, what the persona of your poem might SAY, and to whom is the persona speaking to? (likely our Black History month celebration audience).

The tone of your work should be positive. We are interested in your positive message. We get enough negative messages from our peers, the media, society, and our families.  

HOMEWORK: Complete reading A Streetcar Named Desire. As you read, please complete the handout to be turned in by Thursday, Jan. 10. No late work will be accepted. Black History poems are due by 1/16/13 (next Wednesday) if you write one. Poems for the concert are extra credit for this marking period.

The Glass Menagerie; Brainstorming; Streetcar Named Desire

After our quiz on The Glass Menagerie, we will pick up the play A Streetcar Named Desire also by Tennessee Williams. For details about the playwright, please see the post below. When you have completed your quiz, please turn it in and begin reading the article on "Where do you start? Turning Ideas into Plays." This will help you complete tasks 2 and 3 below. You should have a good idea for a play by next class.

Use the lab today to complete the following tasks:

1. Take the quiz on The Glass Menagerie. When you complete your quiz, please move on to #2. 

2. Please brainstorm an idea for a 10-minute (about 8-10 page) play script. Read the article "Where do you start?" to get some ideas.

3. Create 2-5 characters for your play. Come up with an appropriate setting and describe the basic plot for your story idea. Use the handouts to help brainstorm your ideas.

4. Begin reading A Streetcar Named Desire. As you read, please complete the handout to be turned in by Thursday, Jan. 10. No late work will be accepted.

HOMEWORK: Please read and answer the questions for A Streetcar Named Desire. Homework is due THURSDAY, Jan. 10. NO LATE WORK WILL BE ACCEPTED.

Glass Menagerie & Amadeus

After answering any questions you have about your reading: The Glass Menagerie, we will screen the next part of the film Amadeus. Please continue to complete your handouts during the film, looking for plot, character, setting differences between the script and the film.

Tennessee Williams: Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams "was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. His friends began calling him Tennessee in college, in honor of his Southern accent and his father's home state. Williams's father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy drinker. Williams's mother, Edwina, was a Mississippi clergyman's daughter prone to hysterical attacks. Until Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin, lived with Edwina's parents in Mississippi.

In 1918, the Williams family moved to St. Louis, marking the start of the family's deterioration. C.C.'s drinking increased, the family moved sixteen times in ten years, and the young Williams, always shy and fragile, was ostracized and taunted at school. During these years, he and Rose became extremely close. Edwina and Williams's maternal grandparents also offered the emotional support he required throughout his childhood. Williams loathed his father but grew to appreciate him somewhat after deciding in therapy as an adult that his father had given him his tough survival instinct.

After being bedridden for two years as a child due to severe illness, Williams grew into a withdrawn, effeminate adolescent whose chief solace was writing. At sixteen, Williams won a prize in a national competition that asked for essays answering the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?” His answer was published in Smart Set magazine. The following year, he published a horror story in a magazine called Weird Tales, and the year after that he entered the University of Missouri to study journalism. While in college, he wrote his first plays, which were influenced by members of the southern literary renaissance such as Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Allen Tate, and Thomas Wolfe. Before Williams could receive his degree, however, his father forced him to withdraw from school. Outraged because Williams had failed a required ROTC program course, C.C. Williams made his son go to work at the same shoe company where he himself worked.

After three years at the shoe factory, Williams had a minor nervous breakdown. He then returned to college, this time at Washington University in St. Louis. While he was studying there, a St. Louis theater group produced two of his plays, The Fugitive Kind and Candles to the Sun. Further personal problems led Williams to drop out of Washington University and enroll in the University of Iowa. While he was in Iowa, Rose, who had begun suffering from mental illness later in life, underwent a prefrontal lobotomy (an intensive brain surgery). The event greatly upset Williams, and it left his sister institutionalized for the rest of her life. Despite this trauma, Williams finally managed to graduate in 1938.

In the years following his graduation, Williams lived a bohemian life, working menial jobs and wandering from city to city. He continued to work on drama, however, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying playwriting at the New School in New York. His literary influences were evolving to include the playwright Anton Chekhov and Williams's lifelong hero, the poet Hart Crane. He officially changed his name to Tennessee Williams upon the publication of his short story “The Field of Blue Children” in 1939. During the early years of World War II, Williams worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and also prepared material for what would become The Glass Menagerie.

In 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in New York and won the prestigious New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, catapulting Williams into the upper echelon of American playwrights. A Streetcar Named Desire premiered three years later at the Barrymore Theater in New York City. The play, set in contemporary times, describes the decline and fall of a fading Southern belle named Blanche DuBois. A Streetcar Named Desire cemented Williams's reputation, garnering another Drama Critics' Circle Award and also a Pulitzer Prize. Williams went on to win another Drama Critics' Circle Award and Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.

Much of the pathos found in Williams's drama was mined from the playwright's own life. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness, and insanity were all part of Williams's world. His experience as a known homosexual in an era unfriendly to homosexuality also informed his work. Williams's most memorable characters, many of them female, contain recognizable elements of their author, Edwina, and Rose. His vulgar, irresponsible male characters, such as Stanley Kowalski, were likely modeled on Williams's own father and other males who tormented Williams during his childhood.

Williams's early plays also connected with the new American taste for realism that emerged following the Depression and World War II. The characters in A Streetcar Named Desire are trying to rebuild their lives in postwar America: Stanley and Mitch served in the military, while Blanche had affairs with young soldiers based near her home.

Williams set his plays in the South, but the compelling manner in which he rendered his themes made them universal, winning him an international audience and worldwide acclaim. However, most critics agree that the quality of Williams's work diminished as he grew older. He suffered a long period of depression following the death of his longtime partner, Frank Merlo, in 1963. His popularity during these years also declined due to changed interests in the theater world. During the radical 1960s and 1970s, nostalgia no longer drew crowds, and Williams's explorations of sexual mores came across as tired and old-fashioned.

Williams died in 1983 when he choked on a medicine-bottle cap in an alcohol-related incident at the Elysée Hotel in New York City. He was one month short of his seventy-second birthday. In his long career he wrote twenty-five full-length plays (five made into movies), five screenplays, over seventy one-act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a memoir. The mark he left on the tradition of realism in American drama is incredible.

The Glass Menagerie is one of those standard classics that you can use on a Regents exam, as well as learn good playwriting from Williams. What follows is a little help in unlocking the enigma of the play.


After reading a learning a little about Tennessee Williams, work together in small groups or alone and please begin reading The Glass Menagerie aloud. As you read, consider Tom's role in the play as "narrator" and the idea that what we are seeing is a reflection of his memory, not the actual events themselves. This technique is lovingly called a MEMORY PLAY.

Characteristics of Memory Plays:

1. Often use a "narrator" or "first person" character to tell the story.
2. Memory is tenuous and therefore set pieces or props, costumes, setting are representative or use synecdoche.
3. Scenes and characters are atmospheric and subjective. We are getting the narrator's (often the protagonist's) opinion and view of other characters, events. Thus, the style of a memory play is often EXPRESSIONISTIC.
4. Not exactly realism (which strives to present all facts realistically and objectively) the memory play allows for a vivid expression to suggest meaning (metaphor, for example).

And the title: a menagerie is a collection of animals. How is this Southern family of collection of unhappy, brittle (glass), animals? Consider.

HOMEWORK: Complete The Glass Menagerie over break. We will finish watching Amadeus when we return, sorry about that... 

Amadeus: The Film

The following are the actors and cast of the 1984 film: Amadeus.

Director: Milos Forman

Writer: Peter Shaffer (Screenplay)

	F. Murray Abraham	...	Antonio Salieri
	Tom Hulce	...	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
	Elizabeth Berridge	...	Constanze Mozart
	Simon Callow	...	Emanuel Schikaneder / Papageno in 'The Magic Flute'
	Roy Dotrice	...	Leopold Mozart
	Christine Ebersole	...	Katerina Cavalieri / Constanza in 'Abduction from the Seraglio'
	Jeffrey Jones	...	Emperor Joseph II
	Charles Kay	...	Count Orsini-Rosenberg

Amadeus: Act One, Day 2

Please hold on to your homework (The Amadeus Notes) until the end of today's class. Turn in this paper at the end of today's class.

Reading, seeing other playwrights' works, and writing your own plays will help you establish writing skills and help establish a personal concept as to what separates a good play from one that does not work as much.

Please read the article: "What Makes a Play" and answer the questions for HOMEWORK:

1. Why is "construction" important for theatrical writing?
2. What is the definition of a "play"?
3. What are some differences between playwriting and other forms of writing?
4. Why is conflict an important literary element to use when writing a play?
5. What are some danger signals of cinematic writing that a PLAYwright should be aware of?

Today we will begin watching the first act of Amadeus.

HOMEWORK: Complete your reading of Amadeus. Please pick up the play The Glass Menagerie from the library. Bring this play with you to next class. Please read the article: "What Makes a Play"and answer the five ?'s to turn in next class.

Amadeus (Research & Act One)

Please take the first 10 minutes of class today to do the following:

1. Find out who Peter Shaffer is. Read about him here.
2. Who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?
3. Style and fashion of the Rococo & Georgian period. What passed as fashion of the day? What might the costumes look like?

When instructed, please go next door. On your way, pick up a part to read out loud in class, if you would like to read today. If you select a part, please make sure you have the energy and enthusiasm to carry through with the part so we don't fall asleep. Readers will get a point of extra-credit.

As we read the play Amadeus by Peter Shaffer, please follow along, take notes, and complete as much of the handout as possible today.

Salieri: Scene 1-2 transition.
Mozart: Adagio, pg. 21
Mozart: Marriage of Figaro, pg. 29
Mozart: The Abduction from the Seraglio: "Martern aller arten" pg. 31
Mozart: The Abduction from the Seraglio (Turkish Finale) pg. 31
Mozart: 29th Symphony in A Major, pg. 49
Mozart: Kyrie from the C minor Mass, pg. 50

HOMEWORK: Complete the reading and analysis of the play's plot and setting as homework. This is due next class.