Saturday 28 February 2015

Doing the #28playslater challenge from The Space


About a month ago I found an article on ArtsJobs about this a 28-days challenge in which you'd have to write a play each day.
Now, it piqued my interest. However, I don't join things that ask for money. I simply never decided to take step (most of the time because I couldn't afford it, other times it wasn't worth it.)

A day or two before the deadline I went to an improv workshop from IdeasTap, done with David Bottomley from Brockley Jack (lovely improv btw.)
Anyway, after the improv, I was talking to Deborah (a girl that attended the improv) who mentioned this 28 plays challenge, since we were talking about plays. She also mentioned she did a play at Space.
It kinda planted it in my head a bit more.
So, I decided to join. At 10 p.m.. On deadline day. Fortunately, Sebastian replied in about 20 minutes. Yes, I sometimes leave things late (like 8 out of 10 things. Eesh.)

And then the first prompt came. Write something with zombies. Probably the least favorite play I wrote during the whole time.  I simply find them unappealing.
But prompts came and left (sometimes with more than one idea). Write from someone else's POV. So I wrote about an asshole. Not that I could relate with him, but he made some valid points, in his twisted, put-him-in-jail mind.
Then there was the gibberish one that simply killed me.
Yet I had fun adapting a flash fiction story I wrote into a play, and a portion of an episode of Married with Children into a play (Damn bonbons, Peg).
The one that I enjoyed the most was the one where we had to do it according to rules, one of them wato "write every line of dialogue with one of the following: either 5 words, 12 words, 17 words, 33 words or 87 words."

I also rewrote a short play I did and submitted it, and wrote another one for Brockley Jack and one of their contests (here's hoping, right?)

A bit of fun, a bit of torment, and a bit creative thought coming from someone else's brainwaves.
The end result is that I wrote 28 plays, but most of them are 1 or 2 scenes long, simply because I like just one scene/sketch and I think others do, too. That might not be the case yet, though. 

I didn't write many plays prior to the first one, mainly because I don't know other actors, and every play I wrote was with me as the main guy. Funnily, every play I wrote had me as the main guy, or one of them, even if I didn't think it, but, you know, subconsciously, I did. 

And, err, now I have a bunch of stuff that I can work with and send somewhere, or create something with others, I don't know. We'll see. Something has to come out of this. Experiences are nice, but you have to do something with them, not let them wither away to the bottom of your head and have a flashback when you're 65 and go "Oh, I remember I used to write plays. Damn that was nice. Why did I stop?"

So, thank you, Sebastian Rex, for the challenge.