On the second semester of my Sophomore year, I decided to follow up on my theater experience with another course. Dramatic Writing I took the basics of visual, low-budget storytelling that I learned in Basic Dramatic Writing and expanded upon it. The culmination of my work in this class came in the form of a 30-minute one-act play called Hellmates.
The basic task of this assignment was to create something that incorporated the narrative and “blocking” lessons that we learned into an engaging, cohesive product. I created this play for an adult audience, and my goal was to explore existential dread in a humorous manner.
As I reflect on this product, I find that my feelings on it are conflicted. I was able to maintain a fun interaction between the two main characters, and I had evidently learned how to incorporate more action in a manner that was natural for the characters. Characters interact with their setting as they talk to one another and use their hands to accentuate their words, which makes their interaction much more entertaining to witness. My set design became more creative, my characters gained more of an identity, and my dialogue was a little more nuanced than my previous final project. My dialogue may have leaned a little too much on the cartoonish side, and I do think that I could have been more subtle with the exposition. Overall, it was an improvement from my previous work, but I feel my writing has become stronger since I wrote this.
If I were to tackle this exact assignment again, I would change the character’s respective backstories. While I think both have a backstory that makes them somewhat sympathetic, I think what I have now comes across as too complicated. Another issue that became apparent to me is my reliance on “conversation drama”. Theater is a limited medium, and a one-act play requires that there are no blackouts, so my approach to this assignment was not fundamentally flawed; however, like 15 Dollars and a Sub-Sandwich, I think incorporating an object would have lent itself to better action and a less dialogue heavy story. Regardless, the limitations I dealt with in writing these theater scripts prepared me for the low-budget films I would later write for.