What if you could immerse yourself in a character. Really lean into it and go deep and use that to create your own single act-play with your scene-partners?

 

 That's what Play it Like a Playwright offers.

 

 Costume, set and four pages of script to set you up and set you free.

 

Over the two terms of this course, I've seen students transformed by this work. Really inhabit their characters and worlds. I've seen personal tics and fears melt away and some whole other person emerge to light it up.

 

Kate Bayley's portrayal of Verna Dunray , a drunken mother trying to survive Xmas, but really just afraid of letting go of her grief, Jason Rout and Kevin Yap's kind, but bewildered vagrants who've found an abandoned baby and Adel Cox's silky couch-ridden  southern belle, Maureen Vice, who's deepest delight is torturing her hot-tempered boyfriend by flirting with wealthy fools.

 

 I've seen improvisers become actors, holding the complicated notes of a character with conviction and ease and improvising plays with texture, pace and weight.

 

This is a term for folk who want to play from the heart. Risk embodying someone and something complicated and true and seeing where it takes them.

 

 

 You start with four pages you've never seen before, twenty minutes later, who knows?

 

 

 (Picture of Wade Nixon's 19th century bohunk ponders the melenchollic  rain while Adel Cox's and Jess Lu's sisters plot his demise in "Fencelines." Play it Like Playwright. David Williamson Theatre. 2018.)