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Why writing plays is like juggling
The Space Between
Sam O’Sullivan performing Jessica Bellamy’s original monologue LITTLE LOVE for The Voices Project. Directed by Laura Scrivano.
Laura Scrivano is a theatre and film director and has recently directed for The Voices Project filmed versions of the original monologues from Joanna Erskine (BOOT) and Jessica Bellamy (LITTLE LOVE), that have also been adapted for Damien Power’s forthcoming films BOOTand BAT EYES. Both Laura’s films and Damien’s will be available online later this month. In this extract for an article Laura has written for the Fresh Ink blog and to be published when her films go live, Laura provides advice to writers and filmmakers who are looking at entering the LOVE BYTES competition.
Writing is all about the words. Right?
Words form the scaffolding around which we build our stories, the foundation stone of the transaction between the audience and the author. And in a dramatic monologue, they’re essential.
But for me, as a director, story starts with character. And a character can be revealed as much by what they don’t say, as what they do. Clever lines and pithy prose don’t offer dramatic possibilities. I’m interested in the spaces between the words, the pauses, ellipses, breaks and breaths. While the words carry the meaning of the story, the spaces between reveal truth. They can make a character believable, empathetic and authentic, which are ultimately the reasons why an audience will invest in and be moved by a story.
The space between is where I started when I was asked to direct Boot and Little Love for The Voices Project. But, there were really two spaces between; those between the words and the space between theatre and cinematic storytelling that these stories would inhabit.
Filming a piece of writing originally penned for the theatre can be fraught with problems. Especially when that piece of writing is a monologue - an inherently theatrical form. Monologues exist rarely on film, and when they do it’s often to alienate or shock the audience. And the brief for Boot and Little Love was to engage the audience with the writing. Although the goal is inherently same in both film and theatre – to tell a story that will move or connect with an audience – the theatrical form is a world away from cinematic storytelling. On film, the audience’s experience is no longer live; the eye of the camera mediates and dictates their visual world, the performance rhythms, the story beats and ultimately their feeling states.
When I was asked to direct Boot and Little Love, I knew that in essence we were creating something in between theatre and film. We were expressing theatrical writing through the cameras lens. The biggest challenge would be to keep the audience watching. Both monologues have 8-10 minutes worth of text – much more dialogue than would ever be in a filmed adaptation of the same story.
Laura Hopkinson performing Joanna Erskine’s original monologue BOOT for The Voices Project. Directed by Laura Scrivano.
In order to keep the audience engaged the performances had to work for the camera, while the visual style needed to be both simple and capture the heart of the story. We achieved this by focusing on the performances, setting up a simple but strong mis-en-scene (the compositional elements in the frame) and finding an editing style that matches the emotional temperature of the stories
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Keeping an audience engaged throughout a filmed monologue can be difficult. As cinemagoers we are used to economical storytelling, moving shots, fast paced editing and an orchestral score to keep us in our seats. Unless you’re Steven Spielberg you probably don’t have a large, professional film crew in your back pocket. So, here are some tips on how to make a monologue work on film:
- Keep it short. Film can tell a story economically. (Don’t go over the 3 minute limit!)
- Suspense, subtext and surprise. Find an unconventional way to let your story unfold. Keep the audience in the dark about a key plot element until the end. Give you actor something to do, and something to play. Why are they telling this story? Who are they telling it to? And why are they telling it now? Put your character in a situation where they are out of their comfort zone, put them under pressure and see what comes out.
- Give your character a unique ‘voice’. Their use of language, syntax, movement and body language can all help keep an audience hooked.
- Your actor is your best tool. They are the conduits for your story – without them we wouldn’t have a job! Learn to love your actor and the offers they bring to your writing, work with them collaboratively and be as clear as possible when communicating with them about their performance.
- Shoot your actor at least three ways – wide shot, medium shot and close up. This give you options in picking which take is best for performance and story.
- Shoot some cutaways. You could do the whole monologue as a voiceover with other imagery or you could shoot cutaways of your actor’s hands, eyes, the location etc. Cutting to a new shot will visually refresh the audience, and can be used to heighten symbolism and metaphor in your story.
- Music or underscoring can be extremely effective in heightening the drama. But make sure it’s working for your story – there is nothing worse that the music dwarfing the writing or acting! Due to copyright make sure you use original or music in the public domain.(Check out http://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos for useful collections and advice)
- Trust your instincts. As a writer or director, you have great storytelling instincts, make sure you listen to them and fight for the story you want to tell.
- Most importantly – have fun!
Enjoy creating your own filmed monologue - hopefully my films of Boot and Little Love go some way to providing insight into that space between, from which you can take an exhilarating leap into creative possibility.
Find out more about our LOVE BYTES competition, here.
Laura Scrivano is the creative director of Mess Hall, a collective of artists creating film & theatre projects (facebook.com/messhallproductions) and tweets at @laurascrivano. Recent theatre credits include Polyopera for Opera Australia, the world premiere of Sweet Bird andsoforth and the creative development of Stories from an Invisible Town for Hoipolloi, UK. Her short film Hairpin will screen at the WOW Film Festival in Sydney on 7 March. Laura’s films of Boot and Little Love will premiere online later this month.
Lucy Coleman, one of the stars of the The Voices Project 2012: The One Sure Thing, and director Tanya Goldberg talk about the show, Fresh Ink, The Voices Project and the coming film adaptations of BOOT and LITTLE LOVE (filmed as BAT EYES).
La Conversación by Alexandra Macalister Bills
It can’t be that bad. You were ready. You said you were ready. You told me you were ready.
Death and I haven’t had too many confrontations.
I’ve been lucky, so far. When I was told the theme for the Fresh Ink National Studio was ‘Death and Passing’ I was afraid.
How was I to do justice to a theme that I felt had only brushed past me? So many other writers, so many audience members would have collided with death, what if what I wrote seemed trivial?
This was my initial reaction and it took all of 10 seconds before I was slapped with guilt. I have been lucky, but I have lost people. They weren’t unexpected or necessarily traumatic deaths but they were real. I decided what I needed was to retrace my dealings with death and figure out what aspects of those experiences I could build my writing upon. This is what I dredged up-
My Nan died when I was 16. We were on holidays in New Zealand. My Dad spent hours on the phone to his brothers and sisters discussing details, trying to decide whether to return home or not. It was complicated. Nan had Alzheimer’s. She had been in a nursing home for years before she died and had long forgotten who we were or who she was. By the time she died we had in many ways already said goodbye. She had ceased to be a presence in our lives years before. ‘Nan’ had become instead a hole in my life, an absence where a person should have been.
Absence.
Loss.
Here was something I could work with.
I never set out to recreate that story, I merely wanted to access some sort of sincere emotion. The first rule I ever learnt as a writer was – Write What You Know- like a good little girl I did.
I travel a lot and someone dying or becoming ill while I’m away is something I’m afraid of. Sitting on a grassy hill at Riversdale I started wondering how I would deal with a similar situation to the one my Dad was placed in.
During the Fresh Ink National Studio we knew the title for the show our monologues could potentially be presented in was The One Sure Thing, yet death is not predictable. It is anything but certain and neither is your reaction to it. If you were faced with the same decision as my Dad, return home to your family and a funeral, or remain where you are and deal with death in your own way, what would you do? Stay or go?
I started travelling young. On my first big trip I was the same age as the actors I was designing the monologue for. I know how the places you visit become the center of your universe, how the people you meet become instant friends and family, how everything you’re seeing and doing feels as though it will change you. At the same time you feel immature, naïve and unsure if your behavior is appropriate. How would these people, these places, these experiences influence your decision to stay or go? What would your obligations be back home? What would your obligations be to yourself? What would be the ‘right’ thing to do?
This dilemma trapped me. It became the problem I built my piece upon. My character (I call her Sophie) arose from the predicament I put her in. Before I knew anything else about her I knew she would be dealing with death from a distance. The sense of absence my Nan’s illness and death left me with manifested in the physical distance between Sophie and her family. I decided it was Sophie’s Mum that was ill because it felt like something that could destabilize her. Yet how would she react? How would her background, her personality and her relationships influence her behavior and her decision? How would the conversation play out between Sophie and her sister? What tactics would she use to avoid the elephant in the room? I think because I didn’t know the answer to the dilemma Sophie was facing I decided she wouldn’t either. She would avoid the issue entirely. She would be distracted by the environment she was in, interrupted by the people, the noise, everything she had done and was planning on doing.
I believe that following my own experiences with death I have felt not only grief but guilt. Guilt that I could have done more, been more supportive to those around me, spent more time with those that had gone. Sophie is aware of this same feeling but only subconsciously. She avoids the conversation with Belle because she knows even if she doesn’t go home there is more she should be doing. She is still resentful of the influence of her Mum’s illness on her life so Sophie is running away. She is letting her intoxicating new world sweep her along because it is better than facing the alternative. Her over enthusiasm and immaturity are masking her own guilt.
Ultimately though Sophie is scared. Alzheimer’s can run in the family. Sophie has watched her mother deteriorate, forget her life piece by piece until she was nothing more than a vegetable. She is terrified that is the future that awaits her. She is terrified of what she will lose if she returns home. She wants to (cheesy I know) experience the world first. She keeps souvenirs, photos and tickets as memory aids. She is crass about her mother’s state (“a carrot in a coma”) because joking about it, again, avoids the reality. She is certain if she keeps pushing that reality won’t catch up with her. She can’t see the cracks appearing yet.
I don’t know what happens after Sophie hangs up.
In writing La Conversación, I never found an answer for what the ‘right’ thing to do would be. I learnt not to dismiss how influential your own experiences can and should be in telling the story you want to, but I left the issue open. You can decide.
Alexandra Macalister Bills was one of the 18 writers at the 2011 Fresh Ink National Studio and was also one of the writers selected for the 2011 Fresh Ink mentorship program. Her monologue, La Conversación, is currently being performed by Charlotte Hazzard as part of The Voices Project 2012: The One Sure Thingat atyp in Sydney. The monologue is also now available alongside 20 other monologues in The Voices Project, published by Currency Press.
Stick by Carolyn Burns
They told me I’d be getting sick, but actually I’m just getting awesome.
Too often people talk about death as if it is something that only happens to other people: people who are old and infirm, or the victims of terrible accidents. That’s not the way I think of death. Death rides shotgun in that car that speeds past you on the freeway. Death waves at us from sunny windows. He taps us on the shoulder just before the phone rings with bad news. And he’s got a killer sense of humour.
The day after my twenty-fifth birthday I got very sick. I had terrible abdominal pain. I couldn’t keep food down. It was difficult to stand. I lost ten kilograms in a week. The pain was indescribable. One day it was so bad I decided the only thing I could do to make it stop was jump out the window. But when I tried to move my body was paralysed. I was home alone. All I could do was stare hopelessly out at the perfect blue sky. Eventually I passed out.
I woke up a few hours later and got myself to the hospital. They hooked me up to a drip, pumped me full of water and painkillers and sent me home. A week later I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic illness of the immune system and digestive tract, commonly first diagnosed in people in their teens and twenties.
With Stick what I really aimed to do was write a monologue that revealed something about my experience with chronic illness, but without hollow sentimentality. What struck me when thinking about how to do this in the context of The Voices Project was how much more difficult it would be to adapt to the challenges of chronic illness as a teenager.
Louise is in a situation where she is forced to rely on the care of her parents just when she is trying to establish her own independence, and at the same time, cope with the medical invasion of privacy at the very time of life when privacy becomes most important. But Louise deflects this difficulty with irreverent humour. Louise is a defiant smart-arse, who enjoys deliberately exploiting the discomfort other people feel about her illness.
In Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontag describes her own experience as a cancer patient, reflecting on how the negative associations of diseases come to hurt those who suffer from them: “As long as a particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by learning what disease they have. The solution is hardly to stop telling cancer patients the truth, but to rectify the conception of the disease, to de-mythicize it.” I think this idea also applies to life more generally: fear makes painful situations more difficult.
Being sick is horrible, but being sick doesn’t make me horrible. Being sick makes me stronger. Being sick makes me funnier. It makes me fearless. The subtext of any meditation on illness and death is survival. And that is what Stick is about.
Carolyn Burns was one of the 18 writers at the 2011 Fresh Ink National Studio and was also one of the writers selected for the 2011 Fresh Ink mentorship program. Her monologue, Stick, is currently being performed by Emma Campbell as part of The Voices Project 2012: The One Sure Thingat atyp in Sydney. The monologue is also now available alongside 20 other monologues in The Voices Project, published by Currency Press.
GEORGIA SYMONS on TWISTED
I don’t know how to write a piece of theatre. It surprises me that anyone does. At workshops and in casual conversations, other writers will say “I start with a theme.” Or, “I start with a character. From there I build a world, and then I consider plot.” I have none of these tactics; no map to lay down when pen first goes to paper, or finger to keyboard. When I start writing, it’s either because I have a deadline, or because various events in my life - things I’ve seen and heard and sensed and thought - conspire to form the kernel of an idea which (at the time) seems worth expanding upon. This kernel could be anything from a line of dialogue to a particular tone or emotional note I’d like to work towards. In the case of this monologue, Twisted, I thought when I started writing that I was just pushing towards a deadline and had plucked an arbitrary idea from the recesses of my mind. Looking back, though, what I wrote was the culmination of so much that I was thinking about and experiencing at the time.
This piece was written as part of atyp’s Fresh Ink National Writers’ Studio. All participants in the studio had to bring with them two items that related to the central theme of death. My first item was a photograph of the floor of the garage at my house. When the cement was laid for the floor of the garage, our pet dog walked through it whilst it was still wet, leaving indelible paw prints. On the day we had Jesse put down last year, I found my 18-year-old brother crouched on the floor of the shed, his fingers caressing the paw prints. Until that moment I’d never even known they were there. My second item was the programme from the funeral of an old man who was very dear to me. It had been a particularly touching service, and the programme was scattered with the poetry of D.H. Lawrence - notably The Ship of Death.
A few weeks before the studio, I had also stumbled upon a news article relating to death which fascinated me, but which I had decided was too specific to bring as reference material. In Manchester in 2003, a 14-year-old boy used a series of fabricated, online identities in order to convince another boy to kill him. The inventiveness of the boy in question, and the lengths he went to in arranging his own murder, struck me as fascinating. The boy survived the stabbing, but he and his attacker/victim both served sentences in a juvenile detention facility.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
When I started writing Twisted, I had none of those things in mind. All I knew was that I wanted to write a male character in a black comedy. One night early on in the studio I sat down for some casual brainstorming. Tiring quickly of pondering all of the morbid implications of death, I turned to brainstorming about youth. It would be a young person, after all, at the centre of my story. Qualities that I decided I found interesting in youths were their hidden depths, their potential, their inability to connect actions and consequences, their hormones, and their sense of fun and adventure. Tying all of these things back to the theme of death, I decided a fun piece to write might be a boy making up a really horrific story about a death in order to get some action. And so Twisted was born. It was only after the studio that I looked back and noticed the influence of everything I mentioned earlier on my work. Michael’s devotion to his pet dog; the poem about the boat made of bones; the borderline psychotic commitment and inventiveness of this teenage boy. All of those key items and thoughts I thought I’d forgotten about popped up in the finished piece.
The most important thing about Michael for me is his combination of showmanship, inventiveness, and calculating intellect. It isn’t enough for Michael to just tell this girl that his mother has passed away. He has to put on a show - make up this intricate, nuanced story, and perform it with enough pizzazz to sell it to Kayley. There’s a higher level of risk, but the sense of achievement and the bragging rights are increased exponentially if he can pull it off. What he never counted on was actually falling for Kayley. As he says, it was only ever meant to be a one night stand; presumably he’d go to school the next day, brag about having fooled her with his story, and never really interact with her in any meaningful way again. But Michael finds in Kayley something of a kindred spirit. She’s as cool and calm in the situation as is he, and as creative (with her little poem). Probably they have a pretty excellent night together, and then she cooks him breakfast. She’s the perfect girl, as far as Michael’s concerned. And this is where his calculating nature takes over. Ultimately Kayley is now more valuable to him than is his mother, and so his mother has to go - it’s that simple. Michael considers himself far too sensible to feel something as illogical as family loyalty; you love the best whoever you love the best, regardless of genetics.
The question remains, though - does Michael actually go on to kill his mother? I think this is a question for you, the performer, to answer. As a writer, I can say with no greater accuracy what my character will do tomorrow than can I predict what my best friend will do tomorrow, or even what I will do. Even when we lay plans, they can go awry or be changed. We will never know whether Michael ever gets around to killing his mother.
But I leave it up to you to decide what he plans to do next.
TWISTED by Georgia Symons is part THE VOICES PROJECT 2012: THE ONE SURE THING, currently playing at atyp in Sydney. It is also published in THE VOICES PROJECT from Currency Press.
