[Writingworkshop] Playwriting Week 2

[Neale Morison]

The assignment for week 2 was to take one of the scenes from the writing 
exercises for week 1 and add a scene before and a scene after. This is 
attached as a pdf. The others were written in class.

Exercise 1 - Free writing

[Prompt: A flash of light, then ... 10 minutes]

A flash of light, then ... the afterimage of a shape, a dark crouching 
silhouette, some creature, whether facing away or towards me I cannot 
tell, preparing to spring at me or away from me, in the moment before 
flight or fight, but which? In the roar of thunder I fall and roll, then 
strain to see, to hear, to sense somehow the creature that surely stalks me.

I hear only the pounding of rain, see nothing, smell only the soaking 
earth and the tang of the rivulets that pour down my face.

On my face I crawl, belly in the mud, away from the image of that dark 
possibility, but direction is gone, all direction is the same, I am 
crawling in circles, I am oozing on my belly like the worm ouroubouros, 
I am eating my own tail in the terror of that black bulk, now faded from 
my eyes, that lives forever in my memory of fear.


Exercise 2

[Scene in which someone wants three things and someone else wants them 
to have one but not the others.

The three things may be selected from this list: a secret, a piece of 
string, something broken, the colour blue, a cigarette - and in 
Aristotle's use of the terms, a Reversal and a Recognition. 20 minutes]

Lance: What about the colour?
Fran: Pink.
Lance: Do you know that?
Fran: No. And I don't want to know.
Lance: Pink won't go with the fireplace.
Fran: I. Just. Want. Pink.
Lance: It would be so easy to know for sure.
Fran: We talked about this.
Lance: You're making me so tense.
Fran: I'm making you tense.
Lance: What's the big deal? Why not know?
Fran: Because life is a mystery. It's a beautiful, strange, miraculous, 
fucking mystery.
Lance: Calm down. You have to stay calm.
Fran: You are making me tense. This was such a stupid time to give up 
smoking. Why don't you just go and have a fucking cigarette!
Lance: You're the one who wants a cigarette.
Fran: But I am not going to have one. You are.
Lance: What if I don't?
Fran: Please. For the love of God. Go and have a cigarette.
Lance: I will if you say blue.
Fran: I'm not going to say blue.
Lance: Blue.
Fran: No.
Lance: Blue.
Fran: No.
Lance: Blue.
Fran: No.
Lance: No.
Fran: Blue (recovering) No!
Lance: Because it's a girl?
Fran: Yes. Yes, all right? It's a girl.

-- 
Neale Morison
neale at nealemorison.com
http://www.nealemorison.com
31 Maple Ave #2, Cambridge MA 02139
+1 617 460 9969

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Week2Assignment.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 48843 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://nealemorison.org/pipermail/writingworkshop_nealemorison.org/attachments/20080214/f7e36f60/attachment-0001.pdf