Week of 3/29 : Finishing the Script, Finding Actors, and Kentucky

During this week I was able to finally finish the script for my thesis. The Other Play is complete. It tells the story of Geena Gallagher, a young girl struggling with, well existence, as she would put it.

GEENA: So lately, I’ve been having difficulty… existing. Like, okay, I know people have been doing it for centuries now, but — hear me out — they all stopped doing it at one point or another. It’s just, bad things happen all the time — and I don’t know how people are just — okay with it. How can they keep moving on, living life, and these bad things don’t haunt their every waking hour. I just feel like I’m missing out on something fundamental — because — like when bad things happen to me it stays here ( she points to her head) and it doesn’t leave. I’m not able to just — move on. It just bleeds into all my actions and reactions — and well, things have gotten to be … not okay. Like, really not okay lately and — (cuts herself off mid thought) Or maybe not. Maybe what happened is like a normal thing that happens and I’m just bad at #coping and am generally unprepared for how to handle life and… look I didn’t want to do this — not really. They said I had to. But… look — I do want to be okay. I have things to do and people to see and I’m tired of not being okay.

I’m really satisfied with the dialogue in the show and the development of the characters. I had a really difficult time with the ending of the show and with the purpose of the character Jem. Jem is a therapist that tries to help Geena sort through her subconscious, but originally she was suppose to me a manifestation of Geena’s childhood friend. It wasn’t working though. At the end of the play, when Geena has a nervous breakdown about her inability to cope, Jem has to comfort her and provide some guidance as to how to move on and when Jem was just a manifestation of a childhood friend, it just wasn’t working — and didn’t really fit the theme of finding professional help to work out problems. I finally reached the conclusion that Jem should be a professional therapist and rewrote the show through that prospective and everything really came together from there.

I also found a cast this week. Molly Knapp, a sophomore Women and Gender Studies major, as Geena and Natalie LaSpisa, a junior Graphic Design major, as Jem.

I also attended the Sigma Tau Delta Conference this week in Kentucky and attended a lot of interesting panels on storytelling and was able to present my original play <Project Revive> .

I attended a really interesting panel called Narrative in Games, it was a round table that facilitated discussion about how narrative works in games and where the game industry is headed in both the realm of jRPG and wRPG. There was also really interesting discussion about narrative in indie games and how form can really help amplify the narrative. If an 8 bit character is what would best fit the narrative, then indie games have the ability to do that. They aren’t trying to constantly be the next big things like jRPGs and wRPGs so they have more room to experiment.

It was just really interesting to see people talk about narrative in coordination with technology and it really helped me find perspective through this thesis project to tell an experimental story.