Leytonstone Mystery Play: SCRIPT thoughts
Nov. 12th, 2012 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
artsyhonkerSome of my witterings about a script for the Leytonstone Mystery Play.
I'm thinking of something in two or three acts, each of which is made up of several short sketches, vignettes, whatever you wnat to call them. This patchwork structure means each short section can be assigned to a particular "guild" or group of people, either existing community groups or bunches of people who decide they want to play. But we'll need to know what we're going to perform, and we'll need to issue at least rough script outlines, if not actual script, to the various groups.
So we're looking for anywhere between eight and fifteen self-contained sketches telling Biblical stories.
That could be very disjunct. Things that I think may help with disjunctness:
-Have some kind of theme for each "Act". This could be fairly broad e.g. "Redemption" but we might do better with something narrower.
-Between each scene, sing a verse or two with a refrain. The idea is that the scenes can be summarised in the verses, and the refrain can be the same in each Act or perhaps over the whole thing.
-Have a narrator who can summarise scenes and introduce the next. For groups who don't want a lot of speaking parts the narrator could be quite heavily involved in the scene, too.
-Encourage visual coherence by having a few stock backdrops and using them for each scene (as appropriate)
I'd quite like to feature some women and girls in these stories, people like Sarah, Miriam, Esther, Ruth, Mary... but I don't want to be too obvious about it, I don't want to advertise this as a feminist thing, just get on with it. But it would be good if, without re-writing the Bible, at least some scenes could pass the Bechdel test.
I'm wondering whether a good starting point would be to take some existing Mystery Plays, go through and cut out the scenes or stories that are anti-Semitic, and then decide which additional scenes we might have.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
I'm thinking of something in two or three acts, each of which is made up of several short sketches, vignettes, whatever you wnat to call them. This patchwork structure means each short section can be assigned to a particular "guild" or group of people, either existing community groups or bunches of people who decide they want to play. But we'll need to know what we're going to perform, and we'll need to issue at least rough script outlines, if not actual script, to the various groups.
So we're looking for anywhere between eight and fifteen self-contained sketches telling Biblical stories.
That could be very disjunct. Things that I think may help with disjunctness:
-Have some kind of theme for each "Act". This could be fairly broad e.g. "Redemption" but we might do better with something narrower.
-Between each scene, sing a verse or two with a refrain. The idea is that the scenes can be summarised in the verses, and the refrain can be the same in each Act or perhaps over the whole thing.
-Have a narrator who can summarise scenes and introduce the next. For groups who don't want a lot of speaking parts the narrator could be quite heavily involved in the scene, too.
-Encourage visual coherence by having a few stock backdrops and using them for each scene (as appropriate)
I'd quite like to feature some women and girls in these stories, people like Sarah, Miriam, Esther, Ruth, Mary... but I don't want to be too obvious about it, I don't want to advertise this as a feminist thing, just get on with it. But it would be good if, without re-writing the Bible, at least some scenes could pass the Bechdel test.
I'm wondering whether a good starting point would be to take some existing Mystery Plays, go through and cut out the scenes or stories that are anti-Semitic, and then decide which additional scenes we might have.
Thoughts? Suggestions?