Teaching

In a fit of odd desperation at work, I went to a "huddle room" (rooms with little tables and chairs and dry erase boards for small meetings) and I started to teach a class on playwriting. To no one. Like a young girl has a tea party with stuffed animals, or how I used to play "Mass" when I was a kid, dressing up in one of my father's T-shirts and using grape juice and Lays Potato Chips as communion. Of course, since my congregation consisted of myself, I ate a lot of chips as a kid. I still feel a twinge of sacredness when I have a bag of Lays...

Anyway, so I was teaching this class, starting with Aristotelian principles and Freytag's Triangle. I broke this down further into a basic three-act structure, using terminology gained from Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige: The Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige.


I then moved into a discussion of how this structure works in Caryl Churchill's Far Away, moving from something ordinary to something exceedingly outrageous and unexpected.

I told my imaginary students that another name for "The Prestige" was "Perception Shift," which was taught to me by Sherry Kramer. (We would be investigating this throughout the semester.)

They could also look forward to our session on adaptations, (my forte, my calling as Sherry Kramer decreed one night, "I know what you should do with your life! Adaptation!") and we would be going over such plays as Tallgrass Gothic by Melanie Marnich (one of those other playwrights who have pushed me into a better understanding of myself as a playwright).

My class was cut short by the end of my break, and, sadly, I have left my imaginary students out in the cold. I haven't had a chance to start our workshops, see what they're writing. I'm way behind on my syllabus... Hell, I haven't even created my syllabus!

I'm a poor excuse for an imaginary playwriting professor.