Writing #TheBallantineDays (my perspective)
Photo of my workstation during the earliest process of script development. On my laptop you can see the character breakdown that I wrote once I had held auditions and cast the production, but before all decisions were made about characters and the script. On the desktop monitor you can see the beginning of the rough outline I made of the plot of #TheBallantineDays. The title reflects the (fictional) 70s sit-com The Ballantine Days, set in a dorm room of a women’s college (Ballantine College) and then rebooted to be in a dorm room of a gender-inclusive campus in our current moment.
As much as I enjoyed #TBD, with only two members of the class sticking with the production through our final performance on March 2, 2019, I wanted to ensure that the script was written to take into account the identities of the actors cast in the production, and this meant taking the essence of the script THTR 340 created - the filming of a reboot of a 70s sit-com and a portal taking people back in time - while writing a new play that reflects the actors cast and adds production values that the class was unable to utilize.
There are a few new questions that we are keeping in mind as we compose the script over winter break: Why are we telling a story about social media in the 70s and on stage? How might we incorporate social media and other forms of technology into the production itself? How can we make the reach of the production extend beyond the McDonald Theatre to the rest of our community and then into the virtual world? What are the similarities and differences between our contemporary moment and the late 70s? What story do we want to tell? (We all learned from #TBD that it was easy to get distracted by the logistics of time travel and to lose sight of the human element. We are hoping to avoid that as much as possible in #TheBallantine Days)
On December 17, 2018, Izzy Ingram, Tom Perry, and I sat down to talk about the basics of working on the script. Both Izzy and Tom were in THTR 340 and were excited to continue developing the play they began. By the time we met, the show had been cast (because we didn’t have a script, auditions consisted of three parts: ensemble / trust building / improv; scenes from Three’s Company; and devising a reboot version of the Three’s Company episode we’d used in auditions). I had come up with the basic premise of the play we would be writing, but that was about it. The three of us fleshed out some of the ideas we had about the world of the play and divvied up early writing tasks based on our skillsets and interests. Izzy claimed first dibs on writing some of the rebooted sit-com scenes. Tom claimed first dibs on the opening scene. I set out to lay out a basic plot structure and then start playing with the 70s sit-com scenes. I was also tasked with creating a Google Drive folder that would not only contained our individual writing pads, but also one for the developing script (my purview) and then documents for each actor in the cast to work up character biographies for us to work to incorporate as appropriate into the writing. And then we all went our separate ways.
By December 27, Izzy and Tom had drafts of their first scenes and I had roughed out a plot synopsis - one that by the time we started rehearsals would largely be abandoned. I began working on integrating their scenes into the script I was writing. Questions we asked had a lot to do with trying to make sure that audiences would be able to follow the various characters who were getting pulled between worlds, focusing on the right narratives, etc. The actors were busy drafting character biographies, so writing of the script in earnest began once they had met their deadline of December 29.
I took over writing the bulk of the script, weaving in and editing segments written by Izzy and Tom, between December 30 and January 3. By that point I’d made it through what we were calling Act I. It has turned into a full-length one act, but we found it useful to demarcate everything that happened before the portal transition as Act I and everything after that Act II for a while. Izzy and Tom read what existed and then on January 6 we set up a Google chat to talk about the questions that were arising. Once we got through technical difficulties - fitting for this script - we had a good group conversation about the logic of the portal, the emphasis of the play, and how we were proceeding forwards. One of the biggest questions for me had to do with what world / reality the characters (actors) who were pulled from the contemporary world into the 70s were living in: were they aware of the disconnect? And what about the characters in the 70s sitcom? Were there actors who had a different perspective than their characters? In other words, were 70s characters aware of the fact that they’d been infiltrated by the contemporary world? Ultimately, I decided that it is much more interesting if we are basically existing in two different realities with a shared space.
These insights led me to want time to develop the second half of the script, so I asked Izzy and Tom to focus their energies on things we’d already written and to give me a couple of days to work on hammering out the rest of the script. By January 10, I had a rough draft of the full play ready, though there were a number of scenes at the end of the play that were more plot points than they were scripted. I started sending what I had out to members of the design team, which led to some video and phone conferencing about where we are headed.
On January 13, I decided to send the first draft to the printer so that I would stop tweaking it (and have time to prep my classes). All that is left now is the final scene, which will be created by the members of the cast involved in that portion of the play. I’m really excited about this given that the cast members wrote fantastic reboot episodes of a Three’s Company scene as part of auditions and I’ve been wishing I could find a way to incorporate their work into the script as well.
Script development during the rehearsal process: or, how to learn to love change
As an artistic director of a theatre company that devises original work, I have learned to be quite comfortable with the messiness of script development. The TBD process reminded me that this is not something that has always been true for me, nor is it true for collaborators who are new to this type of work. I made some massive missteps in the early days of rehearsal - perhaps most especially, I asked the reboot cast to try and devise a first draft of an ending for the play on the second day of rehearsal…long before I’d established trust or brought them fully into the world of a play that had been rattling around in my brain for months, nor had I demonstrated the type of collaborative process I hoped to undertake. The magnificent and creative actors I’d cast did their best to fulfill my request, but it was clear to all of us that we hadn’t hit on anything that we liked. After sleeping on it and realizing the myriad of mistakes I’d made, we tabled that scene and continued to work on the play. The first week of our process was during winter break and so we spent three hours a day working on building ensemble and another two on the scenes that were written. There were moments of great joy during our ensemble sessions and great awkwardness during the scene work.
Sometime during the second week of rehearsal we reached a point where the actors began to feel comfortable voicing their frustrations with the script. My attempt to ensure that this did not become a play about the logistics of time travel had made me repeat the very error I’d found in my class’s script: overlooking the interpersonal challenges that would arise when someone accustomed to contemporary society was interacting with people from a different period…or in other words, how we react when we are thrust into situations where we don’t know the social norms or where others’ define our identities differently than how we wish to define ourselves. The 70s cast forced me to quit silencing the voice in my head that had convinced myself I didn’t want to go further down this path out of a fear that it would lead me too far astray from the play. In the third week of rehearsals, I went back to the drawing board and significantly edited the bulk of the 70s portion of the play.
Both casts expressed their frustration with a “censored” scene that I had written in an attempt to give an overlooked character in the show something substantial to do. I was right there with them - I didn’t like it either. So, at the end of January, we took a day for the 70s cast to write a new censored scene and the reboot cast to create the ending. Both teams drafted material and then I took it home and edited it into more fully developed versions. Izzy was especially helpful for me in the rewriting of the reboot ending since she had been part of the cast’s deliberations while they worked on the material.
By February 4, we had a relatively complete working version of the script that all of us have been able to throw ourselves into. I hope that one day I will be able to share some reflections from members of the company who participated in this process as I believe their perspectives might be completely different from my own - I just hope that we all share great pride and joy in the current product.