Playwright Case

When choosing playwright I wasn't one hundred percent sure what it involved, apart from obviously writing a play. When given the title of 'Self' I started looking at my life thinking a play, I could write a whole book based on my life. Personally I found using life experiences as a stimulus harder than thinking of a random topic to write about. I decided to use a section of my life that I very rarely spoke about and use that as my basis for my play. Gathering personal references and evidence I found quite easy, as I had a diary/ journal which I had kept documenting the events which I used to base some of my scenes. The difficulty I had was trying to find academic research that could back up my writing and my play as I had enough personal evidence. Using other sources of research rather than just my diary, I decided to get some background information on domestic violence which I believed would create a more non-bias type of play. When I mean non-bias, I mean rather than just giving my own point of view based on my personal experience, I decided to read up on some other people's real life stories that relate to domestic violence which I obtained from Domestic Violence research centre Victoria main website which is http://www.dvrcv.org.au/stories/. Using my real life story and a wide variety of other female's stories, I decided to merge all the stories together rather than just mine, which helped me, create a story rather than just reliving my past and turning my journal into a script.

Whilst writing my play I decided to refer to Janet Neipris's To Be A Playwright in which Janet mentions her fifty questions to develop a story which I found very useful for e.g. "What prompted you to begin this play?...An incident? Knowing where the play comes from helps keep focus" My answer to this question was the 'incident' from my past which was taken from my own diary entries from a teenager, and also the stories from other female victims of domestic violence.

According to Janet Neipris "Dialogue is the playwright's fundamental tool. It's the major way we connect with our audiences...characters have two types of dialogues always at work....the words that come out their mouth..compromise the exterior dialogue. The interior dialogue is what the character is thinking and feeling-the subtext" Concentrating on the dialogue and what the characters were going to say I had to keep into account that I couldn't write word for word what was said in the real life incident that my play was based on as I wasn't writing characters that were replicas of myself and the other person involved which I will call person 'X' for the purpose of keeping their identity confidential. I also had to take into account the audience and whether they would understand what I was writing about as Steve Gooch says "...it can be difficult to see your idea as others will see it. In this sense all creative ideas are somewhat arcane"

I decided to use www.youtube.co.uk as a form of resourcing other plays based on domestic violence to see how a scene could be portrayed, which could maybe give me some extra ideas as to how my scenes could be portrayed by my actors. Some examples of scenes were actors brilliantly portrayed domestic violence was a scene take from the stage play 'Secret Lives of Ministry Wives' written and produced by Nicole Morgan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3vl6FI5RbA , Also a short film 'Above the Noise' which was created by a unknown YouTube user http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt-qJm3whm8 , which really helped when creating my fictional characters.

The main challenge I found when writing the play, was actually seeing my past that I had previously tried so hard to forget actually written down in front of me and knowing in the back of my mind that that part of my life would be portrayed to an audience. According to Linda Winn "The telling of the story can be cathartic, frightening, or can reveal...'stuckness', and inability to recall what happened" , which in my case was right, I wasn't just writing a script I was in essence telling a story, a story of my life which I had kept hidden and a secret for many years, only evidence of the past was my diary I had kept as a teenager in which I was using to base the script on. Linda Winn also said "Perhaps it is my insatiable love of books that makes me firmly believe that every person has a story to tell, and that storytelling is as natural as breathing" That quote I don't agree with as writing this play/ story didn't feel natural, but also I suppose writing a story that isn't based on a traumatic or emotional event could be very easy and come naturally to most people as I believe there isn't as much emotion behind the story.

Rather than looking at my script I had formed as a play, I decided to look at it as a story to try and help me emotionally connect with it and hopefully help my audience who ideally I would have liked to of been domestic violence victims and see how my message could ideally help them. Whilst reading Geri Giebel Chavis's book 'Poetry and Story therapy: The healing power of creative expression' I noticed that using stories and implementing them within a workshop could help with emotional distress and help make the participants more mentally stable and emotionally healthier. Geri talks about the writer in this quote where Geri says "When clients capture, in writing, links between their personal lives and a story's features, they discover new meanings in a tangible way" I feel this quote really in a personal way related to me as my script/ story was a link to my personal life and also the stories/ scripts features. On the other hand, even though Geri talks about the use of storytelling as a good way of expressing emotions, he also states that "While release of emotions from a troubled past can provide relief,..Expressing raw emotion or spilling out details of a traumatic experience on the page can be alarming and distressing." Which shows that some people may agree that it can be nothing but emotionally helpful, this quote also proves that everyone needs to remember that each individual deals with emotions in their own way and some people could find seeing their story on the page emotional and stressful, which is kind of how I felt until I started researching into other drama therapy techniques or ideas which involved writing about personal experiences, whether that meant writing a story, diary, journal or play.

I decided once the script had been written and before my editing I decided to research more about the effectiveness of writing as a therapeutical way of expressing and dealing with inner emotions. Further reading of Geri's book I came across a list of what they believed