Caveat: This post will ramble.
I'm working on a collaborative project - very organic - for a women's art festival that opens this week. Several artists will be showcasing plays, performances, music and whatever.
The project I'm a part of is a series of character monologues written by 5 women and performed by 1. The "script" was turned over to me 4 weeks ago in the hope that I could make it stage-worthy. I cut some of the monologues, rewrote some, made 1 character the chorus (it was a character who recites slam poetry) and prerecorded the poems to jazz music, and arranged the order of the monolgues to give the piece as much of a dramatic stucture as possible. It will be fine for the festival (the director is fabulous, the actress is great - she truly transforms into each character instantly, and it's been advertised as a work in progress), but the actress (who is the leader of the project) wants to do a full production of it in the winter, and has asked me for help with rewrites.
As it is now, the show is 20 monologues by 5 different characters, each character has 4 monologues. Each woman tells a story in 4 parts about her life, but the stories are completely unrelated.
I don't think this is enough. The original writers disagree with me. I argue that in order for this show to really work, there needs to be something that unites these women beyond being women (i.e. they are all breast cancer survivors, rape victims, single looking for love, etc). There needs to be something that ties them together. The original authors don't agree, citing The Vagina Monologues as evidence, which I quickly point out does have a unifying theme (stories about vaginas), but they aren't convinced. None of them have ever written anything before, but they are all very bright and educated and well-read. Of course, there is ego involved from all sides, and I'm the newest to the project. I also have never collaborated in writing with more than 1 other person, so the sheer number of opinions is daunting.
In my rewrites, I tried to find the struggle in each character's story and focus on that, but I think they are too disparate. The slam poems are really cool, and I had the director get the actress to use specific emotions to evoke what the poems need to convey (we did not have time to write new poems), I set each to music (which also lends emotion), but the WORDS of the poem do not add to the other monologues. Since I'm using the slam poetry as the chorus, the words (not just emotions and sounds) should serve as commentary on the rest, but they don't, and I'm hoping the audience doesn't notice. I sent the production manager this statement for the program: "The character monologues are unified by the idea that every actualized woman participates in the struggle to be who she is, not whom she thinks she should be," but it's BS. I wrote that for lack of anything else that would make it sound like a unified piece.
The people are pretty neat, I'm new to the town, and would like to continue working on this. For rewrites, they want the stories polished and the characters developed, but not changed.
Here's my question:
Am I not being open enough to different forms? Is it enough to tell 5 different unrelated stories if the stories are good? I can't think of any play or book or movie I've scene that does this. The closest I can come to is Jim Jarmusch's "Night on Earth," but even those were related by occurring simultaneously and in taxis. Or "Canterbury Tales" or the "Decameron" - they're related by the circumstances of the speakers. Is there any work someone could point me to that I should look at, or should I continue to try and persuade the others? Is lack of theme/unifcation ever a good, desirable thing?
I'm working on a collaborative project - very organic - for a women's art festival that opens this week. Several artists will be showcasing plays, performances, music and whatever.
The project I'm a part of is a series of character monologues written by 5 women and performed by 1. The "script" was turned over to me 4 weeks ago in the hope that I could make it stage-worthy. I cut some of the monologues, rewrote some, made 1 character the chorus (it was a character who recites slam poetry) and prerecorded the poems to jazz music, and arranged the order of the monolgues to give the piece as much of a dramatic stucture as possible. It will be fine for the festival (the director is fabulous, the actress is great - she truly transforms into each character instantly, and it's been advertised as a work in progress), but the actress (who is the leader of the project) wants to do a full production of it in the winter, and has asked me for help with rewrites.
As it is now, the show is 20 monologues by 5 different characters, each character has 4 monologues. Each woman tells a story in 4 parts about her life, but the stories are completely unrelated.
I don't think this is enough. The original writers disagree with me. I argue that in order for this show to really work, there needs to be something that unites these women beyond being women (i.e. they are all breast cancer survivors, rape victims, single looking for love, etc). There needs to be something that ties them together. The original authors don't agree, citing The Vagina Monologues as evidence, which I quickly point out does have a unifying theme (stories about vaginas), but they aren't convinced. None of them have ever written anything before, but they are all very bright and educated and well-read. Of course, there is ego involved from all sides, and I'm the newest to the project. I also have never collaborated in writing with more than 1 other person, so the sheer number of opinions is daunting.
In my rewrites, I tried to find the struggle in each character's story and focus on that, but I think they are too disparate. The slam poems are really cool, and I had the director get the actress to use specific emotions to evoke what the poems need to convey (we did not have time to write new poems), I set each to music (which also lends emotion), but the WORDS of the poem do not add to the other monologues. Since I'm using the slam poetry as the chorus, the words (not just emotions and sounds) should serve as commentary on the rest, but they don't, and I'm hoping the audience doesn't notice. I sent the production manager this statement for the program: "The character monologues are unified by the idea that every actualized woman participates in the struggle to be who she is, not whom she thinks she should be," but it's BS. I wrote that for lack of anything else that would make it sound like a unified piece.
The people are pretty neat, I'm new to the town, and would like to continue working on this. For rewrites, they want the stories polished and the characters developed, but not changed.
Here's my question:
Am I not being open enough to different forms? Is it enough to tell 5 different unrelated stories if the stories are good? I can't think of any play or book or movie I've scene that does this. The closest I can come to is Jim Jarmusch's "Night on Earth," but even those were related by occurring simultaneously and in taxis. Or "Canterbury Tales" or the "Decameron" - they're related by the circumstances of the speakers. Is there any work someone could point me to that I should look at, or should I continue to try and persuade the others? Is lack of theme/unifcation ever a good, desirable thing?