28 Plays Later

14-What the Heart Wants

Challenge 14 – Due 15/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

There are 206 bones in the human body.

There are 640 skeletal muscles (Although some say they go up to 850).

There are 360 joints.

There are over 900 sinews, tendons, ligaments, and cartilages.

There are 12 systems,

5 vital organs,

32 teeth.

There’s a total of about 7,500 recognised individual body parts.

Each of them with a name

Each of them with a story to tell…

So there you have it!

Body parts – meet writers, writers – meet body parts.

Hope you have a hoot!

Bonus points? Make the play the most moving, gut wrenching piece of drama ever written, maybe even make yourself weep as you write… but don’t write about illness, decay or death.

Yeah… totally didn’t come out as a drama. Damn. That slipped my mind after I started writing.

For a lot of these, the prompt inspires the location and the characters, and I just let them have at it, not knowing what’s going to come out of it. This is one of those times where it went somewhere TOTALLY unexpected. I figured that the main character would have significantly more lines than they did… huh.

13-Swirlies

Challenge 13 – Due 14/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

Hello!

Please write a play to be performed to 14-18 year olds.

Use your phone to record as many people as possible talking about an incident in their lives, after which things were changed.

OR Ask them to talk about their own experiences in the light of a subject that you are interested in.

EG: Mental Health

First Love

Gender

Bullying

Drugs

Knife crime etc

It’s important that people talk about real lived experiences rather than give opinions and that they only disclose what they feel safe disclosing.

Listen to the recordings.

Write a monologue play attributing as many as possible of those memories to one person.

You can use Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads as a template if you like.

I was crashing pretty hard after my very first therapy session since that horrible break-up in college, so I didn’t have the opportunity to get out and find kids to talk to. I tried checking vlogs on YouTube, but that quickly got SUPER depressing, so I just re-hashed one of my own childhood bullying experiences and tried to view it as I would have in High School. Surprisingly, I learned a bit about myself in the process.

12-5 Minutes

Challenge 12 – Due 13/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

Let’s do a time restriction exercise

Decide how much time you want to write today (it could be five minutes or 6 hours, 17 minutes and 32 seconds).

Get your timer out and programme into it half of the time you set for today (I mean, dividing by two?! So easy… you’re all maths pros now!)

Start writing about anything. Maybe ask yourself the question “how am I feeling today?”, or write about time restrictions.

It might come out as a monologue, or a dialogue, or maybe you have more voices in your head…

Once the timer beeps – stop writing.

Take a short break

and then set your timer again for the second half, in which you are to edit the play, make sure it has an extraordinary ending, get the formatting right, etc.

If you want to complicate things slightly (you don’t have to), you can be more time restrictive – (for example, half the second half and use one half for the ending and one half for the editing and formatting, or half that final half and use one half for the editing and one half for the formatting or half that second half and use the first half for the formatting and the second half for a proofreading or half that… I’ve inadvertently found myself in Zeno’s Paradox… I am never getting out of this! You just continue on your way… leave me here! …half that second half and use it for con…)

For bonus points, maybe use a new font that you’ve never used before…

This is another one where the prompt was more inspirational than literal… although I think I actually did write it in about five minutes.

11-Pi

Challenge 11 – Due 12/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

Numbers are so friggin’ awesome, and you can do so much with them – from basic arithmetic to some intense hardcore calculus.

‘But how does that lend itself to a play?’, I hear you ask (I really must do something about all your voices in my head!)

‘Well,’ I respond back to the negative numbers.

What about a dialogue that is structured as a Fibonacci sequence (1 word, 1 word, 2 words, 3 words, 5 words, 8 words, etc…)?

What about a play about someone who can only talk in even lettered words?

What about a couple arguing about the golden ratio?

What about the Life of Galileo? (oh wait a minute… someone already did that)

Alan Turing!

hmmm…

How about a fully symmetrical palindrome of a play? (I double-dare you!)

Or if you want to go more abstract – just have number 7 and number 11 arguing on who is more in their prime!

What would a logarithm of a play look like?

Where do numbers even exist?

I can go on infinitely…

Anyway, go mathematical-crazy! Mathematicalazy!

Counting you out…

in 3…

2…

1…

Challenge: See if you can figure out what I did.

10-Mr Taxi and the Wolf

Challenge 10 – Due 11/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

So…

in the first year we did plays with original songs,

then in the second year we did rhymes,

last year took us to spoken word…

and this year – let’s go easy and write a Jukebox musical!

“Hold it, right there, buster!” (the voices in my head shout at me in fleeting images of you) “that is like so behind the times…wasn’t that a thing like 20 years ago? And also, why are you writing in prose? This is a playwriting competition!”

Yeah… it is…was!

And yes, you’re right. I shouldn’t!

I: So let’s make it more interesting! Use only K-Pop! There, now I’m down with the kids!

IMAGES: Hold your metaphorical horses, there, Mr.

I: Well, I prefer Dr, if you don’t mind.

IMAGES: We don’t care what you prefer, surely you know that we don’t speak Korean! (most of us anyway).

I: I do! I do indeed… but… well… you know, it’s called a challenge for a reason! Find a way around that.

IMAGES: Ahhh… now we understand. Super duper!

I: I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.

IMAGES: We can’t tell if you’re being a @#%@.

I: I don’t mean to… no.

IMAGES: Well, we’re not being sarcastic.

I: Shouldn’t you write a musical instead of talking to me?

IMAGES: We aren’t actually taking part in the competition…

I: Oh… right… yeah. Anyway, I have a lot of work on… so… can we chat another time?

IMAGES: Sure!

Now bring on the JuK(e)-Pop-Box MusiK-Pop-als!

P.S. Here’s a playlist if you need one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzJvBgsFjvQ

So, I had a LOT more fun with this one than I expected.  Reached out to a bunch of friends on Facebook for suggestions of songs.  That’s why the prompt is included on the title page, because some of them wanted to see the final product. It’s crazy. It’s LONG. And I hope I honored the K-Pop fandom decently.

09-Beached

Challenge 9 – Due 10/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

Today we’re going dark. But I leave it to you to decide what sort of darkness is right for you.

You can either go into the dark deep blue sea for a bit of animal research, in which case – follow this link:

BLUE WHALE

Or you can go into the dark side of humanity. Trigger warning – note that the link below contains material of suicide – do not go in here if you’re not ready for the mental darkness.

BLUE WHALE

(I would also encourage you, if you’re up for this challenge, to search more information about the actual content of this game)

Bonus points for combining the two seamlessly – the pastoral with the existential…

Take a deep breath, and dive in!

This is another one where the prompt more inspired me, than I responded directly to the prompt. I also decided to bring back the characters from Challenge 1, because I kinda wanted to know more about them.

08-Passion for the Sport

Challenge 8 – Due 09/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

So, the Olympics are starting (fine, they’re the winter olympics, but we’ll never get the summer ones in Feb so this’ll have to do).

Let’s be all sporty.

Find your inspiration from a sportical event, or from the culture of sportiality or from observing sportition.

Don’t sport with people’s feelings though, but do feel free to sport at sportspeople who sport their sports-gear.

Be athletic in your delivery and add competitive elements to it.

For insportation (hell yeah!), I can’t recommend Elfride Jelinek’s “Sports Play” enough!

No bonus points – but a gold medal instead, to anyone that doesn’t just use sport as a theme, but actually uses it for the form of the play (for example, why not write a play in 10 parts that mirrors the decathalon?)

I hope it goes swimmingly,

On your marks…

Get set…

GO!

07-Utter Shite

Challenge 7 – Due 08/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

OK, so we focus way too much and worry about writing good stuff… how about writing some shite?

Like, proper total crap. (not literally! You know who you are!)

Not as easy as it sounds.

Just have no filters.

Let yourselves go.

Now, typos are the enemy of the writer – but let’s make them our friend.

Type and don’t proof. If you type a wrong word – leave it, you never know – it might sound better!

Bonus points to those of you who are going to send the play without even re-reading it.

Knowing damn well that there’s a chance that a stranger might read it…

Be free, ducklings!

06-You Got This

Challenge 6 – Due 07/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

Today is in celebration of the 100th year anniversary of Women first being given the vote in the UK. However, we’re also going to acknowledge that women didn’t actually get equal voting rights to men until 1928, so today’s prompt is: ‘Still Not Equal.’

And to reflect modern times, I’d love you to write it in the style of a farce, if you like (or whatever you conceive to be farce in these days)!

A weekday means bonus points I believe: So here you get bonus points if you drop in surprise celebrity appearances from the following feminists: Emily Pankhurst, Simone De Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, and Oprah Winfrey.

Easy, right. Just like the fight for female equality ;o)

I went totally off the reservation on this one. First, I was a little uncomfortable writing a farce about women’s suffrage as a white dude. Second, I had just gotten back from a weekend away, and was coming down off a “being close to my friends” high. And coming down HARD. So I got a little self indulgent. Sorry.

05-Dicklberg

Challenge 5 – Due 06/02 at 09:59:59am GMT

Today I’ll give you the opening line – you just have to do the rest!

And here it is:

“Take off the girdle, Gertl, and tell me everything about Onun’s onions, or else little Dicklberg here will get it with this!”

Make the play as long or as short as you like!

Use as many or as few actors as you like!

In other words, do what you like!

Bonus points if you end the play with the following line:

“So there really were 50 of them buying groceries in Panama!”

I totally missed that there was a “Bonus points line” for this one.  Whoops!