Critical Reflection #4: Connect to Outside Sources
I had spent a huge portion of my senior project reading plays, but I was still concerned about how the final product of these plays would look like over zoom. Since my essential question was centered around how to do Theatre while social-distancing and not about actually learning the craft of Theatre as it should be I realized the plays I was reading wouldn’t aid me in learning how to work from home. So I did some research and found some examples of people working from home to entertain us. The Apple Plays were a series of plays following the “Apple family”. Each year there was a new play in the same dining room, with a similar structure. During these quarantine times they’ve become a TV show almost, every Wednesday night you can watch the Apple family sit around and talk in character for about an hour. It’s essentially exactly what I was trying to do. While watching the play what I paid the most attention to were the actors, how did they shift their skill set to the computer and I took notes on how I as a director could learn from them as actors.
The other place I turned was none other than Saturday Night Live. Interestingly enough where the Apple plays succeeded I found that Saturday Night Live failed. The first week of SNL from home I found very funny and charming however I noticed that SNL had settled back to creating the same content just doing it over zoom. So much SNL relies on the audience, on hearing the laughter, the actors are trained to time their jokes to an audience. Essentially the cast didn’t shift. The sketches that were the most successful were Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennets, I think it was because they found their start on Youtube, they trained without an audience. I realized that if I was going to do Theatre it wouldn’t be any good to work on it like it was in person. I figured if I treated each scene like that it would feel like something was missing. Instead I had to shape these scenes for the computer. The scene that was the most successful (in the Theatre club) was a scene that was written to take place over the phone). I decided to keep that in mind for next week.