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31295011762530.Pdf (3.587Mb) AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: CAPT. JACK'S ALL NUDE SHRIMPBOAT REVIEW AND BURLESQUE SHOW by DAVID MILES CHICK, B.A. A THESIS IN THEATRE ARTS Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Approved May, 1997 1 A:S w^^'^ Z^^ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Af' 14- I would like to thank my family, Matt Harrison, Polly O Butler, Joel Lava, David Veliet, Charlie Wise, David Nathan, Jonana Widner, Carla Cook, Adam Reed, Derek Reid, Chris Werner, David Madison, Jeff Holland, Marcus Byrd, Perez Prado, A.C. Campbell and James Worthy for their constant inspiration. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff of Austin College for giving me the well- rounded education that made this thesis possible. Most of all I would like to thank Howie and Terra Norberg for their love and support. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 Influential Methods of Playwriting 2 II. MY PROCESS FOR CAPT. JACK'S 11 The Germinal Idea 11 The Collection 14 The Scenario 18 The First Draft 20 The Prosess of Revising Capt. Jack's 22 Evaluation of My Process 24 III. DEFINING CAPT. JACK'S 25 The Characters 25 The Dialogue 27 The Plot Structure 28 The Theme 30 Conclusions 32 BIBLIOGRAPHY 33 APPENDIX: SCRIPT OF CAPT. JACK'S 34 111 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I used to believe myself incapable of completing a full-length play. My past experiences in playwriting turned out to be nothing more then exercises in futility. The reason that I had no success was because I had no idea what I was doing. When I decided that I was going to write a play, I would just turn on the computer and bravely start writing until I ran out of steam. That is all well and good, but with steam power I was only able to get about two-and-a-half pages into a script. At that point I would read over what I had done, decide that it was horrid, and turn the computer off. This approach led to many half­ hearted and ill-conceived beginnings to plays. After a while my playwriting fire dwindled, and I resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to be able to write a play. I stayed in this state of resignation until the fall of 1995 when I took a playwriting class at Texas Tech. In that class I had some success writing short, ten-page one- acts. My fire was re-kindled. From this experience I learned that if I wanted to write a full-length play, I needed to develop a style that would be conducive to my creative process. My problem was that I needed to develop a process of writing that would enable me to create a full-length play. In my thesis I will discuss the steps that I went through to solve this problem. The steps include: discussion of various influential playwriting methods, evaluation of my experiences writing Capt. Jack's All Nude Shrimpboat Review and Burlesque Show, and analyzation of the results. Influential Methods of Playwriting Studying the writing styles of playwrights such as David Mcunet and Sam Shepard, as well as the playwriting methodology of Sam Smiley, greatly helped me develop my own process. Mamet's and Shepard's styles of playwriting influenced the way that I wanted to write Capt. Jack's and the methods put forth by Smiley in Playwriting; The Structure of Action gave me a framework in which I felt comfortable writing. By combining these elements I was able to produce a style that worked for me. The effect that David Mamet had over my process was to help me generate ideas for plays. When I examined Mamet's work I found that he writes plays with simple subject matter. Looking only at the surface of his plays, Mamet is telling simple tales that do not have complex plots. His plays are about little everyday occurrences. Speed- the-Plow is about the making of a movie deal. Glengarry Glen Ross is about selling real estate. But the real action of the play is what is taking place beneath these common happenings. Mamet uses the subtext of his plays to tell truths about humanity and the human condition in our society. Underneath the simple surface of Speed-the-Plow lies a story of a man who gains and then loses morality. Glengarry Glen Ross's subtext is a story of a company's greed forcing an honest man to commit crime. When I was brainstorming for play ideas, I looked for ones that were simple on the surface but had room underneath to say something bigger. All of the ideas that I came up with were based on this structure. It is not that I was looking for ways to steal Mamet's style; rather I was looking for story ideas that would allow me to incorporate the things that I liked about Mamet into my writing process. His writing style helped me generate ideas that I could work with. The style of Sam Shepard also helped me develop my playwriting process in much the same way that Mamet's style did. By looking at and analyzing aspects of Shepard's work, I was able to incorporate steps into my process that would help me achieve the things that I admire about Shepard's writing. This too was especially helpful to me when brainstorming for ideas. The aspect of Shepard's work that I respect most is the familiarity of the characters. In True West, the audience is immediately able to recognize the characters of Austin, Lee, Saul, and the mother. They are archetypes that are ingrained into America's collective unconscious. When broken down and looked at as archetypes, the characters consist of: a nerd, a bully, a Hollywood producer and a crazy old woman. A feeling of familiarity envelops Shepard's work and draws the audience in. When coming up with germinal ideas that my play would eventually grow from, I looked for ones that could possibly support archetypes and give the play the same sense of familiarity that is felt in the works of Shepard. Archetypes also had an effect on me when I was creating the characters. When I would get stuck during my creative process, I was able to look back at the archetypical seed of the character. From this point, new ideas would arise. There were times in my process when I felt that a character was foreign and not fully developed. It would help me to think back to what Shepard does in his plays. If the character's archetype was not identifiable then I could make changes that made it more clear. If I didn't know how a character would react in a situation, I was able to look back to the root archetype and make decisions from there. Mamet's and Shepard's styles helped me define what it is that I like about theater. From there I was able to work the aforementioned steps into my process that would help me achieve the aspects of theater that I personally find exciting. As much as these playwrights and their styles helped me, I still needed a working process. Sam Smiley's method gave me that process. In chapter two of Playwriting; The Structure of Action, Smiley puts forth a process that I found useful. As I said before, my first playwriting successes had come when I took a playwriting class at Texas Tech. In that class, I was finally able to complete a play, even though it was far from a full-length play. My successes were due to Smiley's method, which was taught as a basic framework for playwriting. Naturally, when I put myself to the task of writing a full-length play, I looked toward Smiley and found my own style from his base. Smiley's second chapter is titled "The Process of Playwriting," and it lays out fourteen steps that a writer can follow to complete a play. The first eight of these steps are directly related to the writing of a play. Steps nine through fourteen deal with submitting a play to producers and the roles of playwrights during the production of a play. I didn't concern myself with these later steps because I was only attempting to develop a process that would help me write a full-length play. Once I had actually completed the play, I would deal with getting it produced. The first five of Smiley's steps are what he calls the "pre-drafting steps."^ These steps deal with the formation Sam Smiley, Playwriting; The Structure of Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971) 27. 5 of ideas that the play will be about. It starts with the writer's "creative compulsion."^ From that compulsion, the writer develops "germinal ideas." One germinal idea is chosen and expanded on during the collection process. The data that have been collected become more concrete through the writing of the rough scenario, and ideas are formulated within the scenario. The next three steps involve the writing of the first draft, and they are followed by a series of revisions that culminate in a final draft. I was able to re-work Smiley's format into a process that worked for me. Smiley's first step deals with the idea of a writer's creative compulsion, which is like "...a field of rich soil ready for a seed." I already understood this step, so I moved on to the next.
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