Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:33:04 -0800
To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] Adapting Grimm's Fairy Tales...


I'll chime in to add a few scripting comments.  Temptation is to 
write a book on it, but no time tonight.  So I'll try to be 
deliberately disorganized and limit it all to a few points just drawn 
from my personal approach.

+ What to start with? Anything & everything.  For me, I go on two 
paths simultaneously.  On the first, I'm carrying a notebook & 
sketchpad, and scribbling down every idea, character concept, 
dialogue fragment, or image that comes floating into the head: 
everything.  On the other track, I'm trying to pursue a disciplined 
process.  Usually that has to do with a plot outline, though 
sometimes it's deepening the characters that stem from the original 
story.  Going back and forth between undisciplined scribble and 
focused structure works for me, maybe for you.

+ For me, I know I'm cooking when I actually start plotting.  The 
story is what happens; the plot is the way the incidents are ordered 
and told.  For example, the basic story incidents of Cinderella are 
obvious, but we could depict them in many ways.
	Off the top of the head:  (a) A narrator introduces her and 
each of the characters in the household, and then they lay into her 
with their insane demands.  Suddenly, the king's messenger appears 
with the ball invitation, and everything moves into double speed, 
including their abuse.  The door slams, she's exhausted, sits in the 
corner and goes to sleep.  She dreams the whole ball, meeting the 
prince, the sudden departure (maybe as a puppet show within the 
puppet show), and wakes again in the ashes as they come home.  She's 
crushed, realizing it was only a dream.  But suddenly the king's 
messenger appears with the slipper, and she's proclaimed princess: 
her dream transcends reality.  Narrator then tells us that the 
stepsisters tried to dream themselves a prince, but got stuck with 
smelly old monsters.
	Now, I won't argue for that as a stroke of genius, and it 
modifies the original but I think stays with the essence.  It also 
makes it more unified than if we were to include scenes with the 
lonesome prince, his dad, the sisters at the ball, etc.  That might 
be good or bad, depending.
	Or: (b) It starts with the Sisters' preparation for the ball, 
with Cinderella as abused servant.  In response to her longing to go 
to the ball, they jokingly offer up the fantasy that her fairy 
godmother will appear, she'll go elegantly, the prince will fall in 
love with her, then at the stroke of midnight she'll turn back into a 
charwoman.  The fairy-tale parody cuts to the bone, and they go. 
Cinderella's dead mother appears to her.  She's terrified, but even 
more appalled when told she must go to the ball.  The major point of 
conflict: to overcome her certainty of failure & humiliation.  The 
mother weaves a spell of belief so deep that her beauty is manifest 
at last.  The ball swirls in, and the house is suddenly the palace. 
She's dancing with the prince.  At the moment they kiss, the Sisters 
shriek, Cinderella loses control of her fantasy, reverts to her rags, 
and the court swirls back into chaos.  She's left with her sisters 
standing over her, screaming at her.  Suddenly, the prince appears 
with the slipper she's lost: he hasn't noticed the change and still 
sees her innate beauty.  He holds out the slipper  One sister grabs 
it, tries to put it on, but it's red-hot; the other grabs it, but 
it's freezing.  Cinderella dons it, they walk away arm in arm as the 
sisters patch their wounds and debate how much they'll have to pay 
for a cleaning lady.

+ Egad, sorry, I got carried away there - I've never been remotely 
interested in that story, and suddenly I started to get involved. 
Obvious point is, many ways to order the incidents and give weight to 
one or the other.  And of course it's affected by the style of 
puppet, your expected audience, and how many hands you've got.  With 
the above scenarios, they could be visually elaborate or bare-bones; 
they could have profuse dialogue or minimal.
	I try to work out a one-page scenario of the action, i.e. 
what the audience is going to see, before any coherent writing 
proceeds, though I'll probably have a ton of little dialogue snatches 
by then, most of which will fall by the wayside.

+ Dialogue:  Yes, I agree that puppetry's visual and that most shows 
could stand a *lot* of pruning.  But it's a tool like any other: it 
works if it's good.  The most common problem is that people write 
dialogue that's for the page, not for the mouth, and the one thing 
that'll make the most difference is if you write out loud.
	Take the general outline of a scene and a little dictation 
device, and improvise a short dialogue.  Go back, take a different 
line to start with, and do it again.  Then sit down and transcribe 
what works.  That's the starting point.  Then do some writing to make 
it more interesting, or more distinctly in the characters' voices, or 
get in necessary content, but keep going back to speaking it aloud. 
Try different phrasings to see if you can get it more concise (even 
if your character is a windbag).  Play with it, say it in ways that 
are deliberately bad & bloated, then try to reduce the whole scene to 
ten words, and then allow what you really need to come back.  There's 
a particular style in a lot of fairytale adaptation that's a kind of 
self-conscious stiltedness that's as bad as self-conscious slanginess.
	And of course, as has been said, each character has his/her 
own "voice."  Try actually to embody & evolve the facial structure 
and the gestural pattern of the character as you create his dialogue 
- it'll strengthen the sense that his dialogue style is dictated by 
his musculature, his breath, his rhythm of thinking.  (And as you're 
working, start listening to every real-life dialogue you hear or 
overhear to attune to the extraordinary ways human beings put 
sentences together - remember Sarah Palin?  She was painful because 
she's so typical.).
	And then:  At some point the puppets join in this creative 
process.  They need to have their own say in creating the dialogue. 
A hand puppet may require a different speech rhythm than a different 
style.  Puppet dialogue, above all, has to be "gestural" - fitting 
the primary stress impulses to what the puppet can do physically, and 
where he needs to breathe.  Like a live actor, the puppet can push 
out and express energy, or he can draw the audience's energy into his 
world.  If he's all push-out, it becomes hyperactive and desperate. 
Where's the in-draw?
	With all this talk about trying different stuff and 
improvising, I don't mean to suggest improvisation as a technique in 
performance.  Some people do that brilliantly, most don't.  I think 
for any given line of dialogue, there *is* a best phrasing and a 
less-best phrasing.  But that's often achieved through the 
developmental process of improvisation.

	Oh God, it's late, I'm starting to wheeze from the bronchitis 
that hit me the second performance of RASH ACTS this past weekend. 
I'll send this off without reading back thru whatever I've written. 
Elizabeth & I are going to be presenting a workshop on dialogue at 
the Atlanta festival, so it's much on my mind.  But this post itself 
is a good example of the fact that brevity takes a lot longer than 
prolixity.

Peace & joy-
Conrad

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