Chapter 1
Suggested Assignmentsfor Theatre in Your Life
These questions may be used simply for reflection. They might also be handled as short writing assignments and/or discussion topics shared in small groups.
1. Where have you been in the audience and known that your reaction and that of those around you was actually influencing and changing the performance itself?
2. What is your own earliest memory of an encounter that could become the first scene in the play of your life?
3. As an audience member, what is your most memorable live theatre experience so far? Your most memorable media experience? How do they compare with each other?
4. What, so far, has been the best (offstage, personal theatre) performance of your life? Why do you consider it a personal triumph?
5. What has been the worst? What caused you to bomb?
6. What is your own most memorable experience of seeing someone only on film and then experiencing that person live?
7. Interview an acting student (or, if you can find one, a professional actor) and ask what he or she loves most, and least, about practicing this art form.
8. Pick a movie or personal theatre event and discuss it with friends following some of the guidelines provided in this chapter. Or discuss with friends your shared senses of time, space, values, pleasure, structure, and the senses.
9. Examine each of the major topics chosen for dramatic conflict (Life Themes). Which of these have you already experienced in your own life that might someday provide the basis for a play?
10. Survey your own key relationships in life. Which of these people are you more likely to act for or to pretend to feel other than you really do? With which persons are you most authentic and real when you are around them?
Suggested Activitiesfor Theatre in Your Life
1. Individual: Make a list of five to 10 films that have had a profound impact on you at various times in your life. Choose one or two from early childhood, grade school, middle school, high school, and the current year.
2. Group: Make an entire evening out of going to the theatre with several friends or with classmates you have just met. Agree to have dinner together before the play and dessert/coffee after. Discuss your anticipation beforehand and share your collective responses afterward.
3. Long term: Start a Personal Theatre journal. At least twice a week, note a performance you observed and one you gave. That is, write down instances where the behavior would have been entirely different if some kind of “audience” had not been involved.
4. Large lecture: See number 1. Share your lists in groups of 10, do a quick assessment of the films that had the most impact on the group. Select a spokesman to share your group results as others in the room do the same.