Switch!
by Maureen Brady Johnson

Over summer break, I ran into a few of the students that had moved on to study theatre in college. One such alum dropped by to fill me in on what he had done during the semester. He mentioned an extremely creative approach to a production in which he had been involved. The audience moved around a building to see the scenes in a play. New room, new scene. The entire building was the venue for the show. It sounded very exciting. I wanted to start out the new school year with something exciting. Maybe I could adapt this idea! I decided to call it Switch: a moving theatre experience.

The (length of the) play’s the thing

I decided have each class do a 30 minute production three times in 3 different venues with the audience switching every 30 minutes. It would give my theatre students a sense of what it’s like to do a play more than once an evening, and the parents would get to see not only their own student’s performance, but the performances of three different theatre classes. It would give them an idea of how a student grows in theatre, too. The evening would run about an hour and a half. The next thing I had to do was figure out the logistics.

The Venues

I contacted the two music teachers in the classrooms on either side of our Black Box Theatre. I decided that it would be easier for the audience to move from one room to the next if they were all side by side. They had enough chairs in each room, the ones they used for their music students.

Choosing the plays

Running time was the most important consideration. Each play had to run 30 minutes MAX. I chose excerpts from “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” for my Theatre One class. This is a great show which allows for flexibility in cast size and choice of vignettes. For Theatre Two I chose a short one act play called ‘Kaleidoscope” a futuristic Ray Bradbury play in which black costumes and hand-held flashlights can be used for a fantastic special effect.

I wanted to give my Advanced Theatre class something more complex to present. During the summer months, I had attended a playwrights retreat hosted by the International Center for Women’s Playwrights. I met a wonderful playwright, Robin Rice Lichtig, (dramamama@nyu.edu). She and I talked about all of the ten minute plays we had written. I asked her if I could read some of her ten-minute plays. They were funny, dear and thought-provoking. When I knew that my Advanced Theatre students would be needing ten minute plays, I chose three of Robin’s for them to produce. As it turned out, each play was a premiere—a world, state and regional premiere, something that rarely happens in high school. Robin was also extremely gracious in answering a wide variety of questions via e-mails from the groups working on her plays.

Casting the Plays

I directed the two shows for Theatre One and Two. For the Advanced Theatre class things were a bit different. Each play had two characters, nd simple sets and costume requirements. “Seducing Ramona” “Purity and the Prince” and “Life 101” were read aloud in class, and the students decided which ones they wanted to work on. I asked three students to direct and made students in each group assistant director and stage manager. There were three groups of 5 students. The director’s had two class periods in which to hold tryouts and cast their plays. I acted as a consultant, asking them questions about their casting choices and giving my opinion when asked. We also discussed who would be their assistant directors and stage managers. There was a lot of give and take, and everyone walked away with a cast and crew and a good feeling about the shows.

Rehearsal

Rehearsal for all the classes took about a month. Our class periods run 40 minutes and they meet five times during a six day cycle.

Timing

When we started running the shows, it became very apparent that two of the shows were running short at 25 minutes and the 3 ten minute plays were running almost 40 minutes! We discovered the set changes, even though minor and simple, were taking up too much time. So we called a meeting of the directors and told them they had to practice the set changes until they ran 1 minute. By the end of one class period they had organized who was doing what and they had lopped 8 minutes off of their running time.

The Performances

As the audience arrived on the night of the show, we funneled them into each venue so that each space had a full house. At the start of the evening one student from each class explained to the audience how the evening would run.

“Welcome to SWITCH, a moving theatre experience. Tonight you will see performances by Theatre One, Two and Advanced Theatre. When this show is over, please wait in your seats until you are given a signal to move to the next venue.”

And so it began. The two shows that ran 25 minutes ran short and the Advanced Theatre shows had a few glitches in changing the set, so the audience was sitting for 5 minutes or so. But they were good sports about it and ended up talking among themselves until they got the cue to move to the next venue. Students acted as guides for the audience members, making sure that each venue was full. The set changes went smoother between the ten-minute plays, and the lag time between switching decreased each time. At the end of the evening the audience had seen three theatre classes perform and not a soul had dozed off. The students learned a lot about performing three times in a night and trying to keep each performance fresh. They also remarked on how differently each audience reacted.

Reflection

As I look back on the experience, I realize that two ten minute plays might have worked better than three. There would be more time to give the students some breathing room in case anything went wrong. As an exciting way to begin a new year in theatre, SWITCH can’t be beat! It gives the parents an idea of the kind of growth theatre students can look forward to and they get an immediate idea as to how their child is doing in class. The students loved jumping right into a production like this.

All in all, I felt that SWITCH began the school year with something completely different. I knew that we could build on this great wave of theatrical energy, electrified, so to speak, when we pulled a SWITCH.

—July 2006

Maureen Brady Johnson is the author of the recently published collection of exercises SHOES ON THE HIGHWAY, USING VISUAL AND AUDIO CLUES TO INSPIRE STUDENT PLAYWRIGHTS (Heinemann, 2005). She can be reached at MaureenBJohnson@aol.com.