NEW PLAY COMING SOON!
The Peculiar Playground at Slackridge Park is a collection of short stories about a playground that’s haunted – or cursed – or maybe just a gateway to another dimension. Every piece of playground equipment has its own story.
- A teeter-totter launches a child into a tree – and turns her into a bird.
- The swing sends an influencer into the sky to become a star.
- A Talk Tube connects a bookish kid to a voice from the past.
- The big slide changes reality.
And so on.
The style is somewhere between RL Stine’s Goosebumps and Louis Sachar’s Wayside School.
This is intended to be highly flexible. Directors can adjust to the cast, their taste, or even the set.
It’s fun to produce. The dramaturgical research is hey, let’s go to the park and remember what it was like when we were just a little younger.
THE PROCESS [a short summary]
In the old times, my boyfriend Emmett used to tell stories to his brother about a cursed playground. He lent me the idea, and I took it to my actors.
With the help of a parent, I took the young actors to the school playground, then on a field trip to public park that had different areas for different ages. I sent them to play first, then gave them different ages and relationships to play around with.
We gathered material, jotted ideas on poster boards, then used that to create stories and characters. I started bringing in pages, showing them different stories early in the process, eventually building out the ideas with them.
For the set, we put signs with the different pieces of equipment around the theatre, then found benches and tables and other items to play these parts. This was in part how we created the play, and how we would eventually design the set.
I held auditions. The parts the kids didn’t audition for, I cut for this production.
In the end, every actor had a ‘lead’ and every actor also had a break.
My tech crew was small this time around, so we had to be crafty. We’d build the set mostly from recycled materials like old fencing and branches, buying only what we had to with the time we had. It’s the perfect play for Facebook Marketplace.
With the money we saved, we splurged on sand for the sandbox and small amounts of artificial turf.
I’m in the process of revising the play and adding a couple stories. It will be available for licensing in August.
ACME’S PRODUCTION of ANNE BONNY AND MARY READ
Acme Theatre, a company near and dear to me, is working on a HS-aged production of Anne Bonny and Mary Read […]. If you are in Northern California, come on out to see it.
Acme is bringing on a professional fight choreographer for this, so the sword fights should be electric.
Thanks to Ground Floor Theatre, there’s also a small-cast professional version of this play. Acme is doing the PG version.
Briandaniel Oglesby 