Campfires and Characters Skip to main content
4th Wall Dramaturgy

Campfires and Characters

By Alyssa Call,
October 09, 2024 06:50 PM

Dramaturgy Workshop Day 5

One of the activities the cast was hoping to do was to sit around a campfire and roast marshmallows together, so we worked a campfire night into dramaturgy week. We set up a speaker with river sounds to create the environment of sitting next to a fire on the bank of a river, and—though we had S’mores rather than bacon, apples and biscuits—it felt as though we were in a scene of the play and sitting around the fire after a long day on the river (it had been a long day in our rehearsal boats).

After getting settled with our marshmallows we ran through one of the campfire scenes from the script. Then, to explore characters further, we built onto the scene by having the cast improvise in their characters. It was great exploration, and we learned so much about the characters and their relationships to one another.

Tags
Articles Men on Boats

Related Articles

data-content-type="article"
2019-2020 Season

The Evolution of Wendy Darling

By Angela Moser
March 10, 2020 12:00 AM
Peter Pan might have refused to grow up, but Wendy Darling has certainly grown and changed since she made her appearance in J.M. Barrie’s novel. Set in the Victorian era, Wendy Darling was created to perfectly fit the values of that society. The “cult of the little child” became a true literary trend of the time, which mirrored the Victorian attitude toward life. Many writers of the time, including Barrie, were fascinated with the childish status and even envied the innocence and purity that belongs to the little ones. Books written through the eyes of children for an adult audience became a way to escape everyday life.
2 Min Read
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= promoTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection= overrideCardHideByline= overrideCardHideDescription= overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= promoTextAlignment=
data-content-type="article"
2019-2020 Season

The Doomsday Clock

By Cameron Cox
March 02, 2020 11:22 AM
As director of BYU’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, George Nelson wanted to provide a sense of foreboding, encouraging the audience to recognize the “flaxen cord” that Audrey II is in Seymore’s life without him knowing. The ominous ticking clock towering above the set creates this atmosphere and comes from science fiction tropes almost as old as the genre itself. The idea of the clock ticking away to destruction originated in 1947 by the Chicago Atomic Scientists (a group of researchers who worked on the creation of the first nuclear bomb used in World War II). “The Doomsday Clock” represented the time until the actions of mankind would end the world. The clock views a hypothetical man-made global catastrophe as midnight, and the minutes till midnight are measured by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which still exists to this day.
2 Min Read
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= promoTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection= overrideCardHideByline= overrideCardHideDescription= overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= promoTextAlignment=
data-content-type="article"
Test

The Doomsday Clock

March 02, 2020 12:00 AM
by Cameron Cox, Dramaturg As director of BYU’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, George Nelson wanted to provide a sense of foreboding, encouraging the audience to recognize the “flaxen cord” that Audrey II is in Seymore’s life without him knowing. The ominous ticking clock towering above the set creates this atmosphere and comes from science fiction tropes almost as old as the genre itself. The idea of the clock ticking away to destruction originated in 1947 by the Chicago Atomic Scientists (a group of researchers who worked on the creation of the first nuclear bomb used in World War II). “The Doomsday Clock” represented the time until the actions of mankind would end the world. The clock views a hypothetical man-made global catastrophe as midnight, and the minutes till midnight are measured by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which still exists to this day. When the clock was first invented, 13 years before the original Little Shop of Horrors film was written and directed by Roger Corman, changes in time directly correlated to the nuclear developments and concerns that the Bulletin had at the time. These concerns are evident in the development of western science fiction and traces of them can be found in both the original Little Shop of Horrors as well as the musical adaptation Menken and Ashman wrote 20 years later. But Little Shop’s relationship to the clock has become more poignant in the past decade in ways that Corman, Menken, Ashman, or even Frank Oz (who adapted the musical to a second filmed version in 1986) could have anticipated. In 2015 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists expanded the criteria of what contributed to the clock moving closer to midnight to include concerns regarding climate change. In the past five years, the clock has moved from three minutes to midnight steadily closer, with the Bulletin announcing earlier this year that the clock was the closest it’s ever been to midnight, 100 seconds. Audrey II represents a trend in fiction of the natural world fighting back against mankind's mistreatment of it. From Audrey II in Little Shop, to the Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter series, to the Batman villain Poison Ivy, to Annihilation written and directed by Alex Garner in 2018, the concept of plants/nature beginning to fight back against mankind's mistreatment of them has been a trend that Little Shop of Horrors did not intend to start but has become one of the most classic examples of.
2 Min Read
overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= promoTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection= overrideCardHideByline= overrideCardHideDescription= overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= promoTextAlignment=
Previous Next