The collaborative script writing process

As Director of a youth theatre company that performs for adult audiences, I have seen kids produce riveting original material dealing with social issues. I began with the conviction that their perspectives are valuable in a community dialogue. For years I had been impressed by my young actors' sensibilities. I found them to be profoundly affected by many of the concerns and hopes held by adults. But it was a struggle for me to help them translate their perceptions into a script. Writing and improvisation about socially relevant issues generally led to talky scenes that didn't hold interest dramatically. They would tend to create scenes according to what they thought I wanted to hear or what they felt the audience should be taught. And they slipped too easily into playing out scenes and characters drawn from television and the movies.

Searching for a way to help them showcase their strengths, I kept returning to their keen insights about what went on between them and their friends, parents and siblings. This was the key. To produce theatre that would promote understanding of young people's perspectives, their real strength lay in dramatically presenting what they believe happens among human beings in a social environment.

Because this approach drew on their skills as social observers, I reconsidered their role in the process. I asked them to think of themselves not as actors creating individual characters, but as artists looking for ways to communicate their perceptions.

I asked them to tell stories about actual events in their experience related to our chosen topic. Rather than dramatize the stories as actors, they unpacked them: they together identified the most vivid, compelling elements in each story, pointing out the single phrases, gestures, sounds and images that, for them, reflected the essence of the event. It was an exciting exercise that drew upon their natural abilities as social observers. The elements they pulled out were inherently theatrical: these were the turning points, the subtle and glaring moments that defined the very nature of the relationships in the stories. They told more stories, and unpacked those. By stripping away the extraneous details of half a dozen different stories on the same basic topic, they found it surprisingly easy to identify patterns of behavior in the kind of things people had done or said. They began to appreciate the potential for incorporating these elements into one scene or song or dance that would capture the sense of what people do in situations like these.

But it wasn't enough to identify evocative elements or patterns of behavior. They also had to be able to present what they were learning in a dramatic form on stage. So, as artists, they began to experiment with found (commonplace) objects, props, and musical instruments, using them as tools to stage visual and aural metaphors that most elegantly and powerfully characterized their observations. How different were the results of this work compared to their earlier work! Instead of just inventing dialogue, the actors were fiercely searching for the most effective and theatrically exciting ways to show how they saw the world. As the exercises progressed, they became adept at bringing together all the different elements - text, movement, props and music - to collaboratively orchestrate a piece of theatre that expressed what they were discovering. They began to exercise substantial control over devising a show that communicated their collective vision.

This approach to playbuilding is founded upon the premise that a group of individuals can create vital and valuable theatre when they put aside opinions about what should happen and work to communicate on stage their perceptions about what does happen. The process is designed so that those with less experience or verbal ability are not left out. It is designed to enable a cast to directly translate the results of their research into an evocative, compelling script.