When a video game is near completion, it goes through a period of playtesting, during which several 30 year old balding men who live with their respective mothers play the game and see if everything works. On the most basic level, they report any bugs they find, but with good companies they also give feedback regarding the game mechanics. The developer then fixes the section(s) of the game that the playtesters didn’t like, and the game ships.

 

What does that have to do with theatre? Well, it occurs to me that Freed-Hardeman also had a bit of playtesting occur last semester. FHU student Melanie McCullough, whom we’re so proud of, wrote a play: Hurricane Ann. The play was read early last semester to an audience that gave her feedback.  Melanie then re-wrote the play, and had a staged reading of it performed again, this time in front of Jan Buttram, the playwright I talked about last blog. I can only assume that Melanie has since re-written the play again, and that Hurricane Ann 3.0 is now complete.

 

To borrow a term from another field, Melanie was engaged in playtesting; that is, she was—in a literal sense—testing the play, and—in a videogame sense—observing the audience’s reaction so that she could tweak her work into something better. The audience’s reaction to the performance of Hurricane Ann was crucial to Melanie’s writing. If a joke fell flat, she cut it. If a line seemed out of character, she either changed the line or fleshed out the character. Every choice we make in writing should be made with purpose. Not only did Melanie make purposeful decisions, but she was able, twice, to see if her purpose was met and to change things until it was. The process was intriguing to watch, though I’m glad I wasn’t the one doing all the rewriting! Good job, Melanie!

Last week, I had the interesting job of driving to the Memphis Airport to pick up Jan Buttram, a New York City playwright. She’s the creative director of the Abingdon Theatre, which helps American playwrights to develop their plays. She was visiting Freed to see FHU student Melanie McCullough’s play Hurricane Ann. And while she was here, she planned to teach a couple of writing workshops.

 

I must have looked nervous as I sat in the luggage claim area holding my little paper sign that read “Jan Buttram,” because a flight attendant walked up to me and insisted that she was Jan Buttram. I didn’t bite. In fact, my reply -- “Miss Buttram doesn’t work for the airline” – came out a bit too bitter, I think. At any rate, eventually a spry woman about the age of my mom came down the escalator and walked up to introduce herself.

 

We stopped and had lunch on the way back. She told me all about a thesis she had written on Tallulah Bankhead, in which she analyzed whether she was really a good actor or just a good personality. It was an interesting distinction—roughly paralleling the distinction between art and spectacle, I suppose. She determined that Bankhead had the potential to be a good actor but settled for becoming a good personality.

 

Though I’m not a theatre major, I shared her love of what she calls “crisp writing.”  Every word should be meaningful, chosen carefully and delivered with purpose. I call it “rhetorical writing.” (I make no claims about this blog exhibiting it.) I want to save Melanie’s play for a different post, but I will say that I noticed elements of our discussion about crisp writing coming out when Jan talked about Hurricane Ann. She noted instances in which she could really tell why a character had made a certain comment, and other instances in which she was unsure of a character’s motivation. Her philosophy seemed to be, “if you can’t articulate a reason for a rhetorical choice, don’t make it.”

This Thanksgiving Break was the 4th in my time at FHU, but it was the 1st one in which I did not have to write a paper. Generally, I have at least one, maybe two papers due. This time, everything was due before Thanksgiving. I spent the first half of the week trying to figure out what to do with myself. Then? I joined the materialist parade called Black Friday, of course! This would be my first Black Friday in 7 years.

My wife and I are two of the approx. 3.14 people in the US who don’t own a DVD player. My computer plays DVDs of course, but we don’t have a stand alone player for the television. Fortunately, hhgregg was having a $10 DVD player sale. Unfortunately, they opened at 4 in the morning. We decided Thursday night that the big seller at hhgregg would not be the DVD player. After all, everyone has a DVD player already. Instead, people would be lining up for their Wii sale. Content to be there at opening and not before, we “slept in” ‘til 3 AM. Then my wife, her parents, and I departed for Nashville. We got there right at 4, and there were already several people walking out with Wiis. Looks like we had been right. They looked a little something like this:

We got about halfway through the store when we noticed that people were walking around carrying huge stacks of $10 DVD players. “Really?,” I thought. “How many tvs do these people have?”  When we found the right section, they were sold out. Poop.

But I had the last laugh. Turns out that the sale wasn’t a real sale; it was a rebate offer. And the company would only honor 1 rebate per person/receipt. Those poor people bought 1 cheap player and 6+ full price ones. I ended up spending the $10 on a better deal: The Dark Knight and The Mummy were $4 apiece. And my wife’s grandparents are getting us a DVD player for Christmas now. So, ha! Take that, nameless Black Friday line-waiters of avarice and excess!

In other news, Bop-It has returned. I loved Bop-It when I was younger, but this version is a parent’s nightmare. Not only do you bop it, twist it, and pull it, you also yell it. Yes, the game requires you to yell at it and a microphone senses whether you have or not. Do they really think a parent is going to buy this? If anything, it’s a gag gift for a disliked coworkers son or something. I confess that it is still fun though. I couldn’t help myself and ended up yelling in Wal*mart twice before my wife pulled me away.

 

Well, I suppose an introduction is needed. I’m Joel, a senior English major. I’ll be blogging about whatever I feel like talking about, with an emphasis on FHU theatre. Admittedly, I’ve never been in an FHU Theatre production, and I don’t intend to; I’d rather watch. So why am I writing about theatre? I am writing to give an interested—and I hope interesting—outsider’s perspective on theatre at Freed-Hardeman.

My introduction to FHU Theatre began in the dorm. For three years, I lived on 3rd Floor Paul Gray, which has traditionally been home to several male theatre majors. I remember being amazed at the countless hours they (“they” being the nameless theatre majors of my freshman year) spent working on the show—and not just memorizing lines or stage directions, but building the set, fixing the lights, choosing their costumes, and whatever else. I guess I thought that theatre was just about performing lines to an audience. I never noticed the design underlying every aspect of the show. And really, now that I’ve started to pay attention, I notice myself becoming more aware of and sensitive to design choices when I watch a show. It’s starting to become a bad thing, because I can’t find the “off” button. I mean, getting lost in the performance is much preferable to over-analyzing everything. But over-analyzing is in my nature, I guess.

Living around theatre majors in the dorm also led me to appreciate their unique experience at a liberal arts university. Yes, they receive the same general education the rest of us do, but they also spend every semester working on real theatrical productions. Their experience seems to me a sort marriage of the practicality of technical school and the mental refinement and the preparation for life that comes with liberal arts education. They are wholly consumed by their discipline in ways that I, as an English major, never could be. Not that I necessarily want to be—I like my weekends.

Speaking of weekends, this weekend is Homecoming. Tension is high in the theatre office as all the pieces come together for this year’s big show: Little Women: The Musical. I’ll be honest: I was a little underwhelmed when I first heard the name of the show. I read Little Women when I was younger (too young to appreciate it), and it just didn’t seem to have the “stuff” of the homecoming show. This Little Women is a new musical though, recently composed for Broadway. That little twist got me curious. Now I’m anxiously awaiting student night on Thursday.