Will Owen

"So Do We All (First Sequence)"...Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and Despina re-imagined for the pixelscreen performance space today... "So Do We All" a multi-episode, concatenation of scenelet sequences for the "zoom space." Each scenelet's running time should be about five minutes -- better, less than five minutes. This playwork, though similar to a stage play, is primarily intended for the digital performance space of our screen devices. It's apt for wide-rangingly devised setting, direction, casting, performance (and rehearsal and recording). A key goal is to put traditional stage-acting skills, most particularly verse-speaking skills, to use in a contemporary work adaptable to the "pixelspace" of our social media apps and conferencing/collaboration software.
We're all in the middle of an explosion of art-making with, and for, our phones; creative teams are encouraged -- using the dialogue to maintain continuity -- to set and "look" the different scenelets variously and inventively, while still pursuing, primarily through play-personage consistency, their particular interpretation of the play.

"ElElAr" -- acromimic for "Lincoln Lyceum Remix" -- is a script for spoken-word performance by a small team of players. It remixes, considerably changing, the script of the speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln on January 27, 1838 at the Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. The subject of the speech was "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions". Performers of this variation -- or study -- in verbatim theater, may find useful a remark about its provenance: it was devised for acting students interested in bringing practices from their Performing Arts studies into their Politics and Government, Political Science, American History, etc. studies.

"Droner" is a microplay that is also an experiment in -- let's call it -- theatrical robotics. That is, this play's two figures can be visually played by drones (or some other sort of robot or puppet or mechanical prop or kite-like thing) while being vocally played by two players, who can take advantage of the range of effects in current sound processing software to modulate their voices to match the -- no pre-set/clearly identifiable gender, age, etc. -- of the drone character-contraptions. The drone pilots/prop operators, like the voicing players can be onstage...or not. The visual, inanimate drones/prop actuators -- darting, feinting, attacking, retreating, etc. -- allusively mime the voiced dialogue. This play's two agonists -- indicated in the script as AY and AX -- are roles made to be -- in all characteristics and particulars (except the words they say) -- devised collaboratively by the robotics-theater artist-engineers who stage and play them. In college and university performing arts programs in particular, there might be an interest in theater-making collaboration with robotics engineering colleagues.

"Unlanded" is a danceplay -- the script for a stagework that is as much contemporary art performance as it is dance theater as it is spoken theater. The Synopsis paragraph that precedes the script provides more information about the devised and cross art-form dimensions of this play. This script is the enabling, conceptual infrastructure for a fluid, fable-like spectacle that fills a large stage with movement and color, pageantry and mystery, and drumming and poetry. This play could be of particular interest to college and university performing arts programs looking for new works that require large casts and call for challenging, fusional collaboration among directors and choreographers, actors and dancers, and sound, set, costume and movement designers. This script is the starting point for a kaleidoscopic stagework of devised theater.

"Flight Into Safety" is a play about a man and woman, and their newborn, fleeing murderous political violence.

"Acting Class" is a short play about a director, and an actor and an actress, rehearsing a play about Adam and Eve. This script can be put on nearly anywhere -- including a classroom -- as it calls for nearly nothing in the way of sets, costumes, props etc. This is a script that could be of interest to acting students, particularly students of classical acting, as playing the play does call for continuously moving in and out of two contrasting language registers: the heightenedly stylized vernacular speaking of the standard naturalism and the heightenedly stylized lyrical speaking of poetic theater -- and both have to sound completely, seamlessly natural. Indeed, the play's characters could well be acting students.

"Pearly Gates" is a comedic sketch for a lone performer -- a stand-up...and lay down and die...comedy routine. The challenge then, for the actor or actress, is -- in the context of laugh-line funny-making -- to convincingly enact the dying of an unexpected, unwanted, quiet death from natural causes.

"X-1" is a long performance lyric for an actor. This script can be used across the spectrum of scripted, solo performance modes: reading to listeners, recital storytelling, empty stage monologue theater, and one man play supported by mummer-actors and sound- and video- commentary -- that the mummer-actors can "dance to", largely by mimicking/echoing the move-and-gesture of those who appear in the, possibly documentary, video companion-works. The plot -- such as it is -- of this performance piece is a man wakes up, gets up, and goes to work in the morning. He lives in an apartment with his wife and children in a large metropolitan area, and takes a subway train to work.

"Teekay 'n' Jeepy" is a ten-minute play that, through a dozen "call-and-response" micro-scenelets, follows a street musician and her/his sidekick from getting going in the morning to settling down for the night. The structure of the scenelets is: Teekay "calls", simply commenting on circumstances etc., and Jeepy "responds", singing while playing her/his guitar (and not necessarily doing either particularly well). Jeepy improvises the melodic accompaniment of the song snatches she/he sings, evoking a range of familiar song styles, to fit with the lyrics she/he intones. In its way, this playlet is a micro-musical. Also, this script is open-endedly adaptable, usable for evoking the widest possible range of street musician personages -- from the highly-skilled busker to the delusional derelict.

"Peleus" is a short, monologue poemplay that -- drawn from a passage in Ovid's "Metaphorphoses" -- re-imagines Peleus' side of his conversation with Zeus (his grandfather), as Zeus pressures Peleus get after Thetis and make her pregnant. Zeus had been intent on adding Thetis to his long list of consorts, willing and coerced (including Peleus' mother). But Thetis' father, Proteus, the ever-changing god of the sea, foretells that Thetis will have a son who will surpass his father in fame and deeds -- and this prophesy so spooks Zeus that he leans on his grandson, Peleus, to take his place in Thetis' arms. And Peleus is conflicted about what to do. "Peleus" was one of five short plays inspired by Ovid that ran from July 10 - 15, 2018 at London's Waterloo East Theatre (Brad Street SE1) in Off The Cliff Theatre's "Metamorphoses 2," directed by Kasia Rozycki.

...long lost identical twin brothers -- one poor, one rich -- and the IRS mistakes the poor one for the rich one...bringing them, at long last after much trial and tribulation, back together again! Identical twin sisters -- one married to one brother...and the other...like so confused... Mistaken Identity...Love...Marriage...Tax Policy...Wealth Inequality...and Comedy...

"...and Another Frankenstein" is...yes, another!...representing of that great, Romantic era, Gothic melodrama that has held spellbound both playwrights and audiences since its earliest stage version five years after the publication of the novel's first edition. Indeed, there are over a dozen versions right here on NPX -- and you can be sure there'll be more. Why? What is it about this novel's four intertwined -- highly melodramatic -- stories that so popularly and persistently fascinates audiences? Well, from a theater-maker's point of view...it's the melodrama: of the Demon's desperate desire for love and his/her rage at its denial, of Victor's crippling remorse for having created such a solitarily monstrous creature, of Justine's calvary wrongly convicted of William's murder, and of (the frame story) Walton's ill-fated quest for fame as an explorer. In this re-enacting, these four plot streams concurrently play out, thanks to the devices of a play-within-the-play and that of making the Demon a scenographic effect and vocal presence rather than a personage enacted onstage the more usual way. In this play then, there is no pale green, most often male, and often cartoonly hideous, horror genre figure; even so, the character of the Demon -- his/her voice intact and beautiful -- is very present throughout the play, as his/her story is being enacted in the play-within-the-play. Also, this play represents this globally well-known story in a theater-poetry made of standard, global English -- to make for compelling, and popular, contemporary theater accessible to a wide range of today's daily users of today's global language.

...for those who've wondered how Schaunard really killed that parrot... "A Scene from Bohemian Life" is a playlet that, in addition to having some fun with a side story drawn from that myriadly re-made melodrama, the love-and-death story of Rodolfo and Mimi, is also a script made to work every bit as naturally played both by actors who are native speakers of (any brand) of English, and actors for whom English is a second language. This script then, could be of special interest to those actors, particularly "international" acting students, looking for something to play in global English, in which their "foreign accents" are a neutral matter.