As we get ready to kick off the 32nd Annual New Jersey Young Playwrights Contest & Festival, we reached out to our adult, professional playwrights to give us tidbits of information, insight, stories and ideas that we could share with our young playwrights who are currently working on a play or writing a play for the first time.
We're kicking off our series with a blog post from playwright, novelist and comic writer, Lia Romeo. To learn more about Lia, visit her
website
Writerly advice from Lia...A couple of years ago, I was commissioned by HotCity Theatre
(in St. Louis, MO) to write a play that had to do with social media in some
way.
I ended up writing a play called
Connected, which consists of several
interrelated vignettes that focus on various types of social media: Facebook,
YouTube, online dating sites, and role-playing games.
The play was developed at Playwrights Theatre in the Forum
Reading Series in 2012, and ended up in HotCity’s 2013 season.
Because of the social media theme, they came up with a marketing
campaign which uses social media to expand the world of the play and
(hopefully) get the audience interested before opening. The director, Chuck Harper, and I worked
together to choose five characters from the play, and then the actors who play
those characters created Facebook profiles for them and began posting and
interacting with one another as their characters. The theatre sent out some marketing blasts
explaining the project and telling audience members to friend the characters,
and I acted as a sort of “show runner” for the project, sending out emails each
week telling the characters the major events that would be “happening” in their
lives that week.
The Facebook project existed independently of the world of
the play, and wasn’t necessary in order to understand anything in it … some of
the characters that were created on Facebook were fairly minor in the world of
the play (one was actually an off-stage character who got mentioned but never
appeared), while others were more significant.
One reporter who wrote a story about the project pointed out that it was
a great acting exercise for the actors … they had to come up with a backstory,
likes and dislikes, sometimes even last names for their characters, and it
seemed like they had a lot of fun with it.
For me, it was totally surreal the first morning I signed on
to Facebook and, in between the usual baby pictures and reports of what my
friends had eaten for breakfast, I saw a status update from a character I’d
invented. It really literalized the
whole idea of having your characters “talk to you” – and it was fun seeing the ways that the actors “fleshed
out” (in a virtual sense) the characters I created. It reminded me of what I
love most about theater, which is the collaborative aspect – the fact that
we’re all working together to bring something to life.
It also made me wonder whether this is a style of marketing
that’s going to become more popular.
It’s already standard for theaters to have a social media presence, and
for authors and playwrights to have blogs, websites, and so on. It seems like it could be a natural extension
for fictional characters to begin appearing on social media – and maybe it’s
already happening more than I realize (just did a search for Katniss Everdeen
on Facebook and she’s totally on there, three times). As a writer, I’m naturally intrigued by the
blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, and I think those lines
already get blurred by the ways that all of us present ourselves on the
internet. So it’s interesting to think
about how far that blurring of lines might ultimately go.
