Character & Scene Exercises; Anton Chekov: The Seagull

This morning please take the next 20 minutes to complete the following 5-minute exercises:

• Choose one of your antagonists in your play.
• Identify an honorable, noble, or positive trait about this character
• Identify how this noble, honorable, or positive trait might cause an audience to "rethink" their reaction toward this otherwise negative or difficult person
• Write for about 5 minutes how you might include this trait in your scene: might it be revealed right after the character says something hateful to your protagonist? Figure out a place for this beat in your play
• Identify the moment in a scene you are writing or have written where there is a PERIPETY: a turning point or reversal of fortune for your protagonist. Once you identify that moment, consider how the change occurs? Who or what creates the change? Include a beat that helps create the peripety
• Identify a moment in a scene in your play where a character leaves. Instead of having this character leave, give the character a TIME LOCK--a reason to obtain a goal within a time limit that keeps your character in the scene. Write that moment or beat where that character stays until he/she gains what he/she wants
• Using the technique of SUBTEXT (not directly stating how a character feels) rewrite one of your beats where you accidentally TOLD how a character feels instead of HINTED. Try to provide details and clues to suggest a feeling as opposed to directly stating the feeling. If, for example, your character is angry--how might you write your dialogue that suggests that the character is upset, as opposed to the character stating: "I'm angry!"

ALL THESE EXERCISES can be used again and again in your scenes, plays, and stories. 

After our short writing exercise, please take note of the following before we head to the library to pick up Anton Chekhov's The Seagull:

Russian Playwright and short story writer, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is the first of what are generally considered to be his four major plays (The Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard are the others). The Seagull was written in 1895 and produced in 1896. It dramatizes the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the fading leading actress Irina Arkadina, her son the experimental playwright Constantine Treplieff, the ingénue Nina, and the author Trigorin.

Similar to Chekhov's other full-length plays, The Seagull relies upon an ensemble cast of fully-developed (and quirky) characters. In contrast to the melodrama of the mainstream theatre of the 19th century, actions (example: Constantin's suicide attempts) are not always shown onstage. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt around issues rather than addressing them directly, a dramatic practice  known as subtext. In fact, it is this failure to communicate that creates much of the conflict in Chekhov’s work. The practice of subtext, although found in Shakespeare's plays, gained so much popularity in play writing, that no successful script today is without it.

The Seagull alludes to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Arkadina and Treplieff quote lines from Shakespeare's tragedy before the play-within-a-play (and even the play-within-a-play is a device used in Hamlet!) Treplieff seeks to win his mother’s favor back from Trigorin, much as Hamlet tries to win Gertrude (his mother) back from his uncle Claudius.

The opening night of the first production was a failure. “Vera Komissarzhevskaya, playing Nina, was so intimidated by the hostility of the audience that she lost her voice. Chekhov left the audience and spent the last two acts behind the scenes. When supporters wrote to him that the production later became a success, he assumed they were just trying to be kind.” When Constantin Stanislavski (a famous director and acting teacher) directed the Seagull in 1898 for the Moscow Art Theatre, the play was successful and well regarded. Stanislavski's production of The Seagull became "one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama."

IMPORTANT VOCABULARY CONCEPT:

• Subtext: what is not said in a character's line. The subtext are the subtle details or clues used by the actor to develop his/her character.

HOMEWORK: Keep writing your play project(s). Please bring your Seagull scripts back with you to next class.