Play Project Draft Due! Preparing Your Script; Yasmin Raza's The God of Carnage

Period 1: Please work on preparing your script.

Period 2:

God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza won a Tony Award for Best Play in 2009.

As stated before, characters are the driving force of a play. Without well designed and depicted characters, a play will certainly fall short. There are some types of characters we want to be intimately familiar with (so that they are 'cast' in our plays):

• Dynamic characters: characters that change through the events of the play or story.
• Round characters: characters that are fully developed. They often have contradictory traits. A loving uncle, but a pedophile (How I Learned to Drive), or a wise chauffeur who is illiterate (Driving Miss Daisy), or a cranky old Jewish lady who has a heart of gold (Driving Miss Daisy), a bitter couple who actually love one another, despite their bickering (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf), etc. These characters are interesting because they possess contradictory or conflictual traits or qualities.
• Confidante: someone in whom a character can confide or speak his/her mind freely.
• Foil: a character who enhances a quality or trait of a major character or protagonist through contrast.
• Sympathetic character: a character with whom an audience can identify.
• Unsympathetic character: a character with whom an audience cannot identify. Usually this character has motives that are questionable, unappealing, or difficult to understand.
• Ally: a character who helps the protagonist accomplish, achieve, or learn something.
• Messenger/Herald: Usually a minor character, although not always--this character delivers an important message or brings some sort of external insight to the protagonist.
• Minor characters: stock characters, spear-carriers, static, flat, cardboard cut-out, stereotype, supporting, allegorical, etc.

How do I develop a character?

• Know what role the character plays in your play/story.
• Use characterization: what a character says, what a character says about another character, actions, thoughts, or description. Description is best delivered through dialogue in plays. In fiction, it is delivered by description and imagery.
• Provide backstory through flashbacks (fiction), or monologues (plays)

As you read God of Carnage (due Friday, Oct. 18) please do the following:

1. Complete a play analysis for the play. Due Friday, Oct. 18.
2. As you read, examine and consider or identify how the characters in the play shift their character type roles throughout the play's narrative. 

We will discuss the play next Friday.

HOMEWORK: Read God of Carnage. Complete a play analysis of the play. Examine character types in the play. Bring your scripts back with you to our next class (Friday, Oct. 18).

Our Reader's Theater production opens next Thursday and Friday (Oct. 17 & 18) at 7:00 in the Ensemble Theater. Come see Pipeline (see clip for details about the play) and get extra credit! Cost is $5 and benefits the Creative Writing Department (for coffeehouse supplies, guest speakers, Scholastic contests, playwrights' festival, etc.)