Some years ago I established a forum just for students of Units 3 & 4 Drama and Theatre Studies. Each year, a small but dedicated number of students post messages on the forum about their developing performance exams.

Unit 4 Drama students find the forum particularly useful, because it is the only place they can discuss with students from other schools choices people are making with the performance examination characters. A great way to help others out and share ideas.

Unit 4 Theatre Studies students also use the forum to discuss decisions being made with their monologue performance exams.

Each year, I wipe the forum board clean. Currently there are “threads” (topics) set up on the message board for each of the performance exam characters in both Drama and Theatre Studies. While a number of students have registered for the forum in recent months, no one as yet has posted anything!

If you think any of your current Unit 4 students may be interested, please get them to follow the link below for free board registration and to post messages on the board.

If I don’t see any activity on the board in the next few weeks, sadly, I’ll just delete the board.

Please note, this forum is just for students. It is moderated by myself to ensure everything is nice and happy in forum-land…

VCE Drama and Theatre Studies Student Forum

Simon Phillips

Yesterday, the second resignation of a prominent theatre director in Melbourne’s performing arts community was announced.

While Malthouse Theatre’s artistic director Michael Kantor will hand over the reigns to Marion Potts next year, his Melbourne Theatre Company counterpart, Simon Phillips, yesterday revealed he will leave the company in late 2011.

Phillips will be remembered among other things for his hugely successful productions of Richard III this year and Tracey Letts’ masterpiece August: Osage County in 2009. The MTC will now embark on an international search for a replacement.

Meanwhile, Phillips will move on to freelance directing, including commitments with the stage musical Priscilla Queen of the Desert, currently showing at London’s Palace Theatre and due to move to Toronto this October, then Broadway in the Spring of 2011.

In the first of several posts on The Drama Teacher for places to find free drama/theatre eBooks on the Net, this post features the website ManyBooks. In the English language alone, there are currently 627 free drama/theatre eBooks at ManyBooks! But if English isn’t your style, then try one of the other 35 language translations! Most of them are out-of-copyright plays ranging from ancient Greek and Shakespearean works to Medieval and Restoration plays. But there are also dozens of eBooks on the theatre itself.

What makes ManyBooks fantastic is that the website’s collection is categorised. When one considers drama plays are a fairly niche area on the web, the drama section at ManyBooks is quite prolific. The next best thing about this website is the range of eBook types available. You can download drama plays and theatre books in the any of the following 26 file types:

• Books.app (zip)
• ePub (.epub)
• eReader (.pdb)
• FictionBook 2 (.fb20
• HTML – custom (.zip)
• iPod Notes (.zip0
• iSilo (.pdb)
• Kindle (.azw)
• Mobipocket (.mobi0
• Mobipocket (.prc)
• MS lit (slow) (.lit)
• Newton (.pkg)
• PalmDOC (.pdb)
• PDF (.pdf)
• PDf – custom (.pdf)
• PDF – Large Print (.pdf)
• Plain text (.txt)
• Plucker (.pdb)
• Rocketbook (.rb)
• RTF (.rtf)
• Sony Reader.lrf (.lrf)
• TCR (.tcr)
• zTXT (.pdb)
• JAR file
• Project Gutenberg
• Audiobook

Keeping everything in perspective, all the eBooks at ManyBooks are legally out of US copyright, so plays of recent decades will not be there to download. But the good news is that every single book or play that is at ManyBooks, is absolutely free and instantly downloadable to your PC or Mac for transfer to your eReader.

Here’s the link: ManyBooks Drama Category. Don’t forget to choose your language once you get there. Enjoy!

Let me know by commenting below if you found this post useful and would like more posts on the Drama Teacher in the future about free drama/theatre eBooks on the Net.

If we work on the basis that realism and naturalism were two distinct theatre movements and not to be used as interchangeable terms, then maybe hyper-realism is referring to what others call naturalism in the theatre?  Or is it something different, again?

Any readers willing to shed some light on this, I’d love to hear your comments below.

Update: Here’s an article in The New York Times about a new adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler set in a Manhattan town house. Interesting….

I listened to how iPods and iPhones are being used in schools for projects, how Macbooks and various Apple applications are integrated into teaching programs for a wide variety of learning tasks in everything from Maths to Art, how iTunes U has added academic depth to video and audio resources for teachers and students and there was lots of talk about the growing number of schools in Australia going 1:1 (1 laptop per student).

But after I left the seminar it hit me.

With every Apple education officer in the room proudly displaying their new iPads, no one ever mentioned how new these devices are being used in classroom settings, if at all?

Has anyone got any stories they’d like to share about how they have used the iPad in the classroom with students? Better still, has anyone used an iPad in a drama/theatre classroom with students?

A. You get the Sydney Theatre Company’s current production of Eugene O’Neill’s classic play Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

The STC’s much publicised run of what many consider the best American play of the 20th century is an eclectic mess of differing styles. The end product lacks any sense of unified approach to the play between the key elements of acting, direction and design.

The internationalisation of the Sydney Theatre Company continues with Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as this is a co-production between the STC and the Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland’s oldest professional theatre company. The four principal characters consist of two American and two Australian actors, the most notable being William Hurt and Robyn Nevin. The show will play in Portland soon after its Sydney run.

As was the case in the recent Australian tour of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, starring Sir Ian McKellan, there is no guarantee that the stars will shine the brightest of all. In that production, Roger Rees out-performed McKellan and in this show, Australia’s Robyn Nevin outshines William Hurt.

This production by the STC is decorated, indeed. Eugene O’Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936 and was a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, including one for Long Day’s Journey Into Night. William Hurt has been nominated three times for an Academy Award for Best Actor, winning in 1985 for Kiss of the Spider Woman, while Robyn Nevin is the doyenne of Australian theatre and one of our most honoured and skilled stage actors.

Along with all this comes much hype and along with the hype comes responsibility. When you mount a production of this calibre, you can’t afford to produce anything but the very best. But what I witnessed several performances into its four-week season left many unanswered questions.

Why did Michael Scott-Mitchell’s set consist of two large angled beams and a reddish frame downstage? The distortion of line and shape, coupled with an abstract, minimalistic, almost bare stage with only a few set pieces, screamed expressionism. And here lay the problem. O’Neill’s days dabbling in expressionism were over by the time he wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night and the Sydney Theatre Company’s expressionistic set design jarred awkwardly with the playwright’s naturalistic, often gut-wrenching text. As a result, the set largely failed to render the play’s location for the audience, the Tyrone summer home in Connecticut. A naturalistic drama the quality of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night requires a naturalistic set. Period. (Speaking of period, the costumes, props and dialogue indicated the year 1912, while the set was so abstract it was timeless).

Andrew Upton’s direction also allowed for moments of Brechtian staging thrown in the mix. A reference to the hallway in the set being in the audience was farcical. Edmund running off stage through the house, in the process breaking the fourth wall, was ridiculous, and his returning dialogue to the set on the downstage left apron alienated (no pun intended) many in the dress circle who couldn’t see the action. Sight lines is usually covered in Direction 101. However, I could see William Hurt for twenty minutes side-stage, but off the set, in the final act. The props table was visible, too. Was it a polished performance? With a generous six week rehearsal period, I would have preferred not to have seen dropped props and dropped lines in the play, either.

The final act of Long Day’s Journey Into Night verges on a heightened, slightly melodramatic form of naturalism, where Mary’s addiction to morphine takes her to another place and the men cope by getting drunker and drunker. Yet the acting here was mostly strong and faithful to the text. It was in the first two acts that Todd Van Voris, in particular, overstated the role of James Tyrone Jnr. Here there were far too many instances of melodramatic hand gestures and unimaginative finger-pointing between characters. Upton’s direction also offered numerous occasions where characters jumped suddenly into mini-tantrums that didn’t allow for a natural build up of dramatic tension.

As a result, character believability suffered. Robyn Nevin’s commanding portrayal of Mary Tyrone made empathy with her character easy. Not so the case, however, with James Snr or his two sons James Jnr and Edmund. O’Neill’s play, at roughly three and a half hours with interval in the theatre, is difficult enough for a modern audience without struggling to connect with characters. At times, it was a battle identifying and engaging with the men of the Tyrone family. The STC’s decision to have only one interval either side of 90 and 100 minutes respectively, didn’t help much either. Many in the audience became very restless in the final act, some even fell asleep.

All up, the Sydney Theatre Company’s production simply doesn’t do justice to one of the great American plays of the 20th century. William Hurt or not, for those in the audience it truly was a long journey, indeed.

ArtsEdge is probably the best resource site for drama/theatre lesson plans in terms of both quality and quantity. Each lesson plan (or unit of lessons) is comprehensive, uniformly structured and linked to US curriculum standards. Searching for lesson plans on this website can also be filtered by grade bands K-4, 5-8 and 9-12.

All lesson plans at ArtsEdge follow this structure:

• lesson overview
• length of lesson
• instructional objectives
• supplies
• instructional plan
• assessment
• extension
• sources

Lessons are contributed by education professionals from a variety of American schools, listed below each plan.

Sample lesson plan topics in drama/theatre at ArtsEdge include;

• characters
• melodrama
• musicals
• structure
• famous plays and playwrights
• myths, fables and folktales
• culture
• costume
• themed units
• history
• Shakespeare
• musical composers
• puppetry … and more

I blogged in September last year on The Drama Teacher about the need for confidence in high school student theatre. As Drama/Theatre teachers, we are perhaps finely tuned to the life of teenagers in the development of theatre pieces. Where our students are in their personal lives – not quite children – not quite adults – can directly affect the theatre-making process.

It’s a myth to think all adult actors are either naturally confident, or find obtaining and maintaining confidence an easy thing. Time and time again we see well-known Hollywood actors interviewed on American talk-shows squirming in their seats, hating the limelight and looking awfully uncomfortable being the centre of attention. On the flip side, however, is Robin Williams. Over the years I have seen Williams so confident on the David Letterman Show, he ran the interviews, not Letterman.

As a teenager myself, I had way too much energy and acting was a method of releasing that energy in a more controlled and rewarding fashion. Confidence was not much of an issue, either. It just seemed to come naturally to me. Yet, Ian McKellan claims that one of the most frustrating aspects for him over many decades acting professionally for stage and screen is the fact that he simply lacks confidence as an actor. It has been the demon inside him his entire career.

So, if you were given one skill to name as the most valuable an actor can possess, what would it be? I’m putting my money on focus. Without focus, an actor is doomed. I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts. Comment below…..

Drama Victoria began discussions with the VCAA in early 2009, expressing the real need for teachers of these studies to have Drama solo performance examinations and Theatre Studies monologue performance examinations filmed for sale on DVD.

Apart from being an excellent teaching tool in the classroom, one that can be retrieved time and time again, a DVD of these performances is helpful to teachers in regional areas who find it difficult to come to Melbourne with their students to see the annual Top Class Season of Excellence concerts, where these performances are live on stage.

While the VCAA film and sell on DVD the final stage of the Season of Excellence each year, Top Acts at Hamer Hall, this mixed program of Drama, Dance, Music and Theatre Studies performance exams, usually only consists of 2-3 Theatre Studies monologues and 3-4 Drama solo performances. In the past, Top Class (not Top Acts) was only filmed once for DVD in 2005 for one of the three Drama concerts.

The new Top Class Season of Excellence DVD 2009 consists of 4 DVDs. There are 3 DVDs containing all 33 performers in Top Class Drama that year, plus another DVD consisting of all 10 performers in Top Class Theatre Studies. Add to this, every student performer is interviewed on the DVD about various aspects of their performance structure, how they developed the exam etc.

This resource was a large and expensive project, so all credit goes to Helen Champion, Performing Arts Coordinator at the VCAA for taking this on. This will NOT be a regular project and these DVDs are expected to be a resource for teachers for some years to come.

Drama Victoria is the sole distributor of the VCAA Top Class Season of Excellence DVD 2009. All four DVDs (Drama and Theatre Studies) are sold as a single package for the low price of just $38.50 (inc GST and p&h). A real bargain!

I highly recommend this resource.

Download the order form from Drama Victoria here.