Open Forum

We just produced the One-Act (which is the High School version, I think) at our school. It was student directed, which was a HUGE undertaking but went so well (in that the right things went wrong, most of the time.) It is a cast of 7 but we had TWICE that many people backstage to make all the magic.

It is a wonderful show and was a lot of fun for the students as performers, technical design team of creatives, & our much needed backstage ninjas.

Crit is correct! Physical AND technical challenges abound...

Examples:

• All the walls fall at the end of the play
• Various items fall off the walls and then stay up again later
• Fire on set (we totally faked this one and just ACTED like a small fire had occurred)
• Characters knocked out by a door opening
• Unconscious characters being dragged through a window
• A person handcuffed to a chaise lounge drag the chaise all over the stage. One and off stage. Eventually that dragging chaise knocks the set down.
• Carrying a "dead" character off just on two poles (after the stretcher "breaks" in a previous scene)
• Characters spitting out their drinks on stage (that is just on the gross effect list)
• Characters holding items up high on the wall with both hands while trying to answer a phone and pass the receiver to another character.
• There are gunshots and guns (we used bright plastic water guns) on stage
• Stage fighting (various times)
• Door coming off the hinges (we did not manage to achieve this one very effectively)

I will say that my students tackled these challenges with vim, vigor, and a lot of creative ideas, and we did TONS of trial and error and trying again with a lot of the effects. We never perfected the fire in the coal shuttle in a way that worked well. So, the actors just performed that one without any flames or smoke. By that point, our budget was spent and so was our creativity!

We did have our set walls printed by a local printing company on PVC and that is lightweight. We had some issues with the corners breaking off the PVC as it fell (see my earlier comment about trial and error) so we glued foam pipe insulation around each piece that had to fall (including our dog portrait.) We used so much pipe insulation, superglue, magnets, & velcro that the Home Depot people just greeted me each afternoon with laughter and some of the associates at Home Depot came to see the show, we were such good pals at the end of this adventure.

Here is a link to our photos if you would like to see the set (before it fell and after) https://leamarshall.smugmug.com/Leon-theatre/The-one-act-play-that-goes-wrong/