Storytelling

by bam

One performer, no scene partner, nowhere to hide. A monodrama is the hardest place to bury a weak story and therefore the best place to learn how stories actually work. This course teaches the six decisions that survive translation into any medium (the change, the owner, want and obstacle, withholding, scene and summary, the turn) by making you apply them to the form that exposes all six at once. It covers what a solo piece can and cannot do, who the audience is to your speaker and why that question decides everything else, how to build place and time with no set, the reliability problem, structural options from the single-sitting confession to the fractured memory piece, how to end, and how to revise. Worked examples are real plays you can read or watch, from Beckett to Anna Deavere Smith to Duncan Macmillan. Ends with a performable draft. Part one of two: performing and staging it is Monodrama II.

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