I’m getting ready to go to Norway, and work with the intrepid students at the TITAN Theater School on an Oslo-specific version of Appointment.
This is the first Appointment since Prelude.
To get them started before I arrive, I gave the following set of instructions. They’ll be making Appointments at a working office downtown.
All pieces must involve:
- a mistaken identity
- a long silence (relative to the length of a piece)
- a moment of counting
- a show of hands
- a shift in time (ie at the end of the piece it is three years after the beginning, or at the end of the piece we realize we are 50 years in the past, which explains a lot)
- a big offer
- also, each piece should use at least one image or video on a computer screen.
Then here are 19 possible scores to use in making your pieces:
Make a piece in which at least one performer is on the phone the whole time. The phone call should reveal something about the viewer’s relationship to the piece.
Make a piece that is entirely silent, not a pantomime, but which tells a story from at least two perspectives.
Make a piece that involves a fall from grace (a boss confesses his surprising impropriety), a lullaby to a dead child, and an offer of a deal that will save face for the boss.
Make a piece in which one performer is supposed to be the boss, and one the assistant, but the roles get either confused or reversed.
Make a piece that involves non-stop talking by one performer and non-stop humming by another.
Make a piece in which both performers are sitting at odd angles and rocking back and forth in their chairs, but make it your goal to keep this fact from the viewer, no matter how impossible it may seem. Perhaps make part of the game to keep the rhythm of your rocking from your scene partner.
Make a piece that involves you and the viewer playing either a board game or a card game.
Make a scene in which the audience member is asked to play a role, with lines, blocking and dramatic resolution. Perhaps they will read their text.
Make a piece in which the story is the same but the actual lines are different each time. This means you have to paraphrase the essential meaning, in a different way, each time you perform it. For this one, you are welcome to use a scene from a play that’s already been written.
Make a piece in which the audience member is the boss. Make them understand by the way you speak to them, body language, what you say, etc. Maybe this piece involves presenting a report, perhaps bad news (we didn’t hit our sales quota, the building fell down, the judge found our client guilty) that you have to spin in a positive way in order to save your own job.
Make a piece that is an inappropriate confession.
Make a piece in which the viewer has just been chosen to take a job with the firm. Unfortunately it is one of your jobs. You don’t know which one of you will get canned. Perhaps the audience member will get to choose.
Make a piece that involves an argument that has begun before the viewer enters, some kind of violence and a surprising departure by one of the performers. The argument should have something to do with the viewer’s arrival, and one performer should be trying to wrap it up to conduct whatever business is at hand with the viewer, while the other is just too carried away.
Make a piece in which both performers spend as much time as possible laughing in an infectious way. The audience member must not be able to resist your charms!
Make a piece that feels like the conversation has been going on since before the viewer arrived, that they are being sucked into it, and that it will go on after they go. Within this, it ought to have a dramatic arc, even if very subtle.
Make a piece in which one performer is trying to talk to the viewer about something important, but is constantly being interrupted by inappropriate ideas, commentary, etc, from the other.
Make a piece in which both performers compete for the affections of the viewer with the most sincere tributes possible – the text and gesture of this piece should be unabashedly, sincerely romantic, not desperate, but ardent.
Make a piece that is a simple story told with the aid of video, about a building that your characters once lived in, or a relationship they were once involved in together, or both. Ideally this story should be very sad, but with a moment of redemption at the end.
Make a piece that involves lots of paperwork. There could be many things for the viewer to sign, many things for you or them to read, for you to file. This piece could be about arcane rules, bureaucracy, and tedium. But there must be something happening of consequence.
APPOINTMENT 