A playwright's toolkit: the instruments, tools and agency of a playwright in the creative writing process

Meany, Michael

Title: A playwright's toolkit: the instruments, tools and agency of a playwright in the creative writing process
Creator: Meany, Michael
Relation: University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
Resource Type: thesis
Date: 2006
Description: Masters Research - Master of Creative Arts
Description: The Things We Do is the title of a triptych of plays that comprises: His Story, a ten minute multimedia presentation; The Things, a longish one-act play of forty minutes in a more traditional theatrical form; and, Her Story, a ten minute multimedia presentation. The play has three human characters and three computer characters. Using an interface similar to a web browser, the characters interact with one another - human-to-computer and computer-to-computer. The computer characters are represented on stage as data projections of the interface. Their voices, audible from a loudspeaker, were developed using Apple Script to modify the standard Apple text-to-speech computer voices, and then incorporated into the interface using Macromedia Flash. The use of computer characters in theatre poses both practical and theatrical challenges; a primary question is will an audience accept computer characters in the same manner they would accept human characters? The "willing suspension of disbelief", a phrase coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, describes the "poetic faith" that an audience needs to have in the ontology of the fictional world presented to them in the theatre (Coleridge 1906). Suspension of disbelief has long been considered a requisite for development of dramatic closure, that satisfactory end promised by the beginning. In the writing of the triptych of plays a primary research objective was to examine the proposition that it is "belief, not disbelief, that is automatic" (Reeves and Nass 1996 ,p.27). The purpose of this exegesis is to illuminate the instruments, tools, and agency of the playwright employed to support belief and, in doing so, examine the nature of the creative writing process. To examine this research objective, consideration is given to the development of the computer voices, action and character, humour, narrative structure and the effect of cognitive load. As a means of situating the creative work in a theoretical and historical context, a literature review was conducted that contributed to both the preparation of the exegesis and to the writing of the play. The topics covered in the literature review included computers in theatre; representation of academics in theatre and literature; A Playwright's Toolkit —The Instruments, Tools and Agency of a Playwright in the Creative Writing Process. playwriting and dramaturgy; comedy writing and the study of humour; psychological studies of humour; literary and dramatic theories of action and character; sociological theories of deviance; affective qualities and abilities of computer-generated voices; cognitive load; agency and structure; and, theories of creativity. These topics were selected for their ability to shed light on what had already been done, how it had been done, and how had its effectiveness been measured. A number of research methodologies were used in the preparation of this exegesis and in the play writing process. Practitioner-researcher enquiry was used to examine the creative process that lead to the writing of the script. In addition, an application of the dramaturgical approach was used as a method of producing data that aided in exposing production techniques and strategies, used in the construction of the script, for the purpose of analysis in the exegesis.
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1418340
Identifier: uon:37332
Language: eng
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