Long Day’s Journey into Somerville

March 12th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

I’m so beyond tired right now. I didn’t have class on Tuesday—it’s Spring Break this week—but I did have class on Thursday because we wanted to make up for a week in April where BU is having a Monday schedule on a Thursday due to getting Patriots’ Day off that Monday. All but two of us were able to make it to class this week. One of my classmates had planned a trip to New Orleans and the other a trip to Chicago before the make-up class had been announced.

Thursday was my scheduled day to workshop my full-length play again, so I brought in twenty pages of revised material, which was about two and a half scenes. I spent so much time on the revisions, but I had begun to feel like I was just going around in circles instead of pushing forward. Hearing it read by the actors helped though. I got to hear for myself how much stronger some of the dialogue sounded. The section that took up most of my workshop time was when we had the actors up and moving around trying to block out the big fight scene I’d reworked a little. My professor said that workshopping scenes like this is always difficult because the characters are moving around all over the place, plus I have six actors on the stage in this scene. Seeing the actors up on their feet going through the motions was so helpful. Some things that had seemed to make sense on paper were not working out as well on stage because of the time it takes for the actors to perform each moment. Some parts were happening too late or too early, so I want to go back and revise that section with a better sense of the timing of everything. I also want to make sure there’s more reactions and interrupting dialogue since parts of it felt too clean and polished for an argument that leads into a fight with six people in the room. That scene has a lot to juggle, so seeing actors walk through it helped me see the big picture of it a lot more clearly.

Our public readings are in late April, which is way too soon. It came up on us out of nowhere. I need to send my professor a title for my play and a little promotional blurb for the postcards they want to mail out to their subscribers about our reading series. A student from last year’s class who sometimes serves as an actor for our class suggested I call it The Prayer Bargain, after a line towards the middle of the play. The main character talks about how when her family had problems when she was a child, the only way she could deal with things is by hiding in a corner somewhere and praying for things to be OK. And she’d make a little “prayer bargain” as she called it, where she convinced herself that if she prayed about it three separate times and promised to do a really good deed in return, things would get better. And now that she’s an adult and her family is once again in turmoil, she wishes she still had that childhood belief that everything would be OK again if she prayed about it three times. I might use that title—I do tend to favor titles that are lifted from a small line in the script, and it does come from an important scene—but I’m not sure yet. I don’t want it to seem like the focus of the play is on faith or loss of faith because it’s really about the members of the family and their relationships with one another. In the meantime, I’ve been jokingly referring to it as Long Day’s Journey into Somerville, after Long Day’s Journey into Night, one of my favorite plays ever, which is also about a troubled Irish American family. I have to decide on a real title later today and get it and the promotional blurb sent in as soon as possible.

I might go see a play in Cambridge tonight by a student in last year’s class (a different person than the one who suggested the title to me). It’s supposed to be really good and is based on the life of Sophie Treadwell, the woman who wrote the play Machinal that I read at HC in Steve Vineberg’s American Drama class and really liked. I’m just so exhausted though from all the revising and the busy week at work. One of my cats is curled up next to me making little kitty-snore noises. Sometimes I get so jealous of my cats and how they can just sleep all day. I, on the other hand, have copyediting and title-brainstorming to do, plus I need to work up the energy to see the play tonight.

A Flower on the Table

March 5th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

We had an assignment that was due in Tuesday’s class this week—we were supposed to write a short play involving just two characters, and there had to be a table and two chairs on the set, as well as a flower on the table. And the two characters had to have a problem between them, but they were not allowed to talk about it directly. It was an exercise in subtext. It was much more challenging to write than I’d initially anticipated. We didn’t get to hear all of them this week, but I did get to finally show my ten-minute play that was due a few weeks ago. I got some great feedback on that one. Once again, it seems like if I make a stronger choice for the ending, I could improve the entire play. We got through about half of the subtext exercise plays, and they were all so different. I love seeing how everyone can be given the same basic parameters and each come up with something completely unlike everyone else’s. Even just the flower on the table and how people have used it—we’ve already seen a fake potted flower, a daisy in a glass, and a rose in a vase, among other things. Mine is a dandelion in a plastic cup (yes, I know dandelions are weeds… don’t worry, that comes up in the script).

On Thursday, I had asked my professor if we could meet after class to discuss some questions that I’ve come up with as I’ve been working through my revisions on my full-length play. One thing I’ve struggled with my entire life is my self-confidence. I’ve gotten so much better over the years—you should’ve seen me my freshman year of college—but it’s still something I always have to consciously be aware of. I always get a little nervous in class that my play won’t be good enough, and I feel this horrible need to apologize to everyone in case it’s really bad. I know logically that there’s no need to apologize for my work and that I’m holding my own in class just fine, but those doubts always creep up into my head and I’m always working to suppress them.

One thing my professor said at our meeting which is helping me think about it in a new way is, “you have to start seeing yourself as a writer, and the class time is like your work time.” It’s not only that focusing on the “work time” aspects of it will help me put aside my insecurities and feel more like I do at work—where I know I have the training and skills to be able to get things accomplished—it’s the “think of yourself as a writer” part that is really affecting me. I’ve always had such a hard time describing myself as a “writer” or a “playwright,” because I felt like I didn’t deserve that title. Shakespeare is a playwright. Tennessee Williams is a playwright. I’m just “someone who likes to write plays.” I felt oddly arrogant claiming to be a “writer” when I had very little success to show for it. But my professor’s allowing me to see myself that way is helping me look at the workshops from a new perspective. Instead of worrying that I need to constantly prove to everyone (and especially myself) that I deserve to be there, I have to start just trusting that I belong there, trusting the work I already have, and focus on using the workshop to improve that work. I’ve been improving and learning so much in the workshops all year obviously, but I like having something to remind myself about when I feel the self-doubts creeping up.

I’m now officially on Spring Break, which for me basically just means that I have no class on Tuesday. Everyone who’s staying in town (almost the entire class) is still meeting for Thursday’s class, and I still have to put in 40 hours of work at my job. So it’s not really much of a break in that sense. But not having Tuesday’s class at least gives me more time to focus on my revisions for Thursday, when I’m scheduled to present some of my scenes again. It is definitely going to be a busy week despite allegedly being a “break.”

On Electives and Grad School in General

February 26th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

It’s scary, but I’m already thinking about what electives to take this summer since registration begins in March. After early May, I will be finished with the four playwriting workshops that make up the most important part of the degree, and all I’ll have left are my electives. We need to take four of them, but I’ll be transferring in a graduate English course I took at UMass Amherst last year (I am now mentally adding “go to the Graduate Studies office to pick up a course transfer request form” to my to-do list). If I can get the three remaining electives completed during the summer session, I could be done in time for September graduation. I know that I definitely want to take a dramatic literature class called Pulitzer Prize-Winning Plays in the first summer session. The other two options in that session are Literature of the Middle Ages and African-American Literature, so I’d have to pick one of those as well. I think the only class in the second summer session that we can take is called Linguistics in Literature. I haven’t made any definite decisions beyond the Pulitzer class though because I’ve heard that another theater professor is supposedly going to teach a class that just hasn’t been posted yet, and I’ll want to take her class if it does end up being offered because I hear that she’s great.

All this planning over electives has been causing me to think about a lot of the differences I’ve perceived in undergrad vs. graduate classes. I got to see my HC roommate Jen again this past weekend, and we were talking about this because she has her MA in Political Science and had noticed a lot of the same trends I had in just my one UMass English course. We both sort of went into grad school expecting the classes to become even more specialized. For an undergrad English major, for example, a lot of the core classes are things like “Readings in 20th Century American Literature” and other broad survey courses. Then the upper-level courses and seminars are where things get more specialized, like the ones I took on just Emily Dickinson and on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. I was expecting graduate classes to be more like those seminars, really focused on one topic that you would study in depth, and Jen had been expecting the same thing from poli. sci.

To our surprise though, the typical grad school courses we’ve encountered have been very much like broad survey courses. My class I took at UMass was on 16th Century Lit, and the BU summer courses sound similarly broad in scope. It seems like once you’re in grad school, the point is to give you a strong foundation in a wide topic and then allow you to dig deeper into one particular area of that topic for your own personal research. It sort of lets you personalize the class to some extent and expects more independent work and study from you. In 16th Century Lit, for example, we read multiple texts every week, and then I did my presentation and paper on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, going deeper and beyond what we had discussed in class.

Graduate courses also almost always seem to include an in-class presentation as part of the grade too, I’ve noticed… which makes sense as a way to help prepare PhD students for future conferences and teaching jobs. My Tuesday workshop this semester includes a presentation as part of our requirements. Mine is scheduled in April and will be on Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. I read his Waiting for Godot and Endgame in Ed Isser’s Modern Drama class at HC and loved them both, so I’m actually looking forward to my presentation.

I think Holy Cross definitely left me well prepared for the different types of work encountered in grad school. I know I was very much prepared as far as the workload is concerned (I’m thinking back to long days huddled in Dinand, Rehm, or even the science library and long nights in front of my computer writing papers), and the classes I took at HC also helped me realize where my passions lie so that I’m able to explore them independently in my graduate classes. I knew right away that I wanted to do my playwright presentation on Beckett because I’d learned at HC that I love his style (I will admit though, that I knew from undergrad experience that I was not a fan at all of The Faerie Queene, but since I joined that course during add/drop, all the presentation topics on works I liked such as Dr. Faustus had been claimed already). It is definitely a confidence booster to know that even when I finish the playwriting workshops and have to move back into the intimidating realm of academic writing, I do have a really strong foundation and am more than prepared to handle the work.

A Pile of Notes and a Guinea Pig

February 22nd, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

I’m a little behind on my blog updates, but this one will be long to make up for that. I feel like it’s been forever since the day I workshopped my completed first draft. We had no class last Tuesday because BU had Monday off and then followed a Monday schedule on Tuesday, but I’ve had plenty of work for that class to keep me busy in the meantime. We have to read a book called Backwards and Forwards about how to read and analyze scripts from a theatrical rather than strictly literary point of view. It is such a great book for anyone interested in theatrical production. Although it’s about how to read a script rather than how to write one, it’s so helpful to see how a script is constructed and what elements need to be there in order for something to work well on stage. And I could see it being equally as helpful to directors, actors, or designers. Plus it uses Hamlet for the majority of its examples, and that is one of my favorite plays of all time (yes, I am being the stereotypical English/Theatre double major nerd right now).

We also, for this coming Tuesday’s class, need to write a monologue, which is something I have very little experience with. We’re supposed to think back to a time in our lives when someone hurt or betrayed us, and write about that moment from the other person’s point of view. As in, write about the hurtful experience from the perspective of the person who hurt you. It gets you thinking about how to convincingly create characters who are mean or even villainous and what might motivate them to behave the way they do.

Last Thursday, I met with my professor before class to discuss my play and the workshop from the week before. We talked about how to focus on tightening up some areas in the next draft, and she also suggested a potential plot twist that may complicate the situation near the end of the play more. I’m still trying to mentally play that situation out and see if it might be something that would work. I agree with her that a more complex situation would be much more interesting, but I just have to figure out how it will work. She also gave me back a copy of my script with notes written all over the margins. The wonderful process known as revision has officially begun. The celebration and sense of relief from finishing the first draft is always short-lived, because soon afterward it becomes time to start ripping things apart, moving scenes around, tightening up dialogue, removing or adding entire scenes… you get the idea. “Writing is rewriting,” as that saying you learn in your first Creative Writing class goes.

Last weekend though, I did get to take a little break from my work and celebrate the fact that my first draft was done and successfully workshopped. My Holy Cross roommate, Jen Baker ’04, came to visit me over the long weekend. She’s also been very busy recently too, so we haven’t had as many opportunities to hang out, even though she only lives an hour or so away. On Monday, a few hours before she was going to head back home, we drove to a pet store so that I could pick up some food for my two cats. The store had a display full of little guinea pigs, and they were so adorable. I love animals, but obviously with two cats a small animal is out of the question (not to mention too much work). Jen, however, did not have any pets. She thought it over while we picked up my cat food, and not long afterwards she became a proud owner of a new pet guinea pig. Jen was with me when I adopted both of my kitties last year, so it’s fitting that I was with her when she brought home her new pet. Her name is Blossom, after one of the icons of our 80s childhood. Below is the only picture Jen’s been able to take of her—guinea pigs can be shy and withdrawn when they first come home to a new environment—and a photo of my two cats too just for fun (their names are Oskar and Marmalade… no 80s references there). Now it’s time once again to focus and think about what I want to write my monologue on.

guinea-pigcats

First-Draft Workshop

February 12th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

The workshop for my full-length play was yesterday. I’m still trying to mentally process everything. There’s something terrifying about hearing your entire brand-new play for the first time. I felt like I wanted to cry afterwards—not because I thought the whole thing sounded awful or because I was afraid of negative feedback, but because it was just such an emotionally draining experience to hear months of writing read aloud like that.

I finished my draft Wednesday night. It came in at 74 pages. Ideally I’d like to add ten more pages or so over the course of revision so that it’s closer to 80–85. I think I was so eager to be done that around page 70 I was just like, “end it NOW” and got to the conclusion a little too quickly. One of my classmates and I were both scheduled to workshop our plays on Thursday, and we were nervously emailing each other the night before about who we thought would go first and whether going first was better or worse.

Our professor ended up telling me that I was scheduled to go first when we got to class Thursday afternoon. I had six actors and then a seventh to read the stage directions, so it was a pretty big cast. My play, as I said before, is about a family in Somerville (where I grew up) and all of their problems sort of spiraling into a confrontation in the days leading up to Christmas. The professor told the actors to not be afraid to jump right in at a high level of intensity, and the reading began. The professor stopped the reading a few times to ask the actors to try reading something a different way or to give notes along the way, and once it was done, we talked about it more in depth.

She likes to start off every feedback session by asking the playwright, “What did you learn?”  And I’d learned a lot. But it’s hard to formulate words to answer that question when the reading is still swimming around in your head. I have a fight scene shortly before the end of the play, and we talked about how a scene isn’t necessarily a climax because violence erupts or weapons are drawn, which, to use her example, happens regularly in a play like Romeo and Juliet, but rather because there is a great emotional shift that occurs in the characters. So the true climax of the play is occurring in the scene following the fight, and the fight is the scene which “tightens the screws” and sets up the climax/makes it inevitable. And while I think that’s what I’d wanted to have happen when I wrote the draft, it’s good to have it spelled out and in my mind when I go to revise those scenes and make sure that that is how they are functioning. I also have a very long and dialogue-heavy scene towards the middle of the play, and we talked about how to go back through that scene now that I know what the intentions and desires of each of the characters are, and make sure in their talking to each other that they’re always going after what they want. That way even though no one is actually doing anything, “action” is still occurring. And we talked about how one of the characters seems to be trying to “wrestle the play away” from one of the others, but that I can’t let that happen. My classmates also had some really great feedback and positive comments. And the actors seemed to have a lot of fun with the script, which is good.

My professor is really great and has been taking the time after everyone’s workshops to write them detailed notes about the draft, including suggestions for reading that might help them figure out their own work. Once I get those notes, we’ll probably set up a time to meet one-on-one to talk about it further sometime before my next workshop date. So I’m completely mentally exhausted, but overall it was a very productive week. It’s great to be done with that first draft, but the first draft really is only the beginning. There are many rounds of revision still ahead of me.

First Workshop of the Semester

February 10th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

This has been such a busy week, and it’s only Wednesday. In my last entry, I mentioned how stressed out I was about having a ten-minute play due Tuesday as well as a completed draft of my full-length due tomorrow. My mid-week mindset is much calmer than how I felt last Friday, when I wasn’t sure how I’d get everything done plus deal with what turned out to be a particularly busy week at work. To make matters worse, I developed a migraine sometime on Friday, and it literally lasted until late-afternoon on Sunday. This happens to me every once in awhile, and it’s probably at least partially triggered by stress. So needless to say, I got no writing done all day Saturday or Sunday morning/afternoon. Luckily, I finally started to feel functional again Sunday around dinnertime, and coffee plus a burst of productivity led me to write twenty pages that night. The downside—I missed the entire Superbowl. But the writing had to get done. And then I wrote another ten pages on Monday night for my ten-minute play. Thirty pages in 24 hours, plus a ten-hour work day.

Tuesday in class I finally got to show my “overheard conversation” exercise, which was the first time something of mine had been read in either class this semester, unless you count the short “play you’ve been avoiding writing” exercise we did on the first day. We’ve been seeing a couple of people’s scenes in class every week since they were due, but we didn’t get to mine until yesterday. I was nervous because I hadn’t looked at it since I printed it out weeks ago. The conversation I had overheard was a brief exchange about a girl who was working on Disney websites, and one thing she mentioned was that her boss kept telling her that the websites needed more “magic.” So for the dramatization, I did this ridiculously over-the-top satire of a Disney boss and his young eager employee whom he feels does not incorporate enough “magic” into her web designs. Complete with a talking Mickey Mouse stuffed animal. It was just something silly I did in an attempt to try out a new style, and I was afraid it would be too “fluffy” of a piece, but the class really liked it. And I got some good ideas on how to take it even further and strengthen the ending. It was funny though, because my professor had been starting off the discussion on every piece by saying, “Well, what was strong about this one?” and, even though I knew she’d been saying that each time, I was so nervous that I actually heard, “Well, what was wrong about this one?” and had this initial moment of “oh no, this one didn’t work out at all.” I felt so much better once I realized I’d misheard her. We didn’t get to all of the ten-minute plays that were due that day, so I’ll be showing that one during our next class.

That positive experience in Tuesday’s class is giving me some encouragement about tomorrow. I’m still really nervous, but it’s nice to have that boost of confidence before heading into my full-length workshop. I spent last night reading through what I’ve written so far on my full-length and making some minor adjustments, and tonight I need to write an ending scene. We’re in the middle of a snowstorm today, so I’m trying to gear myself up for a long night of writing by romanticizing the “curled up on the couch with blankets and a cup of cocoa” angle of it. I’ll write again later this week with an update on how my workshop goes.

Stress

February 5th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

As I mentioned in my first entry, there will be times when I am stressed out of my mind. The first of those times this semester is upon us now. I have a ten-minute play due on Tuesday next week, and then I am scheduled to present the complete draft of my full-length for the first time on Thursday. I have no idea how this is going to happen. I always manage to get things done though. Last semester, I had a really rough time in October because at work we were in the middle of production on the biggest issue of the year for the journal I work on, I had to work at the box office of our theater every Friday through Sunday, and I had plays to write for both classes. And I got through that, so this should feel easy in comparison. Yeah. That’s what I keep telling myself.

I have also been feeling the pressure to take my work to the next level this semester. We’ve been starting to see everyone’s completed full-length drafts for the first time these past couple weeks, and it’s been crazy to see how far they’ve come along. In the first semester, we saw mostly isolated scenes from people’s full-lengths, and seeing the entire thing all at once really lets you see the shape the piece has taken on and how much everyone has advanced. It’s not like anyone is cutthroat or competitive (everyone has been nothing but supportive), but seeing my classmates’ work evolve like this has been showing me what is possible with my own work. I’m excited to finally see my entire draft on Thursday. I’m also scared out of my mind. Close to half of it will be brand-new stuff that the class hasn’t heard before, and some of the older scenes have not been read in class since October. I’m a nervous wreck. But I have to push the nervousness aside for a few days and, you know, actually get the finished draft written first. Then I’m allowed to nervously obsess over hearing it out loud.

So I will be doing lots of writing this weekend. I have to figure out how to end my full-length, and it’s been killing me. And I have to write a ten-minute play at some point too. But it should all be done by the next time I blog. That is both comforting and scary to think about.

Global Fellowships

January 29th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

I mentioned at the end of my last entry that I wanted to give a full entry to talking about the travel fellowship I just applied for. So, BU’s Creative Writing Program recently received a donation that allows them to award travel fellowships to their students. Last year, the first year the fellowships were offered, they sent about 20% of the class abroad, but this year they are hoping to send up to 50% of my class (across all three genres of fiction, poetry, and playwriting). It’s such an amazing award because you can choose to go anywhere in the world for up to three months and do basically anything you want in order to enhance your writing. To apply, we had to write a short proposal about where we wanted to go and what we’d do there.

I never applied to study abroad in college, and I have sometimes looked back and wished I had. I did get to do the May Term in Luxembourg immediately following my sophomore year though (for any current students thinking about applying to this program—do it. It’s so much fun, and it is a way to get a small taste of the study abroad experience if you aren’t able to fit an entire year abroad into your schedule). Other than that month though, I have never spent time outside of the country, not even in Canada. So I knew I definitely had to apply for one of these fellowships.

When I first thought about where I wanted to go, one place that immediately crossed my mind was Bali. Any HC theatre major will know why. I took four semesters of Balinese dance at Holy Cross, and I thought about what it might be like to live there and study their dance and culture on a more in-depth basis. But there was one thought I just could never get out of my head… that I have always, always wanted to go to Ireland. And if I could spend three months in another country, that was the one place that I could see myself being the happiest and learning the most. I want to stay in one of the small Gaeltacht regions (areas where the Irish language is still the predominant everyday language) in County Cork and learn the language. I also want to be able to take classes in Irish dance and learn about Celtic folklore and poetry and music, and then use all of my experiences to eventually create a play that would interweave dance and music with the folklore and incorporate some of the native language into it.

It will be tough getting a fellowship because they are going to give preference to students traveling someplace where English isn’t spoken. And even with my desire to go to a Gaeltacht, I know that it’s going to be harder to convince the committee than if I were going someplace where most of the population doesn’t know English. But I had to write the proposal that would make me the happiest, so I had to go with Ireland. In my research into the Múscraí Gaeltacht in County Cork, I discovered so much about the region that I am determined to go there someday with or without a fellowship. I’ll make sure to keep everyone updated when I find out one way or the other.

In unrelated but very frightening news, my theater today updated its website to include an ad for the Ground Floor Reading Series, a.k.a. “the readings of the playwriting students’ MFA thesis plays.” The readings are in April, and it’s terrifying to see them mentioned on the website already. This program goes by so fast!

This Was a Short Week?

January 24th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

Monday was a holiday, but honestly by Friday I had completely forgotten that I’d had a short week. It was just THAT busy.

My first Tuesday class of the semester met this week. It’s basically a continuation of last semester’s short-plays workshop, just like Thursday’s class is a continuation of the full-length workshop. This semester though the class feels a lot more structured, with an actual syllabus and assigned readings. Last semester the format was much looser, and we pretty much brought in ten-minute plays whenever we had them ready. The structure will most likely be a good thing for me and force me to keep writing regularly, but it will be challenging. We have an assignment for the next class—we’re supposed to overhear a conversation someplace in public, write it down verbatim, and then use it as a jumping-off point to create a scene. The problem is I haven’t heard any interesting conversations yet. And I’m afraid if I start eavesdropping on the T that any conversation I write down will very quickly devolve into “Who is that weird girl writing down everything I say???” We also have a small mountain of ten-minute plays to read for next week.

I met with my professor on Wednesday to talk about my full-length play. I was supposed to set up a time to meet with her at school, but I told her that my work schedule is crazy and that I work ten-hour days on non-class days, and she was really nice and offered to meet me closer to my house during my lunch break (since I work from home and it takes an hour on the T into BU). So I met up with her in Davis Square in Somerville and had a really great discussion about my play and where it’s going and how to get it finished. I’m shooting for having the first draft done and ready to be workshopped in class on February 11. I’m not quite sure yet just how that is going to happen, but it will. There will likely be lots of coffee involved.

Friday we had a special “skills lab” with BU’s undergrad actors and graduate directors at the College of Fine Arts. We do a couple of these every semester, and they’re always fun. I had to take a half vacation day from work to be able to make it though since it met during the day. We all bring in a scene or two, and each of us gets a group of actors and a director to work with. The actors read through the scene and then we all talk about it, and the director talks about how he/she sees the scene working, and then we usually try to go through it once more with the actors moving around or trying different things. It’s helpful for everyone because the actors get a chance to see what it’s like working with brand-new plays still in development, the directors get to experience working with new material and interacting with playwrights, and the playwrights get some really helpful feedback and a chance to work with a director. Which is important since theater by nature is such a collaborative process. After the skills lab was over, six of us from class went out to grab dinner. I love when I actually have time to be able to see my classmates outside of the theater instead of having to rush home and work.

I have so much to get done for this week. I need to get working on my full-length if I want it done by the 11th, and I have that conversation assignment due on Tuesday. I also have to write a one-page proposal for a travel fellowship, but I will talk more about that next time because it deserves its own entry. Now it is time to get started on the aforementioned small mountain of ten-minute plays I need to read.

First Day of Classes

January 15th, 2010 by Colleen Hughes '04

Yesterday was my first day of class for the spring semester. It was also, as I mentioned in a previous entry, my birthday. Most of the other students in the class are in their mid- to late-twenties, but we also have two women who are a little older and have school-aged children. When these two women learned that my birthday coincided with the first day of class, they each brought in a cake and arranged for the class to sing Happy Birthday as we walked into the theatre. It was really sweet of them (and it worked out perfectly because I didn’t have time to eat before I left, and class runs from 12–3 right during lunchtime, so I was starving). One of the cakes was doubling as a “New Year’s cake,” and there were little Monopoly pieces baked into it. One of the woman’s children had written up fortunes that corresponded to each piece, so if you found a piece in your slice of cake you received a fortune for the upcoming year. My slice had the Monopoly thimble hiding in it—the corresponding fortune said that I was going to save money. I found it funny that I am allegedly going to save money during the year that I am a poor graduate student.

Class itself was fun too. This class is a continuation of last semester’s workshop on full-length plays, only with a new professor taking over. Our professor had emailed us over the break and asked us to bring in 5–10 pages of something brand new that was part of “the play you’ve been avoiding writing.” It was a tough assignment. I’ve been throwing around the idea for months of writing sort of a dance/music/text fusion piece, but I had no clue where to begin or how to approach something like that. This assignment forced me to at least imagine what the opening minutes of such a show might look like. What I brought into class was pretty bizarre and will probably change entirely when the piece is developed, but it was fun to just get something completely new and different out there. The current full-length I’m working on (the Somerville family play) is very realism based and does a lot of playing around with dialogue and language, so I wanted to try something as far away from that as possible, where I couldn’t rely on dialogue to carry the piece. I do want to finish the family play first though and work on the dance play on the side when I need a break.

I went out for lunch with three other classmates after class ended, which was fun. On normal Thursdays, I’ll have to rush back home after class and put in another couple hours of work at my job, but I took a vacation day yesterday so that I’d have the afternoon free. Two of the girls are from the Bay Area, so there was lots of talk about their breaks in California and how coming back to freezing temperatures and snow on the ground was not a good time. And the three of them are all in a dramaturgy class (fulfilling one of their non-workshop electives), which meets on Fridays from eight in the morning until noon. I can’t imagine being functional that early in the day for four hours (I know, I know, my science major friends who had marathon labs are rolling their eyes at me right now, but I’m just not a morning person). And I don’t have the space in my schedule to take more than the two required writing classes per semester—I’d never be able to fit in my work hours if I took more than two classes.

Speaking of my work hours, I’ll restart my crazy schedule on Monday. Classes will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I’ll work half-days on those days (from 7:30–11:30 in the morning Tuesdays and from 8–10:30 in the morning and then again after class from 4–5:30 in the afternoon on Thursdays). I’ll have to make up the hours I miss on those half-days, so I’ll be working from 8–6 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It’s similar to what I did in the fall. It was so nice to have a normal 9–5 work schedule again during the semester break, but I’m also happy to be back in class despite the craziness it wreaks upon my schedule. It was harder to keep myself motivated to write when I knew I didn’t have class twice a week and there were holidays all over the place. I believe Holy Cross is also starting up classes again this coming week, so good luck to any current students who may be reading this!