Drama Preparation

Drama Preparation

1. Time Period

   • Late 70s

2. Aims For Final Performance

   • To leave the audience wanting to know more.
   • Leave the audience petrified.
   • For the cast to remember the sequence of acts.
   • Have the play running smoothly without confusion.

3. What Are We Proud Of?

   • Leaving the audience questioning the characters.
   • Creating a scary atmosphere.
   • Remembering the sequence of the acts.

4. Genre

   • Horror
   • Thriller
   • Drama

5. Characters.

   • Happy/ cute girl
     • Turns scary. Audience learns she has a mental problem.
   • The other characters are multirolling.
     • Start off as circus machinery (ferris wheel, cotton candy stall etc.)
     • Towards the end they become crazy zombies who try to kill the young girl.
     • At the end the girl is suddenly lying in her own bed in her home screaming from the 'dream she had'. What she doesn't know is that the zombie-like creatures are waiting for her behind her bed.

6. First Ideas

   • We weren't sure how we were going to create the scary atmosphere.
   • We came up with the idea of the circus fair because we would be able to create a contrast with the happy atmosphere with the giggling of children and the scary atmosphere of the clowns and haunted house.
   • We decided we could use the movie "The Orphan" as inspiration, using the idea of a happy young girl who turns out to be violent and frightening.
   • We decided that to create the circus atmosphere we bring in the concept of Physical Theatre.
     • We could act out machinery by the noises we could make.
       • To help us with this we decided to put a characteristic on that piece of machinery.
         • E.g. Cotton Candy would be hyper, high pitched, fast, friendly.

7. Vocal Ideas.

   • To make the Zombies sound creepy we thought that everything they would say be a question and that their voices would be high pitched.
   • The young girl's voice would be relativily normal but a bit faster and then as she began to become scary her voice would become low and slow.

8. What wasn't working.

   • We wanted the machinery to catch fire but we were not sure how to portray fire ( we thought that if we just flapped our arms about it would be funny for the audience?)
     • Machinery would scream and act just like if a persons hair caught on fire.
   • The zombies movements.
     • Needed to be a lot slower.

9. Target Audience

   • 13-18 Young Adults.

10. Style

    • Non Naturalistic

11. What Would You Change

    • To start off the play, instead of going straight into the circus scene, I would show her coming out of a mental home. This would tell the audience that she was not a normal girl.
    • The Zombies should keep chanting the same question at the girl that would make her angry. E.g Why did you kill her?

12. Title

    • The Girl who Screamed.