Stick to the Story
Posted by Sarah E on January 10, 2013
Last night our first task as an ensemble was to read through the stories and choose the ones we thought would be great plays. We had a significant pile to get through, and over the course of the evening I found myself trying to rationalize how and why we chose certain stories.
Of course, there were some that elicited tears of laughter, knee slaps and shouts of “that would be SUCH a good song!” However, for every story that was clearly hilarious (such as one about a poopy parade….I’m not kidding) there was a story that presented a bit of a challenge. Is it entirely necessary to re-enact a student’s fantasy about meeting someone famous? Wait, this story doesn’t really conclude, how can we make it work? I found that I spent a lot of time thinking about those stories. Every kid wrote a story for a reason; and even if the story is not clear, there is a way of presenting it in a fun and entertaining way.
For example, a story I landed on was one untitled short story about a boy named Peter that liked wearing a rooster suit. The story ends with Peter being told he cannot wear the rooster suit and so he cries and cries. The end. Immediately, in my Disney happy-ending mentality, I thought of ways to wrap this story up nicely. “Peter can put his foot down and never take the costume off!” “Peter’s mom can cave and dress up as a chicken”. But then it came to my attention that I would be changing the story, which is one thing that we never ever ever want to do. That would be the equivalent of saying “Romeo and Juliet survive and live happily ever after!!”, to which Shakespeare would roll over in his grave.
Life does not always have happy endings and neither do stories. So the best that I can do is do this particular tale justice by leaving the ending with poor Peter crying. And maybe write a song about how he could be a million different things for Halloween besides a rooster.