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How Does The Host Live Audience?

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I guess my play is in direct response to the forced politeness & put on enthusiasm that makes up the American Talk Show, I wanted to take that form & make it nightmarish. I took the structure of the host interspersing up to date information with his opening monologue & kind of flipped it on its head. I wanted it to seem like I had never read the news & everything was just a stream of consciousness that I felt important to convey for some reason. I liked the idea of the relationship of the host to the live audience, I was intrigued with the fact that they serve to impress a crowd. They bring out celebrities to keep everyone interested, so I took that model & reversed it, I played with the idea that I was serving to audibly unimpress a crowd …show more content…

I hoped the audience could pick up on this fact as well, although I knew it wouldn’t translate. I actually moved rehearsal to my house, just so the cast could get the uncomfortable tone I desired. I was working on directing through reflections from a television set. I was playing with the concept of what would happen if you gave a sociopath or serial killer their very own show. The set was bare to reflect the simplistic nature of a mind like that.

I tend to gravitate more to solo work because I like having the aesthetic control over what I do, but in thinking about my upcoming Senior Project, I thought it would be more rewarding if I challenge myself to write for voices that aren’t my own.

As an actor, I tend to think that theatre is the best medium we have, in film & television there are mitigating factors that act as a buffer, but in theatre everything is stripped down to the essential core: you. The actors choices are crucial to how vivid the story can be. Without the actor, there is no theatre.

I think a goal of this piece was to send out a distress signal, I wrestled with how to do that. Ultimately, I landed on me becoming an abrasive version of myself. I wanted to illuminate facts about sides of pop culture than hadn’t been thought about while making apparent the frustrations that come with living in this world today. The thing with theatre that I wanted to exploit was the fact that you can make something

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