THE WORST PLAY I NEVER WROTE with Paul Bonin-Rodriguez
part of Nouveau 47’s Nouveau Frontiers New Works Festival
Saturday, May 21st from 2-4pm
Nouveau 47 at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park (map)
Admission is $10 at the door! Bring paper and pen.
THE WORST PLAY I NEVER WROTE
This workshop comes to creative development from the least likely direction – that of prospective failure – for the purposes of freeing up our creative voices and illustrating just how capable we already are at rescuing bad writing, especially after a first reading, during which everyone has fidgeted awkardly. Working separately, but caucusing together, we’ll find ways to rescue bad plots, stilted dialogue, corny jokes, and overly long descriptions (as in the first sentence). Two dimensional characters will expand; melodramas will find their hidden Brecht; unnecessary adverbs will get pruned out; and we’ll all be the wiser. Really. Finally, because the workshop leader bragged about it in his bio, we’ll discuss where we might take our new plays for continued chrysalis-like development.
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez is a playwright and performer who has created and toured multi-disciplinary performances nationally since 1992. His plays include Memory’s Caretaker (1999), Quinceanera (1997), an adaptation of Naomi Shihab-Nye’s Habibi, and six episodes of the stories of John Roy Hobson, Talk of the Town (1992), The Bible Belt and Other Accessories (1993), Love in the Time of College (1994), Fringe and Fringe Ability (2004), Higher Planes (2006), and A Ranch Home in Manhattan (2009). He is currently editing all six as a book.
He holds a PhD from the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin, where he works as an Asst. Professor and researches artist sustainability across the U.S.; consequently his current creative workshops combine artistic practice with resources building exercises, helping playwrights to answer, “Where should this go next?”