On Space

I've spent the past two weekends doing Lisa D'Amour's workshop through the Flea.  She's pretty terrific -- grounded and smart and insightful about craft, with an openness to a lot of ways of thinking about a play without seeming to elevate one way of thinking over all others.

This particular workshop was about SPACE, and the relationship between character, story, and space...and it included a TON of different exercises and prompts...only a few of which I'll include here -- you want the rest, you should try to sign up for one of her workshops, which she does all over the country :)

Here's a few things to ponder/questions to ask, either next time you're stuck within a scene, or trying to generate material, or finding yourself too fixated on plot:

SOME SPACE QUESTIONS
(1) Which of your characters are most OF the space in which your play takes place?  Which are most alien to the space?  How does that change how they interact with it?
(2) What do your characters most value in the space?  What do they least value, or even despise?
(3) Every character has an "interior landscape."  If your character's landscape were LITERAL, what would it look like?  Is your character a swamp?  A high school gymnasium filled with naked girls and cadillacs?
(4) How does your space give gifts to your characters?  How does it fail your characters or betray or work against them?  How do your characters fail it?  How does the space reveal itself or surprise the audience or give up its secrets?

SOME OBJECT QUESTIONS
(1) If one of your characters brings in an object that tells/speaks to either the immediate past or immediate future, what is that object and how does it do that?
(2) What objects in the space does your character think are most stupid, worthless?  Have him/her talk about that.
(3) Have one of your objects tell your character a deep truth (when I did this, my beer bottle turned out to be pretty damn insightful).

ON STORIES
(1) What if one of your characters says, very simply, something about the space or the past?  What if your other character draws out the story, and it turns out to be not-so-simpl?
(2) What if your characters misremember something that happened in the space, or argue because they remember it very differently?