[ working title ]: A Screenplay

Title

[ working title ]: A Screenplay

Author

Mindy A. Mawhirter

Faculty Sponsor

Kent Neely

Gavin Keulks

Date

10/1/2019

Abstract

Toni Morrison said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it” (Morrison). That has always been my philosophy when it comes to writing. I don’t want to write the same story I’ve read, I want to write what I wish I had been able to read. This means I write a lot of abused gay women, and maybe one day someone will look at a collection of all my writings and comment on the fact that I wrote a lot of abused gay women, and I’m really very much okay with that, because I will have filled the niche I so desperately missed when I was a young gay kid, and later when I was an abused gay adult. The film begins with a woman coming home to make dinner. She pours herself a glass of wine and gets everything she needs to make fajitas. It’s mundane and honestly a little boring, with intention. I wanted to establish the reality quickly and help the audience suspend any disbelief early so that when it starts to pick up, they are swept along with her, and not jolted out of the moment, because when it gets going it goes by quickly. The entire story happens over 29 minutes. With this story, I not only wanted to share my experience with the audience, but communicate the mundanity of my experience. To do that, I drew on experimental practices, naturalism, found space theatre, and the theatre of the oppressed. I used what I saw and what I studied at Western, and then I wrote. And then I threw that entire script out the window because it honestly wasn’t that good. Then, I sat down, and in 3 hours, I wrote, [ working title ].

Type

Text

Honors Thesis

Department

Honors Program

Language

eng

Rights

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Identifier

honors_theses/231