An original script: Capt. Jack's all nude shrimpboat review and burlesque show

Date

1997-05

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Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Texas Tech University

Abstract

I used to believe myself incapable of completing a full-length play. My past experiences in playwriting turned out to be nothing more then exercises in futility. The reason that I had no success was because I had no idea what I was doing. When I decided that I was going to write a play, I would just turn on the computer and bravely start writing until I ran out of steam. That is all well and good, but with steam power I was only able to get about two-and-a-half pages into a script. At that point I would read over what I had done, decide that it was horrid, and turn the computer off. This approach led to many halfhearted and ill-conceived beginnings to plays. After a while my playwriting fire dwindled, and I resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to be able to write a play. I stayed in this state of resignation until the fall of 1995 when I took a playwriting class at Texas Tech. In that class I had some success writing short, ten-page oneacts. My fire was re-kindled. From this experience I learned that if I wanted to write a full-length play, I needed to develop a style that would be conducive to my creative process.

My problem was that I needed to develop a process of writing that would enable me to create a full-length play. In my thesis I will discuss the steps that I went through to solve this problem. The steps include: discussion of various influential playwriting methods, evaluation of my experiences writing Capt. Jack's All Nude Shrimpboat Review and Burlesque Show, and analyzation of the results.

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