BWW Blog: The Bright Spots - A New Play, Devised and Filmed During a Pandemic

I want to start this post by acknowledging how lucky I am to be a part of such an innovative theatre program that has allowed its students to safely continue their art despite the circumstances. Since I am a theatre education major, next semester I will be student teaching, so this was my last semester for shows. This semester we had to do shows a bit differently than the standard of getting rights to a script and performing it live. All 80 theatre majors were split into production groups, assigned jobs, and had the freedom to create and film a work of our own. I got the honor of being a director which was a new and stressful, but oh so rewarding role.

There are 10 different production groups, which means each production team took different approaches when creating their play. Some groups had one person write a script and they went from there, others scripted more as they went along. After being in the devised show Voices For Change about a year ago, I decided to take a similar approach as our director did during that process. We started with a theme. I was hoping to do something uplifting and positive, and luckily my group felt the same way. We explored more detailed ideas like finding joy in the little things, there is good in everyone, and you don't always know a person's full story, all of which that we incorporated into our final script.

Once we found the themes, we thought about what characters fit into that. I had everyone present a character idea and also an explanation as to why that person's story is relevant and needs to be told. Someone suggested the idea of a news reporter character, which seemed to resonate with the group and she ended up being our main character, who the audience gets to watch grow as she interacts with the other characters. The other characters came from the team's suggestions as well and were developed through scene work and improv. We continued doing improv exercises to get dialogue and eventually a script formed from that.

Like any project, there were unforeseen obstacles we had to overcome. Our technical director unfortunately was unable to stay on the project, so we had to delegate their responsibilities to other production team members. Shout out to Olivia and Amara for being so willing to take that on! One of our actors went back to live at home for the remainder of the semester, so we had to tweak their scene in order for it to make sense on Zoom. That ended up being good though, as we felt this change improved this character and the context of the scene. Even with minor setbacks, we were able to adapt and prevail, and I am really happy with the work we ended up doing.

Although my involvement in shows this semester did not go exactly how I envisioned it, I still got to do something I love, with a great group of people, and I learned so much. Thank you to everyone who is a part of The Bright Spots, for being such bright spots for me during our process and bringing one another light during this dark time. To watch The Bright Spots and the other 9 fabulous shows in the Xavier Theatre New Play Festival, check out the Xavier Theatre YouTube channel, as these will premiere December 5-15 and stay up for all to enjoy.