It's "Something Fantastic" to Collaborate with Bob Jones

Camp Director Symmonie Preston teasingly titled Bob Jones’ second lecture “Something Fantastic,” and of course he did not disappoint. This time, Bob focused on the concept of collaboration and the importance of collaboration in the playwriting process. The three plays that the campers will perform on August 5th were written using some form of collaboration, and this lecture served as a valuable enhancement to the campers’ understanding of the productions they’re working on. All three were written during England’s “huge thrust” for new plays. This era of popular demand called for single companies to putt on ten to twenty plays a month. This output rate surpassed the ability of a single playwright, whose writing hours were truncated by the sunrise and sunset. Therefore, collaborating with other playwrights and various sources helped to increase output immensely. Collaboration as a concept is fairly simple but occurs in many forms and places. Bob asked the campers to brainstorm in helping him to compile several lists.

Different modes of collaboration between playwrights:
1) Simultaneous partnered collaboration – when two or more playwrights write a play by constantly exchanging ideas so that each scene is the product of multiple authors.

2) Plot and dialogue – when one playwright would come up with the concept for the play and write the basic plott or platt and the other playwright would then write the dialogue for specific scenes.

3) Scene by scene collaboration – when once the plot is agreed upon, two or more playwrights alternate the scenes they write.

Scholars speculate that Beaumont and Fletcher wrote A King and No King in a mixture of the second and third mode. Fletcher wrote the plot and a few scenes, while Beaumont wrote the majority of the dialogue. But these three modes only cover collaboration between playwrights, when there are many more abstract sources of collaborations that a playwright would make use of.

1) Actors – playwrights would base characters off of the actors that would be performing the play
2) Classical Sources – allusions to Greek mythology
3) Historical chronicles
4) Poems/ballads
5) Travelogues – descriptions of foreign lands
6) Stock characters from old plays
7) Recent and current plays – Shakespeare drew from plays running concurrently with his own, and even drew from his other plays, reusing scenarios and certain lines.

After compiling this list of resources for collaboration, Bob presented the campers with the ultimate challenge: to write a nine scene play collaborating with each other and drawing from A King and No King, Henry VI Part I, and Much Ado about Nothing as source texts. The campers started by outlining the main action for each scene. Then they broke into groups of four to write each scene, where they defined the motivations behind the main action. Once the campers wrote their scenes, each group exchanged and edited a different group’s scene. By modifying this new scene to support their authored scene, the campers used this step to make the play more cohesive.

In the end, the play was a hilarious mash-up featuring the protagonists Beadick and Benetrice (a jumble of Much Ado’s Beatrice and Benedick). A King and No King’s clown Bessus joined Much Ado’s Dogberry to wage a war against France led by Don Talbot (fusion of Much Ado’s Don John and Henry’s John Talbot). Much Ado’s Hero acted as a Mulan-type by disguising herself as a man and running off to fight in the war. Not all of the scenes connected well, and there were plenty of character inconsistencies, but the campers learned that those are two side effects of scene-by-scene collaboration. Although the groups weren’t technically supposed to communicate with one another, somehow a random dancing Spaniard appeared in every scene, creating suspicion that some conversation had occurred. This exercise not only taught the campers the struggles and benefits of collaboration and gave them a chance to hone their playwriting skills, but the cold reading of the play also brought campers near to tears from laughing so hard . Everyone could agree that with the guidance of Bob they had indeed created “Something Fantastic”.

--Emma Lo