Writing the bios and thoughts

I'm having serious second thoughts about this. It's one thing to ask the cast members to write out 90-word bios, but what I'm suggesting now seems to be extremely deep. Really deep. I've jotted down a few questions, and maybe...I need to start interviewing people instead. Take this sample of questions for Alex, who played Artie:

• Was it Bananas’ medical care costs that forced Artie to have to take a job as a zookeeper, and what keeps him there stuck in Queens?
• Is Bananas the cause of everything?
• Is that why Artie decides to kill her at the end of the play?
• If not, why does Artie kill her?
• Does Artie really love Bunny, and if not, why?
• Did Artie ever sleep with Bunny, and if so, why in the play does Bunny always ward off his attempts to kiss her?
• Zookeeper is a dead-end job. Other than Billy, did Artie ever have any plans to move away or move out? Or would he have been tied down by Bananas forever? (Is that perhaps a reason why he chooses to kill her?)

I stress that most of these questions probably have speculative answers, and are based on the assumption that each actor thinks long and hard about the history of the character to get into them, to act them better. I could perhaps be completely wrong, but even then, it would still be interesting to see what each actor thinks.

Do you think it would be more prudent to schedule interviews with each cast member rather than post them all on this blog?

This is the same image, again, and again, I'm having trouble with the spacing. With a character bio and an actor bio, I only get about 90 words for each section or thereabouts. The questions I'm asking would yield much larger biographies than space would permit.. I could move the actor bios to their own page instead to give room for about a 100/300 word count for the character/actor bios.

Pool party

Today I did some pool pictures. Breathtaking. I think I nailed the moments, the highlights of the spa images. I remember seeing Alex's mother taking out a camera to take one shot...I stayed and took about 100 or more or so, because I knew it could get better. And it did. Leaps from the spa to the pool, water playing, etc. all happened.

Proposed book layout and covers

Drawn up schematic plans for the book, using the Blurb.com self-publishing service.

Above are the cover images I have picked out.

• Introduction
• Cast bios
  • Actors – three to a page
  • Props and technical – same?
  • Mr. Byers and Ms. Makas
• HBHS practice
• Rose Center practice
• Performance
  • Pre-performance, the meeting and such/li>
  • Arc – starting from the beginning to the end/li>
  • Parallel images (practice vs. performance)/li>
  • Aftermath of the show
• Cast party

Parallelism and thoughts

This was the crux of the sheet I printed out - the parallelism, the transition from the practice to the stage, where the actors could go on and off stage and act with the proper props and the stage arrangement. The above is an example of when Artie chokes Bananas at the end of the play.

This is an example of the insight. I stop the sequence of images for people to give feedback. I envision Alex and Jennifer, for instance, giving their thoughts about how it felt to act out that particular moment, or the reaction from the other actors about how the play ended or how well Jennifer and Alex acted out the scene (in this example).

Characters and cast bios

I've come out with some schematic models for a list of characters from the play. The page is ordered like this:

• Description of what the character does in the play.
• The actor's thoughts on the character.
• Biography of that actor.

Proposed biographies would be about 90 words and up. Artie's entry is a lot longer, and would stand at 90 words; Bananas' is a lot shorter, and Jennifer could write a lot more. That depends on how long their thoughts on the character are, of course.

Biography should include

• Name
• Class of #### from HBHS
• # of years in APA, specialty in APA
• Plans for college – whether to continue theater or to focus elsewhere
• Recent roles played
• Best part about being in APA
• Why you joined APA

Here's a sample biography using all of the above criteria. This biography is 90 words long.

Michael Yee (class of 2006) is in his zeroth year in APA, majoring in theatrical photography. He is a third year at Cal State Long Beach and is majoring in photojournalism. He hopes to become a professional photographer when he graduates. Recent photography assignments have included Fusion 2009 and the House of Blue Leaves. The best part about photographing APA is to see the talent, emotion, and hard work that is invested into each production. He joined the cast of APA because he had never seen an APA performance before.

What do you think?