Thursday, March 19, 2009

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.

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