Fall SAVY 2016 (Day 4) – From the Page to the Stage: Novel to Script to Production
Students, thank you again for an exciting session! I’m rewarded week after week by your creativity, your collaborative spirit, and your evident delight as we discover bit-by-bit the backstory of Tinkerbell, Hook, and the whole of the Peter Pan mythology.
This week we (twice) met for the first time the dastardly Black Stache and his amiable lackey, the pirate Smee; the introductions to these two characters varied significantly from novel to playscript, and it was fascinating to watch you reconcile the vicious and quite serious Stache of the book with the goofy, arrogant, malapropism-prone fool of Rice’s play. Courtesy of this later Stache, we explored all manner of wordplay — pun, haiku, limerick, iambic verse, and rhyme — as well as Stache’s exploitation of power and status. I particularly enjoyed hearing you tell your jokes to invoke our coerced laughter, only to then silence the room with your subtext-heavy hand gestures.
We added to our list of vocabulary words, including: winsome, muse, panache, and Amish, as well as the aforementioned malapropism, haiku, iambic, and subtext. With the last of these words, we spent some time exploring its apparent etymology — how “subtext” is constructed of root words, and how an examination of “sub” and “text” in context can help to deduce the word’s meaning. In fact, after our exercise, I suspect you have the tools and the context to work with your parents to examine this paragraph and to guess at the meaning of the word “etymology.”
Oh, and on the subject of subtext: I thoroughly enjoyed speaking Omnish with you. Once you’ve mastered Omnish, speaking Dodo with Molly and Lord Aster will be a snap. Until next week: Ooonta ffurple dee, eee sana taca Saturdough!
(For those of you who missed our lesson in Omnish, we’ll get you caught up, though for now I can translate into English: Enjoy your week, and I’ll see you next Saturday!)
Furple de durple (best wishes),
David
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