The following piece was written by students in this year's "The Journalist's Lens" JTerm class and is reprinted with permission from the JTerm Times.
William Biscuit
By Phoebe Barr, '19, JTerm Times
"No, William, please," pleads Lily Buckley '20, kneeling over a stuffed teddy bear on the floor of the Black Box Theater. Students surround her in audience seats, watching, working the lights, and taking notes on stapled scripts. "You're my best friend. Don't leave me alone."
"Just know that I will always be a part of you," replies Eric Dzwonczyk, voicing the teddy bear from a seat in the audience.
"I'll never forget you. I love you, William Biscuit."
After Buckley's final line, the students applaud and turn toward English teacher Mr. McCreary, who is seated in the corner of the room.
"Let's do those last few lines again," Mr. McCreary suggests. "Lily, when you're crying, I want to see snot flying."
The play they are rehearsing is called "William Biscuit." Mr. Clay and Mr. McCreary, the teachers for the Reading, Writing, and Directing One-Act Plays J-Term, and Lily Buckley and Eric Dzwonczyk, the writers and stars of "William Biscuit," discuss the development of this project and the way this J-Term has helped them learn about theater and writing.
The idea for this play began with theater exercises done in class. "We were creating a character named Dimitri as a whole group," Dzwonczyk begins. "She was rich, and she lived in Russia, so she had a bear." Later, he says, they changed this real bear into a stuffed bear.
"Dimitri became a little girl, Cassidy," Buckley continues, "and the stuffed bear became a part of her imagination." She explains that Cassidy was a mixture of Dimitri and a character created from another theater exercise. "We played an improv game where we were doing an interview for a TV show, and we had to create a character - how they walked, how they talked, how they would feel, so I did this girl Cassidy." The character of William Biscuit, Cassidy's stuffed bear and imaginary friend, came from the same TV show game.
After the creation of these two characters, Dzwonczyk recounts, "We created a Google Doc and we had a worksheet with "crisis" and "conflict" objectives. We first started writing with that, we got a general idea, and after that it was about creating dialogue." Dialogue had to match their characters' "personalities and ages," according to Dzwonczyk, and finding the right lines was a long process.
"It all started with coming up with the character Dimitri," said Buckley, "and coming up with our characters in that improv game, and we combined it all and added our own ideas, and wrote this really cool play."
Like many other plays that this J-Term has created, William Biscuit was made through a mixture of improvisation and writing. "It's like a layering," Mr. McCreary notes, "where they come up with an idea through improv, then they write about it for a while, then take what they've written and perform it, then it changes some more, and then they refine it through writing."
"When we started this J-Term," says Mr. Clay, "we wrote 'improv' and 'writing' on the board, and we said that these are two ways you can come up with plays, but we're also going to explore the ways they intersect and help each other. If you're stuck in one, the other one can help you look at things from a different perspective. We've been sharing our knowledge in each of those areas with each other and with the group."
This theater J-Term has helped with both writing, acting, and improvisational skills, students claim. "Before this, I didn't know how in improv you're supposed to always say 'yes'," says Dzwonczyk. "I wouldn't have ever thought that before."
Buckley adds, "All the games we play and all the writing we do, I think it'll help me with short story writing."
Students who want to see the finished product, along with many other plays and performances from different J-Terms, should go to Arts on the Move on Friday afternoon in the Black Box Theater.