Our Brand New Piece!

In a dramatic twist of fate, we decided to scrap our whole piece and start again with just 6 weeks until our performance. None of us were truly comfortable with our characters, and we didn't know what each characters intentions were. We think that we got too carried away with the Cinderella story and the theme of body image, and therefore our storyline suffered. Many of our scenes were boring, and although there was a lot of dialogue, our characters weren't actually saying anything, which made improvisation even harder and slowed down the entire devising process.


Myself and Charlotte Trimble came up with the idea of a twisted version of Wizard of Oz, after being inspired by some creepy artwork we saw on the internet.




When we started to google 'creepy wizard of Oz', we found some pretty disturbing pictures which inspired write out a pretty horrifying storyline. Scene by scene, this was the narrative that we came up with:
1- Dorothy wakes up in an asylum where a super creepy Doctor sedates her.
2- Dorothy wakes up in a disgusting 'Oz', where she meets a scarecrow and a Tin Man with their heart and brain torn out.
3- FREAK SHOW! A random yet horrifying circus scene featuring some sick circus acts.
4- Physical Theatre/SC and TM decide to take Dorothy to Witch. They follow the yellow brick road.
5- SC and TM fall asleep in the poppies, Dorothy wakes up in the asylum and creepy Doctor puts her in a cage.
6- SC and TM wake up and tell the story of the red shoes. Then they find Dorothy and laugh at her.
7- The witch appears and tells SC and TM to take Dorothy's heart and brain, they savage her. The end!


So our rather cheery piece had been planned out, and we cast our characters:
Dorothy - Charlotte Morley
Scarecrow - Charlotte Trimble
Tin Man - ME
Doctor/Witch - Matthew Holley


Already we were even more passionate and excited about this new piece than we had ever been about our Cinderella one, and as a group we fully dedicated ourselves to extra rehearsals outside of lessons to make sure we made up enough time to complete the piece.


We started working on our opening scene, and now our characters were bigger and more adventurous, we found it a lot easy to explore the physicality behind them and use our voices in different ways. For example, after being shocked in an electric chair, my character does a roly-poly and jumps into the air before spinning in circus with the Scarecrow and falling into Dorothy's lap. The characters of the Tin Man and Scare crow are more loose, and our voices randomly change in pitch, because we are constantly trying to frighten Dorothy and creep out the audience.


Matthew Holley took on the role of the creepy Doctor amazingly well. His laugh is genuinely the creepiest thing I've ever heard, and we encouraged him to treat Dorothy like more of an animal that a human, and this worked especially well when it came to him putting her into the cage. Charlotte Morley was great at playing the character of Dorothy, which was quite similar to the role of Cinderella, however we are still working as a group on how to make Dorothy more eccentric and creepy, after all she is living inside a mental asylum. The transition of our characters from who we played in Cinderella to who we play in this new piece has worked really well. In Cinderella, myself and Charlotte Trimble played a duo of sadistic fairies, and now we continue to work together as a duo in this piece as well. Matthew Holley was playing the wicked step-mother before, and now he'd the wicked doctor and witch. It seems we all have a type cast!


Building on our new piece, we didn't want to make the same mistakes that we made last time, and as a group we decided that the corny humour and not-funny jokes that we tried to incorporate into our old piece just weren't working. Seeing as this piece would be dark and horrifying, we didn't want to incorporate comedy, and this worked well for our new characters. Also, trying to come up with funny jokes took up a lot of our devising time in our last piece, and creeping the audience out is much easier than making them laugh. After devising the first few scenes of our piece, we took some time out of the theatre space to design the set. Although none of the names of the original characters will be said out loud in our piece, we wanted there to be some evil gestures to the original movie on stage, easter eggs for the ravid Wizard of Oz fans who probably wont be in the audience, however we thought by packing the stage with unknown myths about the original movie would encourage us to work well in our surroundings. We wanted some obvious hints, for example the Wicked Witches legs poking out from underneath the stage, wearing the red slippers, and and yellow brick road running across the stage. We also did some research into unknown facts about the film, and found that theres a myth surrounding a suicidal munchkin hanging himself during filming, and so we'll hang a munchkin in the corner of the stage, and one of the medications that Dorothy is taking will be a medication which contributed to the death of Judy Garland.