Plays Database
NOW 55 31 13 me - The boundary path of realities. One day in the life of adolescents
The script contains the entire text of the production. The actors for the most part play themselves, sometimes becoming fictitious characters.
NOW 55 31 13 me is not a theatre play in the true sense of the word, but is literally a theatre script. This is because it was created during the rehearsal process and is based on the testimonies of particular people. It is composed of both fictitious and documentary parts. The authors of the texts used in the script are writers Bára Gregorová and Blanka Josephová-Lu?áková, with use also being made of conversations and discussions between the actors in the production. Last but not least, it is important to mention that the play draws on the contributions of teenagers studying at a Pilsen grammar school. The fictitious part of NOW 55 31 13 me takes place over the course of a single day. The students get up in the morning and drag themselves into the classroom, going on to spend the afternoon on the internet. Their day is composed of images of mundanity and stereotype, but one thing about it is out of the ordinary. One of their fellow students has committed suicide by jumping off a roof. What form and likeness is taken by this magical NOW, in which children become adults?
Most of Petra Tejnorová’s auteur-style productions are created with no text to begin with, by means of improvisation, and it is thus relatively difficult to provide precise information ”about the author”. The authors of the script are the actual actors in NOW 55 31 13 Me, plus second-year students at the František K?ižík grammar school in Pilsen, playwright Blanka Josephová-Lu?áková and writer Bára Gregorová. The script contains the entire text of the production. The actors for the most part play themselves, sometimes becoming fictitious characters. This script is fulfilled only on stage, when acted in front of an audience, since it is closely interconnected with the action on stage.
Frost damage
Frost damage
is a play for children of about 12 years old, to be played by two actors in classrooms. It is based on biographical data of the youth of a man who is now about 60-years old, living in the north of The Netherlands.
The play is situated around an old-fashioned coalfired stove, in the back of the classroom somewhere up North in the ‘60’s. Associations of warmth, a family life, possibilities of warmth people can give to each other. Some scenes are located in the classroom, other scenes in a cowhouse, a factory and so on.
`Mother and I’ is a story of not being wanted and of neglect.
Eric is born to a mother who didn’t tell anybody that she was pregnant. The boy is born in a cowhouse. When the farmer finds his housekeeper he doesn’t know whether the bucket with water she took with her, was meant to wash or to drown the baby.
The mother is sent to town. Her hobby is acting. She always takes Eric to rehearsals. When he is 7 years old, he plays Hansel in the Christmas pantomime Hansel and Gretel. His mothers corrects him if he calls him mother, because she is playing the witch: I’m a stranger to you.
Eric tries to win the attention and love of a female teacher by buying her flowers, but she doesn’t see the signs of a neglected boy. Eric is becoming a nasty pupil, often punished.
Eric is very often alone at home. He makes up stories being a popular train driver who is bringing everybody home safely. He imagines being a hero: a knight, or a detective, or a rich boy giving presents to everybody. Eric finds the key of the blanket factory in which his mother has started to work, and finds the wage money of several people.
His mother is suspected, being one of three persons having a key for the factory. She denies it of course. Although there is no evidence, she punishes Eric when the police is gone, locking him up in a coal bunker, and beating him. She doesn’t notice that the boy wants her attention.
An actor and a actress are acting scenes from this life. Not a funny story, not a nice life. They discuss the possibilities of solving the problem of the boy. Is there no end to children being unhappy?
The old sendentary and the young adventurer
The old sedentary and the young adventurer: The old teacher is a sort of sedentary farmer & The young schoolboy is a sort of sea adventurer
The schoolyards, that we used to know, no longer exist. Everything has changed. The buildings have changed. The teachers have changed. The schoolchildren have changed. Everything has changed. What stories are we supposed to tell? Which stories can we tell? Here today, we have two storytellers: one is an old professor, a sort of a sedentary farmer; the other is a young schoolboy, a sort of a sea adventurer. One loves lists. The other can’t live without his maps. Both tell school stories. All sorts of stories. The Old Sedentary, which has never left his hometown and is half buried in is own schoolyard, will describe and list the changes that time has imposed on the World and on himself. The Young Adventurer will tell describe and tell everything about the various schoolyards that he visited during the years and about his own changes. What can we tell but stories?