TMPW Session #3 was a rousing success with a great script and a full house of participants!
The script for session #3 was I Am Still Here by Cate Vincent. Cate called in from a boat on a French canal, Rebecca Basham was our guest professor (and the sponsor of the Ten Minute Play Workshop), and Jay Asher and Darren Caulley were the critics.
We again experienced a weirdness with the web cams, and ran it as an audio-only session. Maybe it's better without video, and allows us to focus on the reading more. Darran just wrote me and suggested a Google+ Hangout as a possibility to try to get the video portion working. I'll investigate that. There was also some audio-feedback, which is also on the audio recording, so I've got some techno-stuff to work on.
But, back to the session. The script and the reading, frankly, made me cry. For the workshopping section, I found myself using the questions I had used in Session #1, and adding the new question I picked up from Jeff Sweet's article on feedback, "If you had to summarize the theme of the play in one sentence, what would it be?" The answer overwhelmingly was the title of the play, so maybe I need to find a different question.
From this session I learned that there is something that happens when folks get together to focus on a script. It is unlike anything else I do as a student. The act of workshopping a piece of writing seems to bring out the best in folks. I feel privileged to be doing this.
You can listen to the audio recording of Session #3; sorry about the reverb in the recording...