When I first read Thomas Koron's "The Tragic Tale of Duke Randolph," I wasn't quite sure how I was going to get it through a TMPW session. The script is a four-scene, sixteen-character piece about a tragedy that happened in England in the 1300s. Whew, a script that intense to produce wouldn't make it past the reviewers of a ten-minute play festival, even though the dialogue and sense of tragedy are tight, poignant and well-established in the script. It was such a fun script I knew I wanted to workshop it.
So, when Thomas revealed that he is pursuing his Ph.D. in music and that he sees this script as the beginning of an opera, it all made complete sense! It made so much sense, actually, that I encouraged him to turn it into the first "Twenty-Minute Opera." (If Thomas does start that genre of opera, you heard it hear first... but there's no way I'm leading those workshop sessions... I can't sing!)
It was a little out of the ordinary to workshop what a script that is written for an operatic stage, but we had fun with it, and found a way to read sixteen characters with three people.
My thanks to Thomas for his script and to TMPW-regulars, Jake Wilson and Cate Vincent, for their continued support of this project.
You can listen to the audio recording of the session. Don't worry, we don't sing... that's for another project.