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jackiemomof7
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| Posted: Sept 15 2008 at 12:40pm | IP Logged
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Ladies I need some help here, big time help!! I am trying to help our homeschooling group to put on a play this next spring. Would any of you know of a website that sells plays for groups? And what would you suggest for a play? The children who will mostly likely be in this are in grades 4-8th and a few highschoolers (don't know if many will want to do this).
I have no drama in my background, I am about the least talented person for this type of thing. But I was silly one night and ask if anyone would like to do this and all the moms (and kids) really want to put on a play. So thoughts,suggestions and any ideas would be a BIG help to this mom!
Thanks and God bless,
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Jackie wife to Jim for 27!! years, proud army mom of Chris(25),Chef Matthew(24) and Sister Grace of Benedectines (21),Joshua(19),Nicholas(17),Jaymee(15), Elizabeth(13) and 2 in Heaven.Grandma to 3!
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Mary Chris
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| Posted: Sept 15 2008 at 3:25pm | IP Logged
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Jackie,
Are you looking to do a full length production? Our drama group does 30 minute plays. If you have a good library nearby they should have some books of plays. I will try and find out the name of the book she used a lot. Sometimes our group would split the children up by age and have 2 or more plays each performance.
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Blessings, Mary Chris Beardsley
mom to MacKenzie3/95, Carter 12/97 Ronan 3/00 and wife to Jim since 1/92
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JodieLyn
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| Posted: Sept 15 2008 at 5:45pm | IP Logged
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Who is your intended audience? the younger siblings of the kids in the play?
I did children's theatre in high school and it's more interactive and less costumes and make up and being one particular character. I still have the written one we did..
Magic Theatre: a new-style children's revue with music by Saundra Matthews-Deacon.
You show your character by how you act and move and talk rather than with costuming.. so the actors change characters right on stage.. and it tells you how to go about it. It was huge fun. We went around to the elementary schools and performed for younger kids.
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jackiemomof7
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| Posted: Sept 15 2008 at 6:27pm | IP Logged
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This will be for parents,families and parish members. The kids want to do it as a fundraiser for my dd's order that she belongs to. They are raising money for their new convent.
I thought about doing 2 short plays since there seems to be so many children who want to take part. I also thought about before hand having the younger kids do some songs with movements.
We have a girls group who will provide snacks for this event also.
Gosh, the thought of this scares me... I am so out of my element here. There has been some who have offered help (which I will gladly accept) I just feel since this was my idea (not the fundraising part another thought of that) I really need to pull off something great! Did I mention that I am a TOTAL intervert also. 
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Jackie wife to Jim for 27!! years, proud army mom of Chris(25),Chef Matthew(24) and Sister Grace of Benedectines (21),Joshua(19),Nicholas(17),Jaymee(15), Elizabeth(13) and 2 in Heaven.Grandma to 3!
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SharonO
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| Posted: Sept 15 2008 at 9:20pm | IP Logged
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Coming out of lurkdom to post a suggestion. A friend of mine lives in Lincoln, NE and her daughter has participated in plays under the direction of the person who directs these plays. Some of them sound really cute. I don't know much more than that.
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Sharon in MO
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jackiemomof7
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| Posted: Sept 16 2008 at 2:07pm | IP Logged
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Wow!! I love their plays, but they are little expensive for our group. I wish I lived close by so my children could attend. They really look wonderful!
Thanks for sharing!
God bless,
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Jackie wife to Jim for 27!! years, proud army mom of Chris(25),Chef Matthew(24) and Sister Grace of Benedectines (21),Joshua(19),Nicholas(17),Jaymee(15), Elizabeth(13) and 2 in Heaven.Grandma to 3!
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folklaur
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| Posted: Sept 16 2008 at 2:30pm | IP Logged
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When we did this, we found plays at our local library. They had a section of them, and all the info about copyrights, etc.
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ALmom
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| Posted: Sept 16 2008 at 4:30pm | IP Logged
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We found it extremely difficult to find something in the public domain (ie without copyright restrictions and high cost of royalties and no editing or changing parts - ie we couldn't make a male supporting role into a female one) for a small group. We were a really small group, under 10 people with only 1 male so that may be part of the reason we had so much trouble. We were also informed by the drama person that most of the time you are not even allowed to edit (ie take out s* inuendas from an otherwise very funny play or bad words, etc.) It was extremely frustrating. The restrictions become even tighter if you are performing and there is an admission fee. We were simply doing it for younger siblings. Internet searches were a waste of time - but perhaps some of that was due to our extremely small group of actors and actresses (less than 10) and so were library searches - due in part, I'm sure to our less than stellar library system here. Our particular group involved a mix of high school and middle school performers and they did end up pulling in some much younger folks for roles just to be able to get to do something. The highschoolers who drove this, ie the ones interested in really getting something going, wanted to do something more than your typical life of the saint. They wanted to seriously learn about drama. However, if you had a group that just wanted to perform a play, CHC does sell a collection of plays. It wasn't quite what our group wanted to do - not enough character presentation or development and action for them and they wanted something with a little bit of humor. The plays from CHC is called A Few Lines to Tell You. Some are written for just a few folks, ie doable as a family group.
We learned a lot about theater copyright and it seemed extremely restrictive. The next time we try to do something, I think I'm suggesting that my dd write the author and publisher of a book and we'll just write our own play. It was quite an eye opener to us to see what was out there - most of it was either bad language, bathroom humor or themes too adult for our audience and performers.
I'm very interested in what sources you find as I know my dd would be interested in doing this again if we found a good play.
Janet
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SallyT
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What about adapting something like a familiar fairy tale? Maybe an older child in your group really likes writing and could work from a story that's familiar and maybe lends itself to a humorous interpretation. My daughter for a number of years was involved in a community children's theatre where the director wrote a lot of the plays they put on, just doing kind of wacky versions of tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty -- my daughter herself, in eighth grade, wrote a "fractured" version of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" (great story with lots of girl parts, good for a large-ish group), which this same theatre director helped her revise and then direct -- the children's theatre put it on, not this past spring, but the spring before. It was very cute and funny (not that I am at all biased, you understand), and the other kids seemed to get a real kick out of performing in a play that another kid had written.
So that's one way around the copyright issue -- just take a story to work from, and have somebody write it as a play. If you had a number of kids interested in writing, they could write one-act plays and then the "play" would actually be a festival of all their one-acts. Again, they can work from familiar public-domain stories like fairy tales, and you have no copyright issues and no cost other than printing out their scripts. And you've covered a whole aspect of the theatre experience which often gets overlooked in drama classes for kids.
Actually, now that I think of it, the drama class I taught for our homeschool group two years ago did "mystery plays" at Christmas time -- we studied about medieval mystery plays, then I divided them into groups, and each group was a "guild" that came up with a short play based on a Bible story (creation and fall, Noah, Moses and Pharoah, etc). They didn't do written scripts, just made up their dialogue as they worked out their scenes, but we rehearsed for about a month and then put on the plays for parents and siblings -- the whole show took maybe 45 minutes, but it was really fun, and some of the scenes were very inventive. Mystery plays were traditionally performed around the feast of Corpus Christi, so if you were going to do a late-spring show, that might be another fun idea. (and the kids I did this with were the same age range as you have -- eight-ish to high school. Worked great for all ages).
Just some thoughts -- you CAN do it!
Sally
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Mary Chris
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| Posted: Sept 25 2008 at 7:03pm | IP Logged
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I found one of the books a lot of our plays came from at the library the other day, Everyday Plays for Boys and Girls by Helen Louise Miller. The ISBN number is 0-8238-0274-4.
Some of the plays our group performed are Sourdough Sally, Simple Simon's Reward, and Shirley Holmes and the FBI (a huge, huge, huge favorite!)
Let us know how it goes!
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Blessings, Mary Chris Beardsley
mom to MacKenzie3/95, Carter 12/97 Ronan 3/00 and wife to Jim since 1/92
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4Real Forums : The Arts in the Everyday
Topic: homeschool group play
