Beginnings of Form

At this moment I have a general idea of what I want this piece to consist of. I have two characters that will alternate with one another and create a dialog. One character will be the voice of the research and one character will be Ophelia. At this moment I am thinking that the research voice will be an English professor, or something of the sort, and she will be doing this research because of her own obsession with the character. Perhaps she is working on writing a book exposing the real Ophelia. I want to shy away from her being an actress researching the part because I want this person to start with a total outside/intellectual approach. Her speaking will probably take on the feeling of a class lecture, and perhaps it will start out with her actually giving a class lecture to make the audience a concrete part of the story. Her scenes will be interspersed with Ophelia scenes. I'm not sure how these will go either. I want her to be reacting to the information we have learned from the Professor. One idea is to have her sing. I feel that music should be involved in some way as a way of breaking up the portions where I am talking. I also am spurred on to use music by the script. When Ophelia enters in her madness, the script says she is carrying a lute. I am just getting in to the swing of playing my guitar again, and I think that Ophelia could be using the guitar through most of her scenes. My husband has offered his assistance with music, and this could allow for some scenes that are wordless, using either music or sound-scape behind them. Scenes would interweave until we hit a climax in which both characters would either confront one another in a scene, or perhaps through some other convention involving voice over or music.

I think the arc of the play will be in the Professor character. She will begin very academic and outside of all the feeling of the character, until through circumstances in her life, she will follow the path of Ophelia to some extent. I have the closing image already in my head, but I will save that for later...

The next step is to go through all of my character notes from the time I first played Ophelia. From here I will begin to find the bits I want to use, and see what information I am missing that I need to do more research on. Then the Professor will have the beginnings of her voice.