What I leaned from writing Reader's Theater.

This was actually a really enjoyable assignment. In some ways it was easy since my group chose Snow White, and that was one of my favorite childhood stories. But on the other hand it had a tendency to be difficult when it came to writing dialogue between characters, and making sure the rewrite was close to the accurate story. Another problem arose when only one of my other group members helped with writing the script. The solution to the problem was to have the third person be the main character of the story, in result having a main role. Julia and I also have larger roles in the play, but the story is not about the lives of our characters so our contribution to the final performance is different. One of my favorite aspects of our play was the manipulation of the role of the narrator. The narrator in our play serves as a structure of the plot, setting, and any actions that would be better used with props (which aren't used in reader's theater). This was not an original thought, but rather evolved over time. The use of the narrator also helped keep the play about 12 pages, rather than dragging it out onto 20, because the narrator had the ability to summarize without loosing any depth. The utilization of the narrator brought some insight into the work of writers of books. Narrators are indeed very useful tools and serve as more than just the main narration, they have a whole lot more insight to the story.

The number of lines per character is not evenly distributed. There are 5 major characters (Ricco White, the Evil Queen, Mirror, and Nurse). The other characters are just there. If there was less of a constraint on length I would have been interested in developing the other 6 dames' characters more so, however that was not a possible action if the play wanted to keep its integrity.

Another interesting thing that happened during the production of Ricco White and the Seven Dames came from researching the plot of the story. The Disney animation version is vastly different than the original version written by the Brothers Grimm. I did not know this going into the project and I was surprised by some of the changes Disney made to the plot line, such as in the movie Snow White is only "killed" once from eating the poisoned apple, but in the original story the Evil Queen attempts this action three times in three different ways. My group chose to use aspects from each to come up with a combination of all the things we enjoyed for each version, with a twist...instead of a female Snow White our script has a male lead, Ricco White. This one change created a domino effect; with Ricco White instead of Snow White, we needed to change the dwarfs to dames, and the prince to a princess. Leaving the Evil Queen as a female was strictly for comical and ironic purposes.

Overall this was a great assignment and I really enjoyed it. The process went faster than I anticipated and it was a lot of fun to create my own version of something I loved in my childhood.