Magical Moonshine Theatre

ISS
Inspiring Student Stories

The Story Becomes a Play - a guide for teachers


The culmination of the ISS program is a production of student writings into a Magical Moonshine Theatre puppet production to be performed for the schools involved in the program. Below are some of the criteria that Magical Moonshine uses to analyze the performance potential of stories, as well as some initial thoughts on student writing and its theatrical possibilities.

Introductory thoughts: an initial disclaimer-
Before giving a list of criteria that might impose limitations on students writing, We would first like to say that the whole purpose of this program is to excite students about writing. Limitations can have the ability to both inspire creativity and discourage it, depending on the attitude of the writer/creator. It is possible that teachers will get more wonderfully creative work from their students by NOT sharing the criteria below but rather by letting the students imaginations have free reign. On the other hand, your students writings may be part of a topic or subject that is a part of your planned curriculum, and thus already have some limitations imposed on them, and following the suggestions below might give their writing a better chance of being chosen for the puppet play (although, again, that is not the purpose of the program, only an incentive). We will thus leave this decision to the teachers with the idea that sometimes crazy-wild-creative can make a very interesting story or theatre piece.

Some ways we look at stories when we adapt them to plays:
1. Is there action? Do things happen? Interior or introspective stories can be interesting to read but are more challenging to make into theatre. Puppetry is a visual theatre, a theatre of action.
2. Are there interesting characters? Character development is important both in stories and plays. In puppet plays animal make good characters, and sometimes otherwise inanimate objects can become fun characters as well.
3. Are there manageable numbers of characters? (How many puppets can the performers have on stage at once? Of course, this is Magical Moonshine’s problem. Some types of puppets require one puppeteer per puppet character. Some types of puppets allow for two puppets to one puppeteer, and sometimes ‘group’ puppets can be made that represent crowds.) Number of characters should not be a definitive limiting factor in choosing a story, but it is definitely a factor we will have to consider. For the size and time frame of our production, smaller casts will be easier for puppeteers to handle and audiences may have trouble keeping track of large numbers of characters in a short play.