End of the World Show: Exploratory Rehearsals

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This post is part of a series about creating the End of the World Show. 

With collaborators roughly in place, I needed to figure out what was actually going to happen on stage. I had a vague outline in my head, but these things never work how I think they will.

I emailed out to 22 people in the community who I thought could have the time and interest to help workshop the show. I got a pretty positive response -- a good chunk of them were willing to help. The idea was to help me when you have time to figure out what this show can be!  

What did these early rehearsals look like?

Much of what we did was workshop games. I've played a lot of shortform games, and I wanted to take a handful of them and figure out how they would or could work in this Alien Show concept. 

I don't have photos from the exploratory sessions, unfortunately. But here is the cast ironing out some kinks in 2 Min Challenge.

For example, on of the first games we looked at is 2 Minute Challenge , Challenge  or whatever your group calls it. Here's a great description from our friends over at Friday Night Improvs. I came to rehearsal with a few thoughts:

  • This game could be earlier in the show. The humans want to just tell some stories.
  • At various points, something goes wrong. Either the overlords intervene, or maybe they react and the humans intervene, or the humans always intervene as they learn each others' personalities and what the aliens respond to. These "interventions" are our challenges.
  • The game can still retain its fast pace, it's increasingly silly challenges and so forth.

We tried a lot of combinations, and ended up with something that didn't even look all that close to what I imagined. It was story based, but often the interjections were helpful. There was usually a mix of how the challenge was interjected. And the humans told their stories more collaboratively than competitively as is the point of the short form version.   

I loved this spirit of workshopping games for a different purpose. We had a little bit of time, and we worked together to create something once we saw what it looked like.  

We touched on some of the other major aspects of the show, but most of these early rehearsals were workshopping games.