The Daegu Theater Troupe

This past weekend marked the debut performance of the Daegu Theater Troupe. A couple of months ago, my friend Kristin suggested forming a group for those of us who enjoyed theater in our college and high school days, and this weekend, we put on our first show. It was a 24-hour one-act marathon, and it was hugely successful. Here's how it worked:

-There were 6 groups, each with an average of about 4 people.
-On Friday night, all the participants met downtown and were divided into the 6 groups.
-Each group had one writer, one director, and 2-4 actors.
-The meeting took place at 10:30, lasted until about 11:00, at which point each group's writer went off to write a 10-15 minute script.
-At 9:30AM the next day, and after the writers had stayed up all night long writing, the directors and actors met with the writers. After an initial read-through and discussion of the script, the actors went to work learning it.
-Throughout the course of the day, we were able to spend some time on the stage that we would be performing on, as well as discuss any lighting effects with our technical guy.
-At about 11:30PM on Saturday night, after roughly 14 hours of rehearsing, each group put on its show in front of an audience of around 150-200 people.

My group's show was really neat. I was afraid that all the scripts were going to be juvenile comedies, but our writer actually put together a pretty dark piece. I played the main role of a prison inmate on death row for the gruesome murder of several people. I was basically a psychotic killer who liked to shove pencils through people's heads. The other 2 characters were a prison guard and an artist commissioned to paint my portrait. Our show actually had a dramatic twist at the end; it turned out that my character was actually also a guard, and our prison actually had no prisoners yet (it was brand new.) Myself and the other guard liked to pass the time by messing with people.

Like I said, the show was hugely successful and great fun. There will be another show of some kind in the not-so-distant (I hope) future, and there are also branch-off groups forming within the troupe. For example, some people are planning on organizing something along the lines of an ImprovEverywhere stunt. If you aren't familiar with ImprovEverywhere, they are a group of actors, who are between jobs, who stage random scenes of...well, total randomness. For example, one stunt they pulled was to have around a dozen people break out into a musical in the middle of a crowded food court in a mall. The video is here: http://improveverywhere.com/2008/03/09/food-court-musical/
The top of the page is pictures and a summary of the birth of the idea, putting it together, etc. To just watch the video, scroll down towards the bottom of the page. You should also check out some of their other videos, some of them are really hilarious.

In other news, I bought a plane ticket to Thailand, which I will be visiting with some friends in late February. This is the start of the summer months (I think) in Thailand, so I am looking forward to sprawling out on some tropical beaches in 90-degree weather while the whole of Korea wallows in its frozen dreariness.

Also, today was my last day of outright teaching my least favorite group of classes. Every other Tuesday I have four 1st-grade classes, each of which I am convinced were spawned in the bowels of hell itself. Today was no different, they were little demons as usual. One class was so bad that I took the entire class down to the hallway outside the teachers lounge, had them kneel up against a wall, and put their hands in the air for almost the entire 45-minute period. This is about as far as I am allowed to go in terms of corporal punishment (it is also as far as I am willing to go; hitting a child is unacceptable in my opinion.) Fortunately, they will be testing the next time I am supposed to see them, and shortly after exams the semester will be over, at which point I have roughly 2 months off!

Hallelujah.