Prompt 15: The Casebook [no groups]

By Monday at midnight, please post your contribution to our virtual casebook on Richard III. 

This assignment is meant to provide us with an opportunity to think about how and why we can put critical interests and insights at the center of a play's theatrical realization. Levin is our model here: his career as both an academic and a practitioner suggests that it is not enough to teach or read performance. Criticism should influence production by contributing to the productive theatricality that Davis talks about. 

This sort of work can take many different forms. According to the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America, production dramaturgy can involve any and all of the following:

Collate, cut, track, edit, rewrite, construct, and arrange
Find songs, pictures, stories, videos
Help the designer do the research
Help the director do casting
Seek and present pathways into the world of the play
Gather and arrange images, sounds, and ideas for rehearsal
Explore and present: the world of the play
the author of the play,
the script’s production history,
the relevant criticism
Conceive the forms of the script as a script
Conceive the forms of the play as it grows
Stay on course when all goes well
Create the lobby display

But in general, the dramaturg enters rehearsal with a binder (or a blog) full of information and ideas. For a helpful example, see this site: http://richardiiicasebook.blogspot.com/2010/02/deformity-and-performance-in-richard.html (To see the way a casebook illustrates a production's concept, you might look at the post "Why this play now?"). An example of an online casebook for a new play can be found here: http://www.barbarousnights.blogspot.com/search/label/Production%20History

Your task for this blog post is to exhort the director and design team to integrate some element of your research or insight into the production. Since we would like these suggestions to be specific, and since we haven't assigned the text of the play, we suggest that you concentrate on one of four scenes: the opening soliloquy, the wooing scene (with Lady Anne), the scene in which Richard is 'persuaded' to take the crown, or the dream scene, at the play's end. Two of these we have already examined in multiple productions. The last two you can read here:  

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/ /richardiii.1.2.html

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardiii/richardiii.5.3.html

Note: quotations and images are often very helpful in bringing a concept across. Think about mining those that you have been accumulating on your personal blogs.