Levi Stroud
The Stories Behind my Stories
Piece Two
Piece two of my collection expands upon my freshman year experience with words and their potential impact upon an audience. Its base is within August Guilt, a play I wrote for my Freshman Writing Seminar. August Guilt told the story of a Southern Baptist family facing the recent death of their famous pastor of a patriarch. After the death, they struggle between maintaining his legacy while being haunted by his secret history of domestic abuse. The Good, The Bad, and The Guilty explores the reaction that audience members had to August Guilt. It was my first lesson in both the subjectivity and potency of words as they enter the minds of those around you.
Piece Three
Piece three of my collection captures the process of writing and rewriting Captive Barbies, a play that I wrote my sophomore year of college and continued rewriting and producing into my senior year. Captive Barbies explores the restraints of normativity within the gay community as well as the segregation that takes place within it. I included both drafts because together they tell a narrative of how I changed the development of the play's central character, Lee. I also included Removing the Masc to my Thougths, an essay I wrote for my Writing 200 class because it has the same importance. Voice, an Essay Play, follows the story of the connection that I had to Lee and the way in which by developing Lee, I developed myself and learned to take pride in my voice regardless of its imperfections.
Piece Four
Piece four of my collection retells the struggle I faced junior year of college to craft a screenplay, a future, and an authentic relationship. Bad Abstraction, the feature length screenplay I wrote for SAC 300, follows the story of Cathy, a young failed writer that is now an English teacher at a small town high school. Facing another year of bitter writer's block, she is surprised to find inspiration from a new eighteen-year-old student at her school. This inspiration leads to an affair between the two, and she must decipher between the story she wishes the situation could be with the reality of what it actually is. To Be Real narrates the process I had in developing Cathy's journey and the way in which connecting Cathy's life to mine allowed me to open up to authenticity and realize when I was living in an abstraction and not a reality. From this, I could learn that reality sometimes had more to offer than my fantasies.
Piece Five
Piece five of my collection displays the reality behind making a documentary abroad. While the documentary (Permanent Culture) I made for an internship was filled with hope and heroics, the process of the making the documentary was far different. The Blinding Camera follows this process and makes comments on the filmmaker's role in the world, their ability to make change, and their abitlity to exploit. It narrates an experience for me in which I had to come to understand myself in a global context while pursuing a story that I struggled to feel that I had a right to tell.