Task 2: Development – Artistic Intention

Artistic intention task 2

The play is called “Lit Matches”. It is set in New South Wales, Australia. It is starring Kelvin Jones, a man who has lost his house and child to a fire. His wife is in the hospital from the fire. The other main character is Mr. Waldorf. He is the chief environmental minister for the province of New South Wales. He also lost his wife to a fire, but Kelvin doesn’t know that. He likes his job and really likes to follow protocol. Kelvin barges into Mr. Waldorf’s office to demand help and answers for his concerns. Mr. Waldorf does not know how to deal with this issue at the moment because it is so sudden and unexpected. He wants to help but he doesn’t know how so he tries to make Kelvin leave until Kelvin sets Mr. Waldorf off about his own dead wife. The show is a tragedy and means to bring awareness about the issue to the audience.

The purpose of the play is to show the audience a tragedy about the effect humans have on the environment. It shows the problem of fires in Australia due to dryness and the climate getting warmer, making the environment much more flammable. The purpose of the artwork is going to be a representation of real-life issues in a play format. It shows how these real problems can affect people and should be solved. It shows how tragic and how deeply affected people can be from humanity’s impact. It intends to be a representation of what may have been going on in Australia while the wildfires were happening. This issue caused many homes to be destroyed, lots of wildlife and people to die, and cost people a lot of money. This event mainly happened in the Australian province of New South Wales, home to the large city of Sydney. The whole sky had turned red and uncontrollable fires were raging in the countryside. The Australian government had struggled to handle this problem. The way it relates to the play is that it depicts some devastation and loss due to the issue. Kelvin loses his home and child, and now his wife is in the hospital. We hope to achieve a certain extent of realization and sympathy from the audience. We want to show the extent of this situation. The ways that our play responds to the statement of inquiry is that we focus the whole play on the fires, which are linked to the human’s impact on the environment.

Skills from flash drama that are present in the play include the use of minimal props, one singular location for the set, and the ability to create a play in a short span of time. The use of minimal props is evident in my play, because it is not necessary to use many items to show what is happening. The props I intend to use in the play is my laptop, a mug, a desk, and chairs. These props are relevant to the play, but the play is mostly represented by the characters, the message, and the actions of the characters. These props make the scene more believable in the way that they help the setting look more like a real life situation, overall making it easier for the audience to understand the relationship between the play and the situation it is related to. This play uses the technique where it is in a single setting throughout the duration of the play. It is set in an office, where Mr. Waldorf is working, and has chairs for visitors and a desk for his own workspace. This is because the play is about Kelvin getting deeply saddened about his life after the horrendous incident which took his loved ones from him. Therefore, he stays in the office arguing and trying to get a solution from the environmental minister. He wants to protect other people so they do not have to go through the trauma he went through. The best place to make this seem realistic is the office. This play is going to roughly 5-7 minutes long. This will make the message more meaningful in the way that the purpose of the play is portrayed during the whole time, so it is the main point of focus for the audience. The way the office will be used to represent the serious message is that it will show that real change can happen if you talk to the right people, and that problems can be solved with perseverance. A technique commonly incorporated in these one-act plays is the focus of one concept. This means that there is normally one idea that the play focuses on. This permits the actors to represent this issue very well and in-depth. In this case we focus on Kelvin’s problem and the solution(s).

This artwork connects to the statement of inquiry “Artists draw attention to issues of human impact on the environment (locally or globally)” in the way that it focuses on a play based around the concept of humans’ impact on the environment. This is because the concept of the wildfires in Australia is heavily related to the fact that humans have been taking the earth for granted for many years. The humans keep emitting carbon emissions and let the earth get hotter, causing already-warm places like Australia get extremely hot and dry. When a place is dry, all it takes is one cigarette thrown in the wrong place to get a fire going. If not taken care of straight away, then these fires grow rapidly and begin destroying land and homes. This is a local scale, but issues caused by humans happen globally in many different ways, shapes, and forms. An example is floods, due to the water level rising. Artists have a responsibility to raise awareness about these issues to the extent that it is a way to continue doing what they do while benefitting society. These plays about the environment are not much different than the plays artists generally write. With these plays they mean well and try to help by creating outrage and persuading people to do something about the issues.

To conclude, our play visits the concepts of tragedy and aims to raise awareness for the effects that careless humans have on a global scale. This play is about Kelvin, the man suffering tragedy attempting to receive a response from Mr. Waldorf. He demands to be compensated for his losses. Mr. Waldorf has also suffered trauma from the same issue but does not want Kelvin to know that. This is a one-act play and is related to the SOI by being a detailed representation of a specific contemporary issue.