"A fast-paced, boiling pot
of a one-act play."

Appraisal

Summary: Four boys sneak into the storage area where the exam papers are filed, but one boy betrays the others and locks them in. The three incarcerated boys must face their own demons as well as their problems with each other.

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Suitability: The author has been careful to describe the staging as they visualised it, and it’s a versatile, simple set. It should work in a variety of performance spaces, and it manages to represent the room the boys are locked in and their various home spaces too.

It makes sense for the actors playing the boys to be teens, and the principal audience will be teens also. However, I think the play would also appeal to adults, and give them some valuable perspective on the teen experience.

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Cast notes:The four boys don’t have equal stage time – although Brendan opens the play and is the reason the boys get stuck in the storage room, he doesn’t reappear, even in flashback. The remaining three boys have distinct personalities, but they each grow and change during the course of the play. The three adult characters are little more than cameos, but they contribute to the main characters’ development. I wondered at the feasibility of having one adult represent the three, but I think the clarity would suffer.

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Plot: It’s surprisingly unusual to receive scripts that really use the nature of theatre to best advantage.  The temptation for most writers is to stick to a linear chronology and have representative sets for each location. This play uses non-linear chronology, and has the flashbacks take place within the same set as the storage room. The first character to speak breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly. Because of this, it’s not surprising that the plot doesn’t follow the expected route.In screenwriting, the three act structure is often referred to as “Put your characters up a tree, throw rocks at them, get them down again.” In this case, we have the first two acts, because the boys are locked in the storage room and their own natures are making the situation worse. None of them can afford the consequences of being discovered in the room, even if Brendan hasn’t told the teachers why they were sneaking in there in the first place. All of them have reasons to expect the worst, yet they are offered a surprising ray of hope in the prefects list. It’s a remarkable inclusion, allowing the boys to show that they are not in irredeemable situations, that the right encouragement at the right time really could change everything for them. It’s worth noting that Spike doesn’t quite have the same revelations that the other two do, but he does open up and apologise to them in a way that he couldn’t have considered at the beginning of the evening.

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That brings us to the conclusion: As an audience, we are agog about the ending. Brendan has set the boys up, and now we know they are all battling some form of major issue in their personal or home lives. This one fool’s errand could destroy their chances, and we need to see how they get out of it, or IF they get out of it. Is there a chance that the villainous Brendan will get some kind of comeuppance? We hope so. And yet, the author drops the curtain as the door is about to open, and this signals to the audience that what comes next is not the significant event, or certainly not as significant as what has come before. We were present for the entire duration of the boys’ incarceration, and it was that time that was important, that time that made the changes. Whatever comes after will not un-make them. It’s a bold move, but it will also cement the play in the minds of the audience. The curtain coming down sends an immediate message that you have just seen something profound, and it needs no coda or epilogue. People will debate the outcome for a long time afterward and argue about the importance of what happened in that room.

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Miscellaneous notes: This is an unusual play. It’s a clever way to present three different lives, and in the course of that, raise questions about the fourth. While Brendan doesn’t get to present his case, he is the only one of the four to appeal directly to the audience, and he is constantly referenced by the other three, keeping him in the audience’s mind. He’s a presence even when he is not on stage. But like the unseen consequences of the break in, Brendan’s reasons for doing what he did are never revealed.

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The play uses a simple set, and only seven actors, and I can see it being quite popular, though the cast is quite restrictive. 

​Dtraslerwriting, LazyBee Scripts Appraisal