That Time I Played Zeus in Odysseus!
4Visual Description: A woman sits in front of some bookshelves and addresses the camera, talking about a past experience that she had. She has brown hair worn in a bun, and wears a blue, prairie revival-style dress. She's gone without her glasses, forgoing the additional sensory input of sight to minimize distractions and things to process as she recalls long-ago memories. She's quite animated. Additional footage, recorded after she recovered her tattered copy of the script, is intermingled throughout. In that footage she wears her hair in a Dutch braid pinned back into a bun, and is dressed in a drapey yellow top and brown leggings. She wears clear-rimmed eyeglasses and reads from a bedraggled script in a three-ring binder. In one scene re-enactment she holds a 10-lb dumbbell, lifting it up as she speaks to better showcase how the scene was originally intended to be performed. Towards the end of the video a scan of a physical photograph from the Odysseus! curtain call is displayed on-screen. It depicts nine actors dressed in sheets posed in a line in a blackbox theater. Faces of all but the video maker herself have been blurred, in order to protect individuals' privacy.
Description: I recently watched "EPIC: The Musical" on YouTube and while I loved it, it brought up some... long forgotten (more like repressed) memories of an absolute disaster of a play that I was in as a teenager. So I decided to go ahead and make a video about my experience playing Zeus in "Odysseus!"
Acknowledgements: I checked to see if the play was available online anywhere, and it looks like the playwright has a preview of it on his website here: http://www.brianguehring.com/?cat=57 If anyone is interested in staging it, you could contact him to see if it's possible to negotiate performance rights. I feel bad about how frankly disastrous that the staging I was in turned out to be, and I hope that someday some acting troupe gives him the high-quality performance that his writing deserves. Please note: The playwright was one of my old theatre teachers back in the day, but this video is NOT sponsored.