Creating a Living Newspaper

Reflection on Y, F, Z Living Newspaper Scene The idea of the “Living Newspaper” is an ingenious way in theatre to depict real life in an artistic way and amplify the feelings of the actual event. So, naturally when you assigned us to create our own “Living Newspaper” I was ecstatic to get started. The group I worked with and I decided to choose between finding a newspaper on a cult group or an exorcism, though I preferred the exorcist idea, we decided to go with cults because during our research we found it very fascinating that there were so many cases and different types of cults.
During our research we found there were multiple different kinds of cults, some good, some bad, but most focused on the end of the world or the end of their world and how they would be able to spend eternity, and most usually had manipulative and violent leaders. One such case was the Y, F, Z Ranch where the leader Warren Jeff’s is accused of committing multiple accounts of incest and rape, though that was still not as interesting to us as the fact, that all the girls that belonged to this cult, were in a sense brainwashed.
The fact that somebody or a group of people could be tricked into thinking that something so sinister was the way of a god was ludicrous. As a group we all wanted to add or own tweak the piece, my own personal contribution was the in the beginning of the scene I wanted there to be sheets in front of the actors playing the rap victims of the cult and you would see “Warren Jeff’s” shadow come up to each one and imitate the act of raping them. I wanted this to highlight the silent motif we played with.

Though, of course in the time we had we had to be realistic with our scene so the sheets didn’t happen, we still continued with the most important theme of silence which is what I intended for my contribution. What I took away as an actor from this piece is how different it is to play a real person rather then a character and how much it bends and changes the methods of the acting I was use too. And personally from this piece I realized how difficult it is to work when there are so many people disorganized people trying to voice their opinion. But, I did enjoy the experience.