Speech Tournament as Theater!

For those of you who aren't familiar with the world of forensics, I'm going to give you some quick background information to inform my review. Even though most people hear "speech and debate" and immediately think of Affirmative Arguments, Negative Arguments, statistics, and intense arguments, there is a very theatrical side to many events. I participate in an event called Dramatic Interpretation, which requires that participants memorize a tennish minute long monologue, interpret it dramatically, and present it many times over the course of a weekend.

My piece this year is about three different women and how the war in Iraq has affected their lives, but there are also plenty of pieces about the secretly sad lives of celebrities (such as Charlie Chaplin and Judy Garland), rape, murder, etc. When I describe Dramatic Interp (or "DI") to people, I tend to talk about it in a tone that trivializes is, as I've done now, but in reality, there is a ton of thought, emotion, and energy behind every performance. And many of them are as compelling as live theater. Well, actually, they themselves are live theater.

Anyway, throughout my time at the Columbia Invitational tournament this weekend, I came across a variety of pieces. One of my favorites that I saw over the course of the weekend, and even over the course of my high school forensics career, was called "Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop," and was written by Danny Hoch. After googling this piece, I now know that it was originally written as a theater script but has since been transformed into a movie as well.

There were so many things that I loved about this piece. The writing was certainly one of them. It was a single character speaking, and so it was written in an almost stream-of-consciousness sort of style. However, the main character was also meant to be addressing a few specific people as the piece continued, and so it was also very conversational. The words interrupted each other, cut each other off. Sentences sometimes went unfinished. The tone was very colloquial, and it fit together very nicely as a ten-minute cutting.

The performance itself was unbelievable. The guy who performed it spoke in a (seriously) flawless Brooklyn accent, and his timing was really impressive. There was a lot of humor in this piece, especially towards the beginning as the audience is just beginning to get to know the main character, and the performer handled it well and balanced it effectively with the more serious moments. The funny was funny, the sad was sad.

The last thing that stuck with me was the climax of his piece. As we listen to the story, we realize that the main character is a recovering heroine addict working as a janitor in a jail, and the way he tells us this is mostly light. But there is a moment towards the end where he completely loses all composure, throws his (imaginary) mop on the floor, and actually rages at the audience. It was so powerful, and even though it could be taken as the "obvious route," because he raises his voice and literally screams at the audience, it didn't seem "easy" at all. It felt, to me, very much how this character would burst.

I got to see this piece twice throughout the tournament, which was interesting because it changed from one performance to the next. There is a very strict time limit of 10 minutes and 30 seconds in this event, and the first time that I saw this piece, it went over by 4 seconds. By the next time that this guy was in my round, he had changed some of his cutting and shortened the piece by an entire minute. Both times, I was left impressed, disturbed, upset.