Baggage #1 -10 min play- recorded solo in one take by Kate Herbert-March 26, 2020

Kate Herbert · Baggage KateHerbert Solo V2 26Mar2020


Baggage: Play #1 of 8 X 10. ( 1 male, 1 female)

  

This is the 1st of my cycle of 8 short plays, each approximately 10-minute plays. It's a solo reading.

I record all the plays single-handed, one take, play all characters, no rehearsal, no edits.

This is how I'm entertaining myself and keeping up my Arts practice during the Virus period.

 Baggage is about  an encounter between a middle-aged WOMAN and a scruffy, homeless, 

harmless YOUNG MAN and their conversation that gradually becomes more intimate.

The 8 plays are connected not by a narrative thread, but by themes and characters.

A character that is only mentioned in a play then appears in the following play, until we get to  Play # 8, 

when a character is mentioned who appeared in Play # 1.

As I wrote the plays, I realised that each dealt with a different social issue: bulling, perceptions of disability,

 street violence etc.

I then noticed that each play had characters using mobile phones and that phone technology had become 
a character!

I am recording them all single-handedly at my computer, at home in this Covid isolation. 

Hope you enjoy them and maybe choose to do the same.

KH

 

The 8 plays are as follows:

Baggage – 1 Woman, 1 Man

Phone Calls on a Train – 3 Women, 2 Men

Social ME-dia – 1 Woman, 1 Teenage Girl

Lover Boy! – 1 Woman, 1 Teenage Boy

The House That Alex Built – 1 Man, 1 Woman

DB & Scruff – 1 Man , 1 Woman

Thievin’ Thugs – 2 Men (1 off-stage voice)

Foxy’s Hangout ­ – 2 Men

Epilogue – 1 Woman (same character as Play #1) as yet unwritten.

Kate