Babes in the Wood by Wendy Grevenberg - Short, Dark Comedy - Little Ivy is not in the Christmas spirit. Luckily Grandpa knows just the stories to brighten her mood. 17 pages - pdf, format 8)

Hi Wendy, I'm gonna read your script and make notes as I read it.  I won't harp if you have an ongoing problem (like with tense).

Good luck.  Here goes:

1.  No title page.  It's important to have a copyright on it.  You don't want anyone stealing it.  I can safely say the regulars on here would never do that, but, you should put that on it.  Protect your work.  Just pull up a script from a regular and copy what they say.

2.  No description for Grandma and Grandpa.  Are they skinny, fat, black, white, Native American, etc.

3.  Page 2, you have Grandma speaking 3 times in a row.  I think the middle one should be Ivy, right?

4.  Or if Grandma is speaking all 3 lines, you need to tell us why she's breaking up her speech with a BEAT or something.  And you say "be happy that's all SHE's making you do"  I hope we get to know who the she is.

5.  Page 3, you definitely make an error.  One of those should be Ivy speaking.  And why would you have Grandma say twice come here girl, I want to tell you a story.  Did Ivy leave?  We need to know these things.  

6.  Why identify them as Man, Woman, Boy and Girl when they are the parents?  You can save words like that.

7.  Page 5, you say they are in the hallway.  It's passive.  Say something like they walk into the hallway and come face to face with 2 ruffians.

8.  Oh, the Uncle is bad.  I thought the kid made the gesture.  You need to clarify that.

9.  These stories are morbidly bad.  And confusing.  I'm with Ivy.  This is kinda hard to read.  Are these real fairy tales?

10.  ummmm, yeah.

I don't know what to say.  You might be more morbid then I am, and that's scary.  These "Christmas" stories were um, wow.

All I can say is WOW.

Really morbid.  

It needs a lot of work to clean up the story.  The description are either too much in some places or really lacking in other places.  

It will be interesting to see what others think.

Good luck
Dan

Hello Dan, and thank you for the feedback. I will definitely go back and clean up some of the rough spots.

To answer your question, yes, these are "real" fairy tales. By "real" I mean that they're traditional stories, the quoted parts are the original texts. I realize some of them are obscure, but it surprises me a bit that you don't recognize The Little Match Girl. So as far as the stories being "morbidly bad" goes, I'm going to have to pass the blame along to Hans Christian Anderson and his colleagues. :D

But, your perspective is very helpful. It didn't occur to me, but I suppose if the reader is not familiar with the source material the whole thing might fall flat. There may not be anything I can do about that, but I'll think it over.

Thanks again!