itriedthatonceitwasabadmove said:
A collaborator and I successfully kickstarted an original play about fandom, transformative works, and Sherlock fandom in general to premiere at Sherlock Seattle Con in October 🙂 we’ve been using the community and tumblr in general as inspiration!
Dude, WHAT. I think I saw mention of a fandom play go by on the-mamishka’s Tumblr a while back, but I NEED DEETS. This sounds badass! I saw your short summary, and the Kickstarter. But like, how did you think of this? What do you hope to achieve with it? Give me your thinks!
Woo, I’m glad you’re interested! Vicious and Vulgar should be a ton of fun.
So Sammy is a nationally accredited playwright/theatre journalist, and I’m a nationally accredited actress and comedian. Along with having a passion for the performing arts, we are also gigantic geeks.
For a long time we’d wanted to collaborate on a Sherlock Holmes play (there’s so many Sherlock plays out there that writing one is basically a rite of passage for playwrights). A few months ago I mused that there was a local Sherlock convention… maybe they’d be down to form a partnership and we could sell tickets at a discount or something. When we approached the organizers their enthusiasm was incredible, and they offered us performance space at the convention.
Being offered free use of space is basically theatre kid Christmas, so we decided to expand on what we originally wanted to do.
We wanted to create a piece that celebrated all the things about fandom that we love, and figure out just why this series is still popular today. We want people to walk away with a sense of pride in knowing that it’s wonderful to love things. And that’s what fandom is, isn’t it? Loving something unconditionally? Fan Shame is a real thing, and we want people to know that you should never feel bad for loving something.
This is our love letter to the Sherlock fandom, and it will eventually be framed as a giant AU. We discuss fanfic, genderswapping, cross-generational differences, and all sorts of topics from within the fan community.
We’re about 2/3 finished writing and expect to have a four-person cast with a run time of 1 hour. In addition to the cast we’ve come up with a design team (from outside the fandom!) who are also massive geeks. In the end we want to create something that we could tour to different conventions because touring is awesome, and live performance is awesome. Because it’s a play ABOUT fandom framed WITHIN the Sherlock fandom, we hope that eventually we can tweak it for other audiences. Audience-specific theatre is a relatively new concept that hasn’t been explored much, so we want to play around with the idea of creating an original work for a very narrow audience. The result is a PILE of inside-jokes, subtle references and winking and nudging.
We’ve also contacted several artisans from within the fandom for artistic collaboration. Puppets! (Hopefully) using fanartists for our poster! We even thought about outsourcing popular fic writers for bits of smut to read out loud.
More than anything else, we want to bring the magic of theatre to an audience that maybe hasn’t seen a lot of plays. There are some things that you can only really do onstage, and we want to share that with the community!
Holy craptarts, that’s amazing.
So all of you folks heading to Sherlock Seattle have this to look forward to!