GIRLS WRITE NOW SUMMER SALON SERIES: ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHARACTER, A SCRIPTWRITING SALON WITH CHRISTINA HAM
Join us on Thursday, July 30 at 6PM EST for another installment of our Summer Salon Series, Anthropology of Character: A Scriptwriting Salon with Playwright and TV Writer Christina Ham.
Where your character comes from can help inspire the stories you want to tell. At this salon, we’ll explore how the specificity of place informs character and story. Here’s what Christina wants you to know: Where we live shapes who we are. Different regions of the country have varied dialects, belief systems, and axioms. This trend is equally pronounced within different countries, socio-economic statuses, time periods, and uprisings. In plays, this is no exception. Dramatists such as August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Anton Chekov, Sarah Kane, Tennessee Williams, and Shakespeare made the deliberate choice to set their classic dramas in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Russia, Northern England, New Orleans, and Denmark respectively to tell their powerful dramas. The same can be said for such television shows as The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Ramy, and I May Destroy You. But setting can be more than the environment in which your story is set, it can also be a reflection of your characters. This salon will explore setting and how it can help shape your story, characters, and theme as you look to write or rewrite your play or script. Setting can be a valuable asset to your story and not just a place where your characters dwell.
Christina Ham was named one of “The Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights of the 2018-19 Season” by American Theatre magazine. Her plays have been produced both nationally and internationally at the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, Seattle Rep, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Tokyo International Arts Festival, and The Market Theatre in South Africa to name a few. A graduate of the University of Southern California, with an MFA in Playwriting from The UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, she was most recently a writer/producer on Netflix’s Sweet Tooth with Will Forte.
Our Summer Salons—now open to the public—are a space for our community to learn from and write with incredible authors, poets, journalists, and novelists. The Girls Write Now Summer Salon Series is an extension of our Writing Works Program. Registration is required in advance for all Girls Write Now: Summer Edition events.