As a director and actor, I had no problem after initial research imagining character and situation in the context of where they are and in light of the technical conditions of setting, lighting, and the theatre itself. Now, what I had envisioned from a script I had to create from scratch. Fortunately, I had learned much from working on The Eagle and the Tiger and the rough sketch for the musical about hairdressers.
As it turned out, from the research I had done I had little difficulty in envisioning the characters in their situations, and my experience in versification and poetry let me slip into the poetic forms appropriate to each era but written with a modern slant. Thus, for Odysseus I used a form that had been adopted by many translators of The Iliad and The Odyssey; for Spenser I used a modernization of his own form, the Spenserian stanza; and for Archer I used poetic forms appropriate to the stories and their era (more on this in later blogs), and in modern forms.
More about creation in the next blog.
