Proposal: Final Project

For my idea, I'd want to do the book The Outsiders by S.E Hinton which is a story about a rivalry between two rival gangs, one is called the Greasers who are the poor kids with slicked back hair and t-shirts and jeans and then there is the Soc's who are the richer kids who dress more upscale, this story talks about their rivalry and how much it impacts the life of both groups who fight over everything. The story is told through the eyes of Ponyboy Curtis who is part of the Greaser party but he is not violent and likes poetry and watching movies and going to school. I would want to adapt the scene where Johnny and Ponyboy are in the park and then Ponyboy is jumped by the Soc's who are drunk. Johnny comes to the aid of Ponyboy who is being drowned by the Soc's and stabs one of them and then all of the other Soc's run off. I want to do this scene because I feel like this scene is significant to the whole story and is the buildup to the bigger plot which goes into the portion where they run up to the church and hide there where no one can find them. Staging this would be difficult because we could need something to resemble a fountain for when the Soc's attempt to drown Ponyboy but other than that it'd be quite simple to stage. With this, the costuming is quite simple, t-shirts and jeans for the two Greasers and more upscale clothing for the two Soc's. We would have Ponyboy and Johnny sitting under a tree in the park talking about how Ponyboy's brother had hit him in the face for being out late, causing Ponyboy to run out of the house and run to find Johnny in the park. After about a two or three minute dialogue between the two, we would have the drunk Soc's pull up in their car and start making trouble with the Greasers. In the movie, one of the Soc's splashes whiskey on Ponyboy so we would need a small glass of water to imitate whiskey for that sequence and other than that it would be all words and actions. For the real stage setup, we would have the fountain at centerstage and the tree that Johnny and Ponyboy sit under at stage right, the Soc's would pull up from stage left and walk towards them stumbling and stuttering to each other, walking in front of the fountain where in that case the confrontation would start and that would how the staging would be. In terms of timing, the scene would probably run around 10-13 minutes in length with each character having at least 10 lines each. Overall, this scene is a classic in literature and in film history and is very open to adaptation and it'd be fun to put a unique, theater-ish type spin on it.