These are the first two plays that the Golden Stag Players ever produced. We did both of these together as combined they came out to about 1/2 hour.

Synopsis: Our Kind is simply the tale of a new member of the SCA finding out what it's all about, from some very stero-typical characters. The character names tell you all you need to know about most of them. The fun of this is the stereotyped characters -- you can almost see someone you know in every character. The dialog is fun, but it's obviously a first play ...

Mistress Laurel Seamchecker Explains It All At You is basically about Mistress Laurel Seamchecker (introduced in the first play) coming out and talking to the audience, with frequent interruptions by various stereo-typical characters. As you might guess, she's rather opinionated on the 'correct' way the SCA should be played. At the end, she is "given the bird" by the Queen in court for her service ...

Incidents: We realized that we didn't have any kind of curtains or side-walls, and the event we were performing at was a camping event. To the rescue comes Duke Paul of Bellatrix ... he was kind enough (we asked a couple of weeks prior to the performance) to loan us a couple of the walls that are often used around his encampment, with poles, ropes, etc. His son Stephen came by and helped us make sure they were put up solidly. This helped a lot, as the actors needed a way to do entrances ... of course, we hadn't had a chance to rehearse around the ropes, so there were some bits of stumbling around them, but no one seemed to notice.

Among other interesting things -- William of the Merlands made a set of tablets used for the "Corpora" ... they looked amazingly like the 10-commandments. (We want those back, William!! Honest!)

When making the tunics and tabards and such for the different characters, we realized that while Lord Stickjock Rhinohide's tabard was supposed to have a rhino-head on it (that's what Goldwyn's script says!), there was a problem. The problem is that there's a really delightful knight in the West (Sir Douglas Dunbar), one of those who embodies what I feel chivalry is supposed to be about, who has a purple rhino's head on his arms. So, we made sure there could be no confusion -- we made the rhino's head red, and had it facing the other way. The last thing we wanted to do was equate this character with Sir Douglas ...

For Duke Paragon, we had fun as well ... the West has lots of active Dukes. As it turns out, many of those use ermine spots in their armory ... so, rather than picking on any one Duke, we did up a flashy tabard with "PP" (Paragon the Perfect) and ermine spots of various colors around the hem ...

The video camera operator (a friend of the gentleman who ran the Mongolian General Store for several years) did a really nice bit with the program for the shows, giving us credits ... the problem is, she did it with the sound off. It was a hot day, and she was waiting in the sun (without a hat) for a long time (we were hoping the Royalty would show up -- they finally did, about 20 minutes after we were scheduled to start), and got a bit of sun-stroke. She forgot to turn the sound back on ...

In order to attempt to get a video with sound, we did a couple of pickup rehearsals and prepared for a performance at Mists Fall Investiture a month (or less?) later. During all that, Robert got mugged and had his jaw broken. We managed to get hold of Wulfric of Creigull, and he rehearsed the parts (did a pretty good job of it). Unfortunately, the fates were against us -- the week of performance, Na'arah came down with a combination of pnumonia and mumps (or measles or ...). We gave up, and didn't do the second performance, since we needed to get ready to do the next play, if we were to do it for 12th Night.

Video Tape: Sort of ... see Incidents above. We have a silent video ... we sometimes call it "The Silent Years" of the Golden Stag Players ...

DVD: Now available as part of the "Our Kind Trilogy" -- the DVD includes these two plays and "A Nightmare on Laurel Street", contact Hirsch for details (probably $5-10, just to cover the cost of the discs, the case, etc. and any postage would need to be tacked on).

Photos: We have photographs by Hal Ravn and Megan nic Alister at the West Kingdom History web site: Our Kind I and Our Kind II Photos.

The Script(s): There are actually two separate plays here, and you can view them either in HTML or in Adobe Acrobat format:
Our Kind I: Acrobat
Mistress Laurel Seamchecker Explains It All At You Acrobat

The Cast of Our Kind:

The Cast of Our Kind II: Mistress Laurel Seamchecker Explains It All At You: