24 Hour Plays!

Last weekend, I worked with The New Theatre Project to create 24 plays in 24 hours. We met at 8pm on Friday (incidentally, my birthday) and were soon asked to play a game where each of us described the previous day in as much detail as possible, in 60 seconds. Afterward, we were told that those details had to be the base of our plays, along with the theme "Getting Lucky" and, possibly, the 11/11/11 date. We were also told to use each actor only once.

The writers began working immediately - spending the first hour or so after the meeting together was crucial, as we needed to remind one another on what was said and also get a feel for the project (I actually wrote Infinite Bread as a warmup before I headed back to Ann Arbor). Scripts were due at 7am on the 12th. We met two hours later to begin rehearsal, and, tired and loopy as we were, performed the whole shebang at 8pm.

I ended up writing four plays that night, and got maybe two hours of sleep. I also directed two, including my own You Can't Really Kill Ben For Experience Points, and acted in six. Against my better judgment, I'm posting the results here.

The project, as well as my recent work for 826michigan's Five Bowls of Oatmeal, reminded me how necessary it is sometimes to throw off fears and plans and just make stuff. As a bonus, I got to write roles for a few of my friends, which is something I haven't had the chance to do for quite some time.

These are unedited from the versions I turned in on Saturday morning (though, sadly, I couldn't keep all the Final Draft formatting). I added comments before each one 'cause I wanted to.

Plays after the jump!

News News News

I have changed the look of the blog. Black on grey, though not in itself a bad color scheme, was just not doing it for me. What say you, my fellow Reactionaries?

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I am now spending plenty of time in dance rehearsal, which is pretty new for me. A little while ago, the director of Barefoot in the Park revealed that she is (gasp!) also the choreographer for Gypsy, and they were in need of a Tulsa. Apparently my audition convinced them that I could sing the part and be taught to dance, so I came aboard.

Which means I now actually have to learn to, y'know, dance. Though the routines soundly kicked my ass for several rehearsals, tonight things started coming together fairly well, as my feet somehow miraculously figured out how to shuffle. Between the physical comedy in Barefoot and the dancing in Gypsy, I have learned some interesting things about myself. These include:

- My upper body strength is not what I thought it was.
- However, I am bodily strong enough to lift a woman much larger than myself on my shoulders.
- I have very good control when taking a fall (I hope this is not disproved, fingers crossed).
- My memory really resists learning box-steps.
- I can shuffle!

I'm sure I will add to this list, given time.

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Finally, Lady in the River has big changes in store, with the next draft. I now have good reason to take it where I originally wanted to go, before trying to please anyone else. I am reminded of the story of the farmers walking to town with their mule (or something like that). The title will probably not be Lady in the River, because though I initially thought I could deal with the title being similar to that of a terrible movie, I now have no good reason to cling to it. Once I'm done with the current Thorstein revision, I will rub my mad-scientist hands together, take The New Script apart, and put it back together in new and exciting ways. While, uh, changing all the pieces, too. You know what I mean.

Is that what it's about? Huh.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the process behind Thorstein the Staff-Struck - namely how, if I had done adequate research before starting to adapt the story, I might not have tried. I only realized the real contradiction once I'd finished the first draft. Rather than kill the project, I think it kind of enhances it.

At first, I saw a neat short story, with a small and vivid cast of characters. It offered a great view of the culture and the period, full of detail and the signature understatement and wry insult that permeates the Icelandic Sagas. (This is why Penguin included it in its little collection, as a good entry point to the vein of literature.)

I had initially meant the story to be the comic middle part of a three-Saga play, but two images got lodged in my head: Thorarin's emotional, tragic, and funny meeting with Bjarni, and the simulated horse-fight between Thorstein and Thord...as played by Thorstein and Thorarin. Others images logically followed these - the farmhands, the duel, Rannveig's precise nagging - and before long, I realized that I'd rather write one detailed, interesting piece than a collection of sketches full of lit-geek jokes.

I started writing fast, just getting ideas on paper (well, virtual paper) and trying to lay the foundation before it could start to seem like work. It's pretty much always the most fun phase of a new script, when things just flow, and you go in the direction that seems right. Of course, the structure of the story gave it an overall shape, and most of my work was extrapolating action, character bits, events, that sort of thing. I noticed the mention of Christianity, and worked it into the script, initially just as a detail, and then as a major theme (keep reading to find out why this is way ironic). That phase slowed down and finally stopped, and I actually put off writing for a few months in favor of doing research. However, my research was, well, incomplete. Either that, or I just didn't follow thoughts to their logical conclusions, or something along those lines.

Some time before the call for Fireside Festival entries, I decided to put aside my reading and finish the script, and that's where the real scene-writing slog set in, including a near-complete restructuring of the piece before I could even get the final scenes done. I had put several research questions out of my mind in favor of forward momentum, though Nate Beckman's input had already helped considerably. With encouragement/proofreading by A.C.T. of Squirrels in Love, I hacked the last scenes out in the Performance Network office, just so I'd have something to edit.

And editing meant reading everything I'd written, comparing it to the source material, and going back over my research, resulting in my big "Hey, that's interesting" moment. I don't know how I missed it. Maybe I just hadn't thought about why Christianity was mentioned so significantly, or how neatly the story portrays certain virtues and failings. Maybe I'd glossed over the pieces of my research that make certain inferences about its authorship. Whatever.

In my relative newness to the Sagas, I had thought the story was based on an incident, albeit one that nicely framed the ongoing conflict between farmers and landowners. Turns out it was probably written by priests, who were probably making a point about the virtue of moderation. It's embodied by the resolution of the duel, by the trade of three mean-spirited, gossipy farmhands for one man of worth, by Thorarin's humbling moment with Bjarni, by the fact that Bjarni's home is named Hof...the word for "moderation." Huh. I'd just written a play in which Christianity is addressed rather cynically, as I was fascinated by the fact that, at that time, the religion was legislated in Iceland, without being widely taught. This, in a story that seems to have been written to show Christian virtues.

However, I didn't feel a crisis brewing so much as a philosophical "well, okay, we can work with that." Instead of adapting the story, I'd kind of unknowingly subverted it. Sure, I'd added to it and embellished, but turns out I'd gone further and messed with its thematic origin out of sheer ignorance. With this newfound knowledge, it seemed to me that the only way out was further in, to perhaps draw a line between virtue on a human level, and virtue as mandated. Can't retreat, dig in.

I don't know if I achieved that in the second draft, but the reading audience definitely responded to that element, and I'm all for giving credit to the power of the original story. More than one commenter saw the direct mentions of Christianity as a counterpoint to the main plot, highlighting it while placing events in history. As I've said before, I was prepared to get slammed for it. In fact, I'm still prepared to get slammed for it, along with my use of the Sagas and my use of history. It hasn't actually happened yet, which means I'm going to be bracing myself for a while, I think.

And so far, I'm happy with the play. Revisions are apace, and I have hope that the next draft will be the final one. It's strange to be glad that I started without all the necessary information, but hey, on-the-fly research is part of why I like writing.

The Musical, draft one.

And the first draft is complete. There's a long road ahead, but the first step is taken. While I'm in the happy post-first-draft haze, I thought I'd post some thoughts about the process.

From a story perspective, this has been one of the hardest scripts I've ever tried to write. At once, I felt I had to address familiar conventions of musicals, and familiar conventions of the crime/mystery genre. It's hard to say where the script places the most emphasis, but I'm trying draw on both, while also setting it apart.

To make things slightly more difficult, the mystery of the story isn't one that the protagonist uncovers, but rather, it's what he's trying to hide, and why. Various complications and theories cloud the issue, but overall, what I find affecting about the story is connected to both its simplicity and its ambiguity. Early on, I made a set of rules that I wanted the script to follow regarding how its story gets told. They are, essentially, a set of "do"s and "don't"s that I believe will keep the project on course, defining its level of reality and storytelling aesthetic. Now, I'm wondering how I'll regard them in further revisions.

I'm aware that my own preferences in the mystery genre might clash with the mainstream - I always think the best mysteries leave some ambiguity, whether it's an implied loose end or just a point that's open to interpretation. I've tried to do that with The Lady in the River, and I'm wondering whether it'll be a bump in the road in the script's development, or even the reception of the final script. We'll find out. Not that it gets anywhere near Raymond Chandler levels of complication and confusion (read/watch The Big Sleep, where a notably absent plot point nearly becomes a meta-joke), but I'm expecting the story structure to come under fire over the next few months.

Finally, I tried to orient several scenes around the music I know, and made guesses at where music that I don't know could be inserted. I'm predicting that this element will undergo the most changes, as it's the area where I'll be doing the most collaborative work (I think).

Okay, enough reflection for today. I'll try to follow up on this post before long, as I've recently had a bit of a hiatus from Reactionary Meter.

The Playwright Prompt.

I haven't really had time to post here over the last few days. However, I did respond to an interesting prompt from journalist and theatre-lover Davi Napoleon. Since the article she's researching might only use a paragraph or a few words of my response (if any), I might as well put the full text on this blog. Why not, right?

The prompt was, "Can playwriting be taught? Have you become the playwright you are because of or in spite of playwriting classes you took? Or were these classes just irrelevant? Did anything outside classroom experience feed your development? Are there ways playwriting teachers can be helpful? Ways they can be destructive?"

Here goes.

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Warning: May contain tangents. Actually, that's less a warning than a promise, but "Promise:" doesn't look good at the top of a page.

I have to say, it's damn hard to pick through my work and try to identify why it turns out the way it does, or why my process as a writer works the way it does. I mean, have you ever tried to un-bake a cake and figure out if you were using Grade A eggs? (And did I steal that line from somewhere? Can't think, it's almost 2 AM. Maybe I should write this tomorrow.) While I've had some good teachers, there are very few elements in my work I can directly credit to any of them in particular...however, I can tell you what they may have shown me, or convinced me to pursue. Also, I can tell you what I was reading obsessively at any stage on any particular script, or which writer's influence made something I was trying to imagine suddenly seem possible.

To be clear, my classes were not irrelevant. In fact, I have something I call the Luke Skywalker Complex, where I completely latch onto the ideology of a teacher, totally believe in it for the duration of the class, and afterward let my subconscious pick and choose the parts that I actually like while I go in search of the next teacher (or another writer to read obsessively). I guess I just can't do these things by halves. This is possibly because of my own insecurities, but also possibly because even when you disagree, what you can always get from a teacher is an understanding of their aesthetic.

I don't mean aesthetic in a hoity-toity, intellectual, latte-sipping sense. All right, so maybe I kind of do, but the way I think about it is, what is cool about plays, mine, yours, Sam Shepard's? What works, and why does it work? Totally subjective, totally open to debate, totally necessary to listen to someone, inside or outside a classroom, because finding out what's cool and why is really, really important. Disagree, start a nasty rivalry, but approach each statement fully and take it at face value, because the people who are willing to discuss how to write plays might be the only ones who will ever want to talk about this with you. If nobody's eyes begin to glaze over, it is entirely possible that you are sharing something important.

Three-quarters through college--I had already taken playwriting and screenwriting courses--I got to witness a playwright named Gian DiDonna explain the basics of dramatic storytelling to a room full of ten-year-olds. This was just amazing. The way he said it gave these grade-schoolers a leg up on many creative writing majors. It took less than ten minutes of clear, slow, thoughtful explanation, and the kids were off, hacking out their first scripts, feeling the power of doing so, even starting their first battles against the format (and, in one memorable case, against Gian).

So, if form is all you're interested in, you can actually learn the basics pretty quickly, and start banging out plays. But then, if form is all you're interested in, you probably don't actually like plays, or watching plays, or writing plays. This is also a reason why there are writers who are deathly afraid that any training at all will spoil their work--if there are rules, man, I'm, like, totally limited! Okay, okay, I can imagine a scenario wherein too much training, or a particularly controlling teacher, can hurt one's work, but it hasn't happened to me, and if it has, then I don't know it because I'm the one it happened to.

It seems to me that a good teacher's training can be crucial if he or she comes along at the right time, but you never know if that's what you needed unless you already got it, or are simply at a total loss without it. Aside from that, you're relying on your influences, your life, your loves, and the way you connect all those to the outline you just wrote down. This may not be helpful at all, but at least I believe it.

Thanks! I hope this will be of some use. If not, it was fun all the same just trying to corner my thoughts on the subject. I may actually re-read this tomorrow and beg you to forget I wrote some of it.

Best,

Russ

Another Evening on the PlayGround

I went over to Berkeley tonight for the monthly installment of PlayGround, "San Francisco's source for New Play Development". I had bought a subscription at the first show of the season in mid-October. However, due to unforeseen reasons, I had to miss the November and December shows and this evening was my return to the format. However, it's still a good deal, with the five shows I will see coming out to a total of $50. And I feel good about choosing to support a small, ambitious local arts organization (aside from my home company) on moderate financial terms.

Tonight's theme for the five-six 10-15 minute plays was "Fish Out of Water", short musical theatre pieces performed with the accompaniment of Joshua Raoul Brody, a noted local improvisational musician. The climax came in the final piece, "The Origin of the Species/Showtune", a "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread" style musical parody of musicals.

All of tonight's pieces were magnetizing and appealing in one form or another. However, I felt the most successful ones came at the middle of the show, as they focused on 2-3 characters and generally followed more intimate storylines. The two that stood out most for me were "Back" and "A Lovely Day".

"Back" told a story of family strife in the 1960's in a humorous manner. A father, mother and daughter broke the fourth wall to express their disdain for their lives. Suddenly, they switched into song and told their stories through a rhyming round, eventually coming back together as one large happy family.

"A Lovely Day" straddled lines of comedy and drama as it sketched a tale of an apparent amnesiac and her husband. What could have been an overly serious (or overly silly) subject was treated with restraint through the dialogue. The husband expressed sympathy for his wife and her plight (which she had no idea of), but then pivoted and said he enjoyed watching "Memento" and laughing at some scenes, as she apparently did too. The theme worked and led to an honest-feeling conclusion.

PlayGround assembles a pool of writers to write these scripts in a period of five days or less. This time, the music was also composed (complete with lyrics) in that same time frame. It has a zestful yet presentational energy of guerrilla theatre at its best, which is exactly why I enjoy being a part of the audience at each performance.