The Halfway Point of the Long Surrender

I have completed 7 of the 14 plays I have intended to write.

The Long Surrender is proving to be somewhat of a journey for myself - more than I intended it to be.  While the individual 'plays' are coming out quite quickly (most are taking about an hour and a half to write), it feels like the concept has weighed heavily over the past couple of weeks - this past two weeks particularly - so the "Long" part feels like it's living up to its name.  [though, really, I know this whole thing is going very fast, indeed]

And the process of writing a short scene every couple of days (though I've done 3 in the past 2 days) has become, out of necessity, a Surrender - where I can't linger on each play too long, I have to let one be done and move on (I'm not rewriting until I finish all 14).  So, even if I don't feel completely satisfied with a play, I surrender it.  And that's not so easy to do.

Just thinking back over the 7 plays I've written, there are already trends (I wouldn't necessarily call them repetitions).  I would like to see something different come out during the other 7 plays, but I don't want to force something - all of a sudden one of these is a slapstick comedy or something.  But a whole evening of somber scenes might be tough to make it through.  But I still rely on the fact that there's a continuity to what I'm writing because there is a continuity in an album of music - not that the plays are exactly matching the songs point by point; but inspiration is inspiration.

Given the plan of how the evening of theatre is to work out, nothing is yet sticking out as an Opener or Closer - but hopefully that will become clearer after I have the set done.

The goal: finish 7 more plays/scenes by a week from today.  A play a day.  It may go faster, but it can't go slower.  Why?  I'm leaving for a family vacation - and during that time, a conference.  The change of scenery/ venue has the chance to really change the tone of what I'm doing, and I don't want to let that happen.

Four on the floor.

Hopefully, I'm not going to just post every time I finish another Long Surrender play.  But that's what I'm doing right now.

"Soon..." is done.  A strange little piece - no movement, just separation and longing.  I'm liking the first draft, but thinking that there may be more to this one on another pass - more than I've felt about the other ones so far.  Only concern there is that this one is 8 pages already; don't want it to be too long for the format.  But without any movement, the words may go by quite quickly.

Speaking of the format, I did hit on the idea the other day that the cycle could work with one opening play, break out into the small groups for a set of 6 plays in rotation, an intermission, then another 6 rotation, then back together as one audience for a final play.  14 plays.  That would make this an over 2 hour endeavor, and really only be capable of having 36 audience members per show.  it would also mean that we need at least 18 people on cast and crew - 2 actors and 1SM/tech for each piece.  That may still be too much...

And then there were three

I now have three plays for the cycle "The Long Surrender."  Wrote the first pass at a short play for the song "Rave On" by Over the Rhine, which was tricky because I've written a play from that song once already, and it was tough not to write another version of that story.  But it's a really great song - it probably will yield more for me in the future (it's my favorite on the album, I think).

Three plays, three fairly different styles.  Can't wait to get through the whole set so I can start looking at how this can all work together.

The candelabra

This is the second piece I wrote in that evening at The Art Factory.  I enjoy it when this kind of writing happens - it's a response to the flow of the moment; for a place in time and the people inhabiting it.  I don't know if it has any further reach than for that evening, but I thought I'd share it anyway.  It's written down more or less like a poem, but I don't know if I'd call it that...

It drops from above

This rain of wax

Coating

Melted from the whole

Hanging just above

Within reach but secure

The candles spend themselves

To coat what lies below

The burn felt

Being only a fraction

Of the process from candle to wax

All sacrificed

To prepare itself to creat

A protection

Taking perfect shape

Over that which it covers

Individual

Internationally produced playwright

Last night (or thereabouts - with the time difference), two short plays of mine - called East Wind Unfair and Peach Blossoms Fall - were produced at Guizhou University in China.  This was a joint project between students of mine at Belhaven, and Chinese students under the leadership of my good friend Charlie Pepiton, who is in China wrapping up a two-year stint with the Peace Corps.

Our assignment was to write a cycle of 10 plays using the ancient poem called The Phoenix Hairpin by Lu You.  We broke the poem into 8 parts, wrote a short play based on just that phrase, then wrote an opener and a closer - between 4 students and myself, we each wrote two plays.  The plays were then given to 10 students in China, who cast and rehearsed them.  Last night was the performance (in front of an audience of about 500, I'm told).  Hopefully, I'll be able to post photos (or maybe video) at some point.

It's been an exciting project, and certainly a resume-builder. :)  Very proud to have been a part of this.

The cracked window

This is the first of two short pieces I wrote during a really great evening while on the trip to the Art Factory in Kandern, Germany - written really quickly, and for the most part it was for the people in the room.  But I thought I'd share it here as well...

A cold wind rushed in at the crack in the window.  She had intended to fix it all summer and all fall, but had never gotten around to it somehow.  It had happened that spring, an accident – of sorts.  She’d wanted to throw it, a heavy object – heavy enough to smash a window.  She wasn’t mad at the object, but it had the necessary weight.  So frustrated.  She thought it would make her feel better, and she thought it had; and maybe it did, for a time.  But now, as the winter has come and the east wind whips past the pines on the hill, it hits hard her exposed east wall.  Where the window, designed to let in the suns morning beams, now gaping, allows the chill to seep through.  Morning after morning, she’s tried it all – warmer coffee, thicker socks, more layering, a ceramic warmer, a snuggly blanket, a hat, a coat, 3 different shades of masking tape, a piece of cardboard, foam, duct tape, a board and a disastrous attempt at caulk.  But what it needs, what it’s built for, is a whole window.  Until then, she cannot warm herself.  It takes a window, to hold out the wind and to let in the sun.  That is what a window is for.

Two down...

I've tackled a first draft of a piece for the second song in the cycle, called 'Sharpest Blade.'  This one was a little tougher to write, and is a lot more stylized than the last play - but I do want them to be different from one another (mission accomplished).

If I can keep up this pace and actually get through one play at day, I'll be done at the end of next week...

First of the cycle

So, I've written the first draft of the first short play of the Long Surrender cycle - one piece for each song on the album by Over the Rhine. Play one is from track one, called The Laugh of Recognition. The plays do not follow the same story told by the song, but are instead inspired by the tune, the mood, and sometimes snatches of lyrics.

 As a special bonus for me, this first draft received a workshop staging today by my friends Stephanie Bishop, Grace Varland and Ginny Holladay, and in my opinion worked very well. It gave me hope that this project will come together. And now, all I have to do is write 13 more plays...

Coming out from under...

So, i'm noticing that i've not put anything on this blog since november, when i was happy about finishing some more pages on Mayfair.

Well, that got finished - and workshopped with a presentation in February.  It was a fun show, great responses.  There is another presentation scheduled for October at Weslyan School in Georgia, which I'm looking forward to going to see.

In the past two months, i've performed in the New Stage production of All My Sons with John Maxwell and a great cast - very proud of that show.  and I took a team of students to Germany, France, and Switzerland, where we performed The Tempest (I played Prospero).

I'm home now, and looking ahead at the next couple of months.  As always, I have a lot of hopes and dreams of how a summer 'off' will yield a massive amount of writing time - which somehow always gets sucked up to watching the fourth hour of morning talk shows and reruns of HeeHaw.  (that's a joke.  no one runs reruns of HeeHaw.  I've checked.)

My writing project currently on the front burner is to write a 'progressive play' - where the audience moves from site to site to watch short 7-10 minute plays at various locations.  My idea is to write a play based off of each track from the Over the Rhine album The Long Surrender - which might prove tricky, since I already wrote one (which is too long for this project) to the song Rave On.  But we'll see how it all turns out.  The goal is to have a set of plays which the audience sees in groups of 10 or less, then at the end, all the small audience groups comes together to watch the last play together - maybe people from all the individual plays are all in the last play.