1 tweet play

Here's a link to this week's One tweet Plays via the New York neoFuturists...

(I am Atticscripts, if you didn't know...)

http://nyneofuturists.tumblr.com/post/31404427532/twitter-plays-part-clxxx

Talking about a play

On Thursday, I was blessed to go and visit with the cast of the new production of The Mayfair Affair - a dedicated group of high school students at The Wesleyan School in Norcross, GA, under the direction of my good friend Steve Broyles.  I got to see the set under construction and the first scene being rehearsed.

But most of our time was spent having the actors ask me questions about the play, what something meant, what I had in mind regarding a particular action or character.  What I found was that some of those questions I had answers to, others less so.  Good questions, all, but some of them I really had to dig into the recesses of "what DID i mean by that..." to come up with an answer.  I think eventually I did come up with answers, and reasonable ones at that.  I was happy that a number of questions I was able to divert to the director - it's about what he thinks will play best opposite what other people are also playing.

But I'm continuing to understand the idea of farce as a comedy machine - the difficulty in playing it is turning off the improv impulse after rehearsals are over in favor of supporting the big laughs as you've rehearsed them.  You can get an extra laugh at just about any time in a production - but it will hurt the overall work unless the laughs help an audience carry through.  They have to get the information they need (exposition and development) and the rhythm of the play must be maintained in order to connect the info to the big surprises and revelations later in the script.  And in the climactic moment of the play, realistic character response and processing of new information (revelation) only slows down the rhythm of the machine.

I can't wait to go back and see the production in October.

The drawing board

I've been churning over ideas for a new play for a couple of months as I often do - usually hoping that they go away, and if they don't then I move forward.  

Well, they didn't go away...

I'm not going to get into specifics until I have a little more, but it is a play that will be highly structured - so I'm working out the plot and characters, and then I'll start the sharpening process.  I feel as though I may have settled on a title, which always sets me in the right direction.

But coming off of this past month, I'm feeling very positive that I can get some solid work done on this and fairly quickly.  I'll share more if it develops...

Reflecting on 31 plays

113 people finished by the deadline.  31 plays, one for each day of the month of August.  Total: 4,599 plays were submitted.  I finished all 31.  232 pages.

I'm just glad that I made it through.

I learned a couple of things during this month.

1) Yes, I do have time to write.  I am as good as anyone about lying to myself (and believing it) that I don't have time to write.  Yes, there were some days where I was deliriously typing away at my computer at all hours of the night - but even on those days it was because I had chosen to not write at times that I could have.  And this is without neglecting other important parts of my life (family, job).  The time is there, I just have to decide to use it.

2) Somewhere in the middle of this month, because of the pressure of needing to crank scripts out, I started to get past the idea of 'being inspired'.  Some of the scripts suffer from that.  More of them do not.  (Most suffer from lack of rewrites...)  I came to the point of realizing that I could, in fact, find an inspiration in just about anything - a piece of dialogue, a picture, a song, an old lady on the street, a piece of historical fact.  And maybe my second most-used excuse of "waiting for inspiration" is just as invalid as the time excuse.

3) And I mentioned this before in posts about the individual scripts.  When I moved 8 years ago, I set up a writing space in a small shed behind our house.  I put in an AC unit, did some insulation, put in a table a wrote.  For a while.  Then I didn't write out there anymore, I switched to coffee shops.  But I'm now accepting that I CAN write at home, even during the daytime, with my two year old eating his lunch right next to me.  I've done it.  It can happen.  But I have to get more comfortable dining room chairs.

I woke up this morning, and I had the urge to write.  Not because I had to for a deadline.  Or because I had a fear that I would lose an inspiration.  I just wanted to do it.  Because I like to do it.

Someone asked me if I was going to keep going and do a 365 project a-la Suzan Lori Parks.  I think I'd like to, at some point, but I'd want it to be more purposeful - either do a calendar year (like 2013) or from birthday to birthday.  But all other writing kind of stops while this is going on, so I think I'll hold off on it for a bit.  I have a couple ideas I want to start working.