Thursday/ Fish

As part of the playwriting track at The Glen Workshop at Mount Holyoke College this past week, we were asked to write a ten minute play.  My play is called Thursday/ Fish, and I've posted it on my Scribd.com page HERE.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out - it was inspired by an image of a mother and daughter cleaning up a pile of rubble which I found on Flickr.com's image archive.  I'm not exactly sure what I found so compelling in the picture, but what it inspired in the play was the resolve to continue on - to clean up and begin to heal by continuing to live on.  Tradition as a guide through tragedy.

New Short Play - RETURN

For reasons not particularly clear to me, my brain has decided to put itself to work on a new short play, currently drafted under the title Return.  It's about a 20 page script, developed from material I had written out this summer - about 5 pages of stream of consciousness writing.  Almost everything in the 5 pages got used somewhere in the script, changed the order of some things and added some others.  A vaguely realistic piece, ripe with subtext, and a couple of strongly symbolic elements (I can't seem to shake the influence Harold Pinter's work).

I cranked out a 15 page version in time for the deadline of a one-act contest last week and got it submitted - but I've now smoothed out some rough spots and filled some cracks.  I can't tell yet if there is another draft of this one before I'm done, but there are a couple of elements of the play that I can't tell whether or not they click.  Particularly the presence and discussion of a Bible, which somehow worked its way into this play.

I'm fairly happy with this draft of the script and story itself, but yet again, I find myself with another short one-act that may or may not actually be produceable.  But after a post-production funk (finished directing Galileo last week), it feels good to actually get back into the writer's chair and complete something - which is the only reason I let myself indulge in this script, when I really need to get to work on the latest draft of the full-length play scheduled for production in February.

Onward.