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.

About... Granite - Play 31

Granite - script

Play #31.  Completed.  I will do a recap of the whole month in a later post, but for now...

I do actually kind of like where this one is going.  I was a little sad, though - I came up with a title off of the song I was listening to for this one ("Hold On" by Tom Waits), and I even started out by doing the title page with it; it was Bullet Needs a Gun - which I had no intention of that being literal.  But as I wrote and tried to tie these four people together, it became clear that Granite was a much more appropriate title.  Ah, well.

I had two images I found online - one of a European cobblestone street on a hill with storefronts and a large steeple-ish object at the top of the hill, the other an enormous carved stone block with a very tiny person looking at it; the roots of two of the stories.

About... Baling - play 30

Baling - script

This is the 30th play I've written this month.  There is one more and then it is over.
This is the hard part: being satisfied with having written this much, but not being satisfied with the writing.

This play felt awful to write.  It is not what I had in mind when I started - and I may need to take a good long look (psychologically) as to why I keep writing mobsters and Irish people.  At least it wasn't yet another love triangle.

I think this one came out Irish because I spent some of the day looking up information on a theatre festival in Ireland, then ended up looking at maps and images of the area.  (Visiting Ireland is on the bucket list)

And I won't lie.  I came up with a title because none of the other plays from this month started with B.

About... Leaving Circus Town - Day 29

Leaving Circus Town - script

29.

I did some web searching for images (I highly recommend Flickr's Most Interesting pics of the Last 7 Days).  I came upon a picture of a train, called The Circus Leaves Town - I twisted that around for a title.  I found a picture of two girls in a window, it was called Ines & Lisa.  I found a cool image of a wall of windows with colored panels, making the lobby area of this space brightly colored, and an image of paper lanterns on the ground.
I don't know exactly what Ines and Lisa are talking about (this happens to me a lot).  But somehow, Ines invents more drama than Lisa can tolerate any more, and if the circus is in town here, she'd rather be someplace else.