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.

Mayfair - more pages...

So, with deadlines past and urgency at an all time high, I am cranking out new pages for The Mayfair Affair.  I went off to a local coffee shop to write this afternoon - one that, thankfully, password protects its wireless (they change it daily, I think, but will tell you the new password if  you ask the barista).  So I didn't ask for the pw, which means I actually hunkered down and WROTE.  I hit a nice stop point around page 42, which might be the end of act one.

Some of what I have right now is really funny - which is the point, I suppose - but I already know it will need to get tighter as I move forward with the next pass.  Hopefully, I will have a whole draft before the end of this weekend.

Our expectation is to cast this play in the beginning of December (which is next week), and have a reading with the cast before we all go away for Christmas - which will mean finding a time during final exams.  No pressure.  That will then give me the material with which to rewrite over the holidays and have a new draft by the time rehearsals begin in January.

This is a crazy schedule, I am well aware...

Workshop Production scheduled

The premiere workshop of my new farce, The Mayfair Affair, will be produced at Belhaven University in February of 2012.  My good friend, John Maxwell, has agreed to serve as the director for the show, even though up until now, the play has only been a series of outlines, and one really terrible draft that has to be almost completely set aside for the next pass.

Yesterday, I started the new draft, a 12 page rewrite of the opening scene - a much better version (if I do say so myself).  The hope is that I can get enough pages of this draft done in the next few weeks that we can cast the show and have an initial read with them in place, so I will have time to do at least one more draft, if not two or three, before rehearsals begin at the start of the spring semester.

I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to be in rehearsal as the playwright again, where I can put all my focus on the script, and leave the directing to someone else.  I found that process to work well for me during the staged reading of Anathema at Square Top Repertory in Colorado - made a lot of progress in just one week.

A little bit more...

So I got another 17 pages done, which is the bulk of one of my primary climax-type scenes, a very complicated sequence which has proven to be a real challenge today. The scene isn't done, but i did map out how the rest of the scene will work. Up to 86 now.

I'm finding it quite difficult to write scenes with this many people in them. I realized a couple of days ago that I haven't actually written a play with more than 4 characters total, much less a scene where 8 people are all trying to talk. Almost as confusing as the fact that almost every single person in this play is pretending to be at least one other person, if not more.

I will also say that, as someone who almost always writes to music, I'm having a great time listening to all the Tango music that I've chosen to inspire the writing - a LOT of Astor Piazzolla. It's a fun kind of energy that is beautiful, takes itself quite seriously, and is bouncy and fun at the same time.

As the New Year is approaching, I am also realizing that if I finish this first draft - no matter how badly it is written - I will have kept my New Year Resolution for 2010, to write at least the first drafts of two new full length plays. I might just be able to sneak it in under the wire...

A beginning!

It has begun. I have started to write script pages for The Mayfair Affair.

On December 21, I pounded out the first 20 pages of script, another 24 pages on the 28th, and today, I have about 25 (That's a total of about 69 for the math-deprived). This is all some really terrible first draft writing, but I continue to make discoveries, as my pre-conceived ideas seem to take a back seat to whatever the characters start to say while I type - though I am hitting all of the major plot points (a necessity in a farce comedy - which needs to have a highly structured plot). I have reached some moments which should hit right around the end of Part One (pre-intermission), and a big scene that I think should go in part two. Though I do think there might be more setup necessary before I could call part one 'done' even for a first draft.

I'm actually just glad that all of the characters finally have names now - which really helps when trying to flesh them out as full characters and not just 'the maid' or 'the male thief'. Obviously, there will be a lot of cleaning up to do - including re-establishing some of those initial ideas, but a start is a start.

The goal is to have a full first draft (which I'm guesstimating will have about 100 pages, maybe a little more) sometime over the weekend. That's long for a play, but inevitably there will be some trimming. With a pending trip next week, I'd like to have at least this first pass done before I leave. Perhaps putting it in the drawer for a week while I'm gone will let it settle before charging ahead with another draft.

Kind of funny, the idea first came to me in early January, while making the long drive back from visiting family - roughly the same trip I'll be taking next week...

So much to do - but glad to finally be at a beginning - a whole year later!

So, many months later...

I'm just about ready to get back on track with the farce that I'm working on, The Mayfair Affair. While I haven't gotten any script pages done per se, I've been turning the ideas over in my head over the past few weeks, and it's been heating up over the past few days - the fingers are itching to write. Directing has been where the energy has gone, but every time I don't really have the energy to work on writing - that's when the ideas start to roll.

I'm very lucky to be in the position I'm in, where this project already has some deadlines built in: I'm scheduled for a staged reading in the late spring, with an eye toward an actual production during the 11-12 season - plus a director attached who I'm very happy to have working on the play. Of course, the panic of not actually having pages in hand could potentially be crippling as the reading approaches, but knowing me, having that deadline that I can't push back just because I feel like it should be a strong motivating factor.

I'll always remember the story that my playwriting teacher would tell us about the English playwright whose agent came up with a title, booked a theatre for the opening, and hired a graphic designer to make a poster with the title and show dates - then sent it to the playwright, who then wrote the play! I don't think I'll go that far...

Working...

Today, I had a really great pitch session with Brandon Whitlock - lots of fantastic ideas for the development of a new project I'm working on; a farce called The Mayfair Affair. I've never written a farce, and it's been a long time since I've done comedy. But this idea jumped into my head almost fully formed a few months back, and I can see working on this as a great opportunity to write something that might have legs (would be something that a lot of other places might be interested in producing).

I have one other play currently on the front burner, Several, which I am working on a second draft of within this next week so that I can start rehearsing it with the floodlight theatre company, then I can look at starting a draft of Mayfair.