The first draft of Long Surrender is done!

The Long Surrender has a complete 14 play first draft.

The first play was written the morning of May 20, the last one complete around 1 am on June 4.  15 days, 94 pages.  14 stories.  All written at my dining room table.

The longest play is 9 pages, the shortest has 6.  Yes, they are 'just scenes' in terms of length, but I'd be hard pressed to think that there's more to the story to be told in any of them.  All but one of them have just 2 characters on stage (a couple of voices that could be recorded) - the final play has 9 speaking characters, but it's a fable, and could well be done with 3 actors.  Simple sets - relatively low tech (even the most high-tech one has a low-tech alternative).  I even had restraint enough to keep from writing moments where someone overturns a table full of marbles* (or anything like that).

I'm feeling quite relieved - the final play did not turn out to be as difficult as I feared.  I worried that the idea of culminating the whole project with a final play would get in my head and block me up, but deciding (while listening to the song, Favorite Time of Light - in fact, a bonus track when you buy the album online) that it could be like a children's fable, purposely different from everything else, then it was easy to just take this play as its own thing, and not bother with the pressure of having to wrap it all together with a little bow.  Surrendering.  My own little lesson from this project.

I can't say I know exactly what to do with all of this now - certainly, I have to go back and read the whole thing all together, and see what it is I've actually done.  We'll see how I feel about it at that point.  But even if it all comes to nothing - I think I've gained a lot from the attempt.  And that makes me satisfied.

* mental note: write someone overturning a table full of marbles into the next play...

3 more done

I've now completed plays #8, #9 and #10, which means that there are only 4 more plays to write to finish the first draft of The Long Surrender cycle.  I won't be surprised if these three plays turn out to be my favorites when all is said and done.  Two of them are fairly realistic, the other has some style to it (it'll be a challenge).  But when I finished them, each one of them, I felt pretty satisfied that I'd captured what had come to mind (though there may be some adjustments to be made).

I'm realizing now that I'm blogging through the process of writing, but I'm not really saying much about each individual play.  I might do that when I go through a second pass - I'm wanting to avoid influencing the plays that are yet to come by over-describing the ones I've written.  I'm afraid of too closely identifying the pattern I'm setting down, then getting stuck trying to continue the pattern.  I've had that problem before.

Hoping to write another play later today, then I'll be on track to finish on Wednesday...

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.

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.

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...