About... Wannabe Fanboy - Day 07

Wannabe Fanboy script at Scribd.com

Day 7 proved to be difficult.  I've been staying up too late writing these things.  I had to go to bed early.  So I wrote script 7 on the morning of day 8 - unsure if I'll actually get to write script 8 today.

Also proving difficult was the lack of inspiration.  About the only thing I was going on was enjoying watching the web series called Comedians in Cars getting Coffee - Jerry Seinfeld picks up a comedian friend and they go get coffee.  It really is just them chatting and being conversationally funny as they sit in a car, then a coffee shop.  So I was going after that kind of flow of conversation; lighter and amusing.

I do often wonder about the fanboy impulse.  There are a lot of things that I really enjoy, but I would never get a tattoo of it, or dress up like a character at a convention or movie premiere.  I would never paint my body to attend a sporting event.  I do buy a fair amount of books about a subject I like (maybe a playwright, or director), but I'm not going to go out and re-enact something, or look on ebay for authentic Elvis paraphernalia.  There's something I admire, and maybe even slightly envy, about that kind of fan support - and maybe I wish I had it.  Not enough to paint my house the Pittsburgh Steelers colors.

About... Communication - Day 06

Communication

Day 06 and I'm back on track.  Except that it is far too late at night right now.  Seriously, the Olympics are killing me.  Maybe I have a shot at writing in the morning tomorrow...

So this play is another tough one - three characters all talking on phones but not necessarily to each other... or are they?  Not so far as I can tell at this point.  If I ever come back to this idea, I may try for that a little more.  But much like some of my other work, I'm intrigued by juxtaposing two halves of conversations next to each other to make an almost-connecting third conversation.  I'm also fond of making things I do at random sound like important exercises and research.

The names came from nowhere, just that when I'm writing a lot of short things like this, I hate to repeat names, so eventually the names become random collections of letters and punctuation symbols that approximate names.

These late night writing sessions seem to all happen at the dining room table.  And let me tell you, these chairs are not at all comfortable after about an hour and a half.

I was listening to The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails for a while during the writing.  I took a break and stopped the song, and when I came back to writing I forgot to restart it.  I don't know what it contributed to the play, perhaps nothing.

About... Silverware and the Strip - Day 05

Silverware and the Strip

Yeah - I'm catching up.

Straightforward little piece, writing by just following my nose.  I've always been a fan of the image of a table of silverware getting overturned - like in American Buffalo.  Didn't have much of anything else in mind in terms of images or symbols.  Like I said: straightforward on this one.

Still sitting in the same place from writing the last play, dining room table.  No music this time - but for some reason, I'm still wearing the earbuds.  (don't understand it myself)

Well now it's incredibly late, and I will definitely pay for this tomorrow.  Let's try not to get behind again, shall we?  (it's the Olympics.  too many interesting stories to be told there...)

About... Dead Wedding - Play 04

Dead Wedding

Right up front - I'm behind schedule.  And this one is really long for a one-day write.  This is why I say play 04 and not day 04...

So the idea of a dead wedding is something I got from theatre artist Tadeusz Kantor in his piece called Weidepole Weidepole, where is deceased parents (images he borrows from old photographs) are experiencing their wedding day.  I've rolled the idea of someone marrying someone else who is already dead round for a while.  thought I'd try it out here.

Some of the details in the play are vague - like exactly why this is all happening.

The idea of the priest as a former associate of the groom was something that just occurred to me as I was writing.  It became central to the play, oddly enough.

to write this one, I am in my usual spot, at the dining room table, headphones in.  Listened to the Swell Season song "I Have Loved You Wrong" on repeat - possibly about 30 times.

And I rushed the ending.  Just had to get done with it.  It's really late right now.  And, ideally, I was going to write #5 tonight as well and get caught up...

About... Pyramids - Day 03

Pyramids

It's hard to know what to say about this one.  I purposefully took abstract to the next level, perhaps past any measure of sense.  There's a couple of connections probably worth mentioning, so I'll give it a shot.

The jacket thing is something that's been rolling around in my head for a while, so I'm trying it out here - it came from sitting behind a kid in a long event in a room that was hard to temperature control, so it'd be really cold for a while, then it would get hot; but he took it to the extreme.  The domino thing is something that's from an activity of my day today - not too much to say about it, it was just what came to mind.  The names were the first words that came to mind; no idea why.

And yes, the pyramid speech is the first section of the Wikipedia article on pyramids.

Anyway, it's really late right now, and I wanted to finish this before I went to bed.  Bad idea?  Possibly.

About.... Cassiopeia's Story of Leo and Gemini - Day 02

Cassiopeia's Story of Leo and Gemini - a fable about searching for love on one's own terms.

OK, truth time.  This was supposed to be for day 2, but I wrote it on day 3 - first thing in the morning.  Day 2 was the first day of a teaching assignment I was doing (teaching drama to students from China) - and was too nervous about it and doing last minute prep to even think about writing even a short play.  but I got it written the next morning.

I wanted to write a more abstract play after writing a realistic scene yesterday.  I had a vision of a particular action to happen on stage (a strange stage kiss) - somehow it didn't actually get to happen in this play, but maybe it will still find its way in sometime this month.  but it led me down the path of thinking of this story of searching for love.  I like to keep staging simple, so I wanted no set, just the lighting effect.  I started with Cassiopeia coming on, thinking that she was IN the story, but she started TELLING the story, so I just went with that.

I know there's more to this whole fable, and maybe in September I'll go back to it.  I'll probably say that about all of these...

About... House of Cards - Day 01

The first of my 31... plays is titled House of Cards - a period piece where a husband returns after being gone for months to earn money to pay a debt, and discovers that his wife has moved on.

Shannon and I had gone for breakfast at Brent's Drugs - a great little diner in Jackson (it's in the movie The Help).  I stuck around afterwards to write, and with the mid-century vibe and 1940s big band music playing, it seemed only natural to write it in period.

As with most things I write (especially these short, quick writing stints), I don't have any grand vision of where the story came from or what it means.  I like the tension of the piece.  Not sure I'm crazy about it - I think I was trying to hard to twist it back on itself and try to make it surprising, only ending up not making it that surprising.

But it's day one, and hopefully we only move up from here.