Solamente Una Vez

While working at the box office last week for the Iowa New Play Festival, I thought to myself, "Hey, I'm just standing around here not doing anything, what does this remind me of?" I worked at a credit union for almost three years. In that time, I wrote and rewrote ONE full play and wrote a couple of scenes of another. Since we were on computers all day long, I used to open up microsoft Word and type up scenes, outlines, thoughts, journals. As I look back on a lot of the writing I was doing, it all is pretty petty and not very mature. My writing has matured a great deal as my mind has expanded and my views of the world broaden. Life experience does count for something. The plays that I was working on at the credit union have become diffifult for me to rewrite since I can't get my head back into that same frame of mind, that same victim mentality I was writing all the characters from: "Oh, my life is so hard, I'm sad, no one loves me."
Fast forward to last week... In the box office, I think, Hey, I'll use some of this scratch paper here and I'll write a scene. So, I grabbed a pad of "University of Iowa" paper and a slick pen that was on the counter and I stared at the blank paper. "How do you do this again? What was I going to write? Make a decision and go. Come on. Anything. Write something. A scene. What scene? A scene for... How about a scene for "Solamente Una Vez?" Yes! There are some scenes missing in that play, why don't I write one of those. Like which? I don't know. There's no scene with Becky and Federico together having their affair. There isn't? No? Wow. Could've sworn I wrote that one. Okay. So, where do I start? I don't know. Are they in bed? Sure. Right after sex? Okay. And what do people talk about right after sex? Sleep? No. Food? No. The scene has to mean something. The scene has to say something about why she goes for Fred and not her husband, but I don't want to make it blatant and obvious... What about fantasies? What's her fantasy of Fred? Yes! Okay!"
And I started writing a short monologue and my mind went deep into the scene. It's a pretty hot scene without being vulgar. At the undergraduate readings of 10 short plays, there was this monologue about a woman having her first orgasm. It was really bad. No sense of emotion, no sense of purpose, and it was more vulgar than anything I've ever written. Shock value can only go so far to create a world. It wasn't a play, it wasn't even a monologue. It was an essay or a short story. Just because a character is talking doesn't make it a monologue. I've had to learn that for myself. Monologues have to move and be said for a real reason. There has to be something that the character wants to get out of the person(s) he or she is speaking to or else why would the character go on so long? And there has to be something the persons listening want to get out of the monologue otherwise why would they listen so long? For the first time, I feel like I broke through the surface in writing a monologue. Real purpose. That monologue I started in the box office last week has become one of the best scenes of the play. Strong purpose, strong emotion, and a genuine drive forward, a thru-line. My skills in scene writing are growing. I need to polish up "Solamente Una Vez" for workshop in the fall so I can send it off to the Alliance Theatre for their MFA student competition. "Solamente" has my best writing to date in terms of dialogue and character. I'm still working on getting the form to work for the play. I've been poring over what Lee Blessing told me about how to begin a play: Once you have the concept, find the change, the climax. Look at the play like a lawyer's opening and closing statements. "Here's what I'm going to prove." Then you write the play, showing the evidence. "You see? That's what I was going to prove." With "Solamente," I had instinctually figured out that I wanted to answer some basic questions: "Do you have to be macho to be a Latino male?" "What makes a man a man?" But the most important question is "what are the consequences of following your impulses?" If all the characters in "Solamente" get what they want, if all the affairs happen, what are the consequences? It starts off as a romance, affairs, and then it turns into something darker. Romance is dangerous and the consequences of following "instinct" in the civilized world are severe. It's odd to write that out and see it in front of me. But that's what the play is about. Seems trivial or perhaps pretentious, maybe racist or sexist, but the writing in the play is ringing true and that's all that matters to me at this point.