End of Summer

Well, it's nearly the end of the summer "season." Orientation is next Wednesday, which means classes start a week from Monday. It's going to be a great year, I can feel it. Why? Because I've been working hard this summer, (though you wouldn't know from this blog), and I've had many breakthroughs.

I've spent a lot of time experimenting with short plays and trying to understand the difference between a "full length play story" and a "short play story." Some ideas can only sustain 10 pages or so, some ideas can carry an entire play. This is something that the people at Saturday Night Live need to understand. Not every idea can blossom into a large piece of work. This was a difficult lesson for me to learn. For too long, I've thought of plays as 100 pages and 2 acts. That's it. So, if I had an idea for a play, then I had to make it 100 pages and two acts. The scenes would have to build and you have to fill in the audience on what's happened in between the scenes so they don't get confused... I've come to the point that I want to take the audience wherever I feel like it and let them keep up with me rather than me slow down for them.

What does this mean in terms of writing? Well, in my short plays, I've started to use ten pages to tell a complete story rather than ten pages to tell "part" of a larger story. These short plays have been some of my most interesting ideas and I feel they've helped push my writing into something more exact and... economical? That's close to what I mean. Before, my writing was a bit winded, a bit all over the place. Characters got their tongues tied, repeated things, and scenes got very confusing as they wrapped around and around and around. Part of that was because I saw scenes as at least 10 pages. If it's not ten pages, then it's not a scene. So, again, I plumped up scenes and added unnecessary dialogue to create these "correct" scenes. These were the strange, unwritten rules that were guiding my writing. Seems so odd to look at them in black and white and face them. Yup, those were the rules I was writing by, and, boy, do they make me look like a fool. Come on, plays can't be so restricted!

I think my earlier plays that I wrote in my first two years in the program were suffering because of these strange rules. My plays wanted to be less "realistic," less "well-made." I wanted to write dramatic collages and I was altering these ideas because of my ideas and subconscious rules of what scenes and plays were "supposed to be."

Well, no more of that. In my latest play, "All Grace," I kept it as a collage. That's what it is, that's what it's supposed to be. And it works. As far as I can tell, it works. It's something that holds together so far. Most of the connections might still be more in my mind rather than on the page, but I'm working on it. I'm getting those scenes out. And I'm understanding that short scenes are okay. A scene can be a single stage direction. A scene can be a single character. I'm learning.

Yesterday, I went back to the play I finished early this summer, "Solamente Una Vez." I had written some "new" scenes in the middle of the summer after some comments from my friend, David Gothard, a British director. He told me to throw out the play, and begin writing it again. It would come easily he told me, it would all come out and be richer. I tried this. I created a new file, I wrote two scenes to "replace" their counterparts in the old version. But that's as far as I had gotten. Yesterday, I looked at this "alternate" work and the original work. I tried to put the two together and see if there were any portions that needed some help. I spent all day writing, revising, trimming, moving scenes. I deleted the "scene that started it all." The "first scene" wasn't the first scene anymore. My "alternate" first scene set up the world of the play much better and provided a better connection to the final scene. I tried to find a home for the old first scene, but couldn't. So, it got cut. However, I did salvage the big monologue in the scene. It works much better where it is now. And I love the way the scenes progress now. Everything has a meaning. It's more of a collage rather than a plot-based narrative. And I love it now.

This experience makes me want to go back to all my early plays and restore them to the collages they once were. Part of me wants to continue to move forward. I have plenty of new ideas... Most of these ideas are, oddly enough, adaptations. Playwright Sherry Kramer once called me at home and said, "I know what you should do with your life! Adaptations!" I'm learning that she may be right. More on this soon.

Chris out.