Return

After a long absence for personal trips and such, I've returned to blog-land to document further evolutions of my plays, at this time, The Brothers Caramillo. Yes, yes, I'm still working on this Brothers Karamazov adaptation that began two years ago during the first National Playwriting Month (the third annual NaPlWriMo begins on November 1st). Back then, the play was called Goody, Goody and was more of an adaptation of Brecht's Good Person of Setzuan, but evolved as I was reading Dostoyevsky's story about three brothers, their father, and the philosophical conversations that go directly to the heart of their struggles.

Lately, my work on Brothers C has been ripping the play apart, literally, hacking and cutting and slicing with my precision scalpel, or spacepen. I've been looking for things that ring false, that are missing that sense of character or truth and moments that were simply creating as ways for me, the writer, to push the characters from point a to point b. I use the word "push" quite deliberately. I feel that a play works best when you feel the breath of the characters propelling them forward, or even the fickle finger of fate factoring in there somewhere. However, I feel that feeling the fingers of a "literary" puppetmaster can kill drama. There's a difference. One has its fingers on the pulses and fates of the characters, while the other merely has its fingers on the keys of a keyboard. One has true power, while the other apes it.

I've been excising my false fingerprints from the play and have been allowing the characters to live. One of the main epiphanies that told me that a new approach to the play would be required was allowing the play's description to finally sink in. I called the play a "fast & loose adaptation," but in reading the play, I realized that the play was neither fast nor loose. It was stilted and slow and methodical. Dostoyevsky's original moved quicker than my play, and that's saying something!

So, in trying to find the quickness, the vibrancy, the looseness, and the pulse of the play, I searched out a theme song for my play. Why? Well, I needed a visceral experience that would allow me into the true world of the play, and what is more visceral that music? After searching for the theme song in soundtracks varying from The Motorcycle Diaries, Frida, Battlestar Galactica, I found the theme song by accident when I felt the need to watch Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 2. In the special features there was a live performance by Chingon, director Robert Rodriquez' band, rocking out a traditional mariachi song Malaguena Salerosa. This song, with its undercurrents of Mexican folk, sprinklings of rock, a near-Brian May peal of the electric guitar, and its dynamic changes made this the theme song that defined the world of The Brothers Caramillo.

I've spent plenty of time taking bits of fat and skin and muscle from the play, breaking its bones, and looking, not for a spine, but for the beating heart, and now that there's a song that can act as a direct link between my heart and the play's, I feel much more prepared to continue.