Teaching

In a fit of odd desperation at work, I went to a "huddle room" (rooms with little tables and chairs and dry erase boards for small meetings) and I started to teach a class on playwriting. To no one. Like a young girl has a tea party with stuffed animals, or how I used to play "Mass" when I was a kid, dressing up in one of my father's T-shirts and using grape juice and Lays Potato Chips as communion. Of course, since my congregation consisted of myself, I ate a lot of chips as a kid. I still feel a twinge of sacredness when I have a bag of Lays...

Anyway, so I was teaching this class, starting with Aristotelian principles and Freytag's Triangle. I broke this down further into a basic three-act structure, using terminology gained from Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige: The Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige.


I then moved into a discussion of how this structure works in Caryl Churchill's Far Away, moving from something ordinary to something exceedingly outrageous and unexpected.

I told my imaginary students that another name for "The Prestige" was "Perception Shift," which was taught to me by Sherry Kramer. (We would be investigating this throughout the semester.)

They could also look forward to our session on adaptations, (my forte, my calling as Sherry Kramer decreed one night, "I know what you should do with your life! Adaptation!") and we would be going over such plays as Tallgrass Gothic by Melanie Marnich (one of those other playwrights who have pushed me into a better understanding of myself as a playwright).

My class was cut short by the end of my break, and, sadly, I have left my imaginary students out in the cold. I haven't had a chance to start our workshops, see what they're writing. I'm way behind on my syllabus... Hell, I haven't even created my syllabus!

I'm a poor excuse for an imaginary playwriting professor.

Vexation

I spoke to my friend, Andy, last night and when asked what I was up to, I said, "Besides trying to finish my 'Brothers Karamazov' adaptation?" And he said, "Is that still vexing you?"

YES! I remain vexed by the project.

BUT! Yesterday, I was back at my coffeeshop of choice, Cup O Joe, not to be confused with one of my favorite websites, cupojo.net. Anyway, so I was there, armed with a printed copy of "The Brothers Caramillo," ready to get clicking away. I had my new "bullet space pen," and started actually reading the play that I had thought was finished several months ago. Ha, ha. No, silly boy. You've left out waaaaaaay too much of the story to call this a "finished play." As I read through the play for the first time in months, I realized that the scenes I've been adding to the play for the past few weeks don't really fit into the emotional and narrative scheme that I'd created. Simply reading the play allowed me to notice all the places the play needed to expand, where all the characters and moments just needed time to breathe. So, now, I have tiny segments floating around in my mind, like deleted scenes from a dvd or something, flipping through my mind. The play is ready to expand, like it wants to take a large breath. Suppose that's what a play is: a collective in-take of breath, and at the end, whoooooooooo. The breath escapes and what is left is an odd, uneasy, energized peacefulness.

So, I typed all the nips and tucks I made yesterday, and printed out a new copy, ready to add those moments of breathing.