Notecards

I've made notecards for my play, "Contact/Space," (the new title I'm not fully comfortable with)... I gave all my characters names, after doing some googling of baby names and their meanings and looking at pictures of friends to see if their names would click with a character. When I start crafting a character, I find them a "real world surrogate," a person that I know whose personality I can mine as a starting point for my character. Then, when I find a name for this character, something odd happens. The new name and all the "meanings" behind that name mix with the personality of the "real world surrogate," and a completely new being is born: a fictional, full character that is both separate and fully connected to the real world around me.

Back to the notecards... I made use of the dead time here at the call center (blogging from work, hooray!) to create these cards, each with stripes of a different highlighter color indicating which characters are involved and if a "dance" takes place in the scene. 18 cards. 18 cards of gestating scenes, monologues, and dances. Now, the question comes to the forefront: How do you "write" a dance? Being married to someone getting a masters in dance notation, I don't ask this question lightly. What I'm trying to do is represent dance in the script without giving choreography. I'm also trying to keep the dance from "mime" or from turning into things such as "a dance about seduction," or "a dance where people break up." I want the dance to be a character in the play, a living, breathing entity that interacts with the characters, has its own drive.

Easier said than done.

But at least the characters are leaping into the notecards and coming more to life in the back of my mind. We're halfway through the month of November, and I have about two weeks to finish this play. But it only needs to be 75 pages of a first draft, and I'm about to crack this thing wide open!

Preparations

National Playwriting Month (Naplwrimo) is not until November, but I'm already prepping a new play. By prepping, I mean brooding. By brooding, I mean collecting thoughts and stories, storing up emotions, and twisting my "emotional danger muscles." "Emotional danger muscles?" I don't believe I've ever used that phrase before... What do I mean by that? Umm... I think it has something to do with what's at the basis of drama: conflict. And how do you create conflict? Well, you drop out of a comfort zone, drift dangerously close to the edge of taboo, and stop listening to reason. So, in a sense, these "danger muscles" are exploratory in nature, taking what's out there in the real world, in real moments, and finding your personal censor. Where do your sentences stop? Where do your actions stop? What words do you choose to say? When do you keep silent? When do you have a dirty thought that is cut off? Okay, so you've located those moments and are now hyper-aware of your little censor in the back of your mind. I will call mine: Leo Bloom. Leo has been in overdrive lately since I've been working in the customer service arena and must choose my words carefully. In addition to this, working in a corporation demands a certain sense of decorum and "grace" when dealing with coworkers. What would happen, in any of these humdrum, boring, and seemingly innocent interactions if the spigot on my Leo (sounds dirty) were to be loosened? Now, in order for this to work and open up dramatic possibilities, you also have to, in the playground of your imagination, also loosen everyone else's Leo Spigot. Play around with the spigots, how loose they are, try them at different levels to see what interactions take place. These are the "emotional danger muscle" exercises that can lead to the creation of a play. I believe this is what happened in the creation of the film "Shortbus," allowing taboos and decorum to let loose and to play around in a safe, controlled space with letting loose the Leos of as many people as possible and reveling in the creation of a completely unblocked smörgåsbord of humanity. And this is the kind of play I want to create for Naplwrimo. Now, this doesn't mean I want to write a play where the actors are all actually having sex on the stage, this isn't the idea. I'm speaking conceptually. I want to open up the characters to their extreme vulnerabilities, so they can touch and be touched and be truly affected be each other. Of course, isn't this at the heart of the dramatic experience? Catharsis.