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.

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.

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.

Back at the MoJoe Lounge

I'm here at the MoJoe Lounge, just below me is the box office to the 30 screen AMC theatre here at the Easton Town Center. The large open lobby to my left that I'm lording above is somewhat distracting. There are a lot of people here for a Friday morning. Guess people are starting spring break a little early or something. I don't know. It's about 11:30am and I still have about an hour and a half before heading over to work.

Open in another window is the file of "The Brothers Caramillo," complete with some changes from today. I'm battling with a case of writer's block that is different from the kind I usually experience. This time, I actually WANT to write, I desire getting into the world of the play, but I'm having trouble getting a handle on the story at the moment. I feel like I'm confusing characters and moments and the timeline of the action. I know at this point, I should just be writing and then "fix" any continuity errors when I start revising and really putting scenes in their correct order.

My mind has been trying to fix scenes, to give each character his or her due and purpose. This play has... Let me think... Alex, Dimas, Elian, Theo, Simon, Faith, Lise, Kate... 8 characters. Not too bad. But I need to make sure that each character allows an actor a good opportunity. Lise is a problem character right now... She's Alex's "girlfriend" and isn't serving much more of a purpose than putting Alex in a particular path. I'm considering cutting her, but she does add a nice layer to Alex's character. So far she's only in a single scene, so I'm trying to find a place for her in the second act, someplace...

Theo is also a problem character. He's in the first scene of the play (or what is the first scene of the play right now) and it's a really fun scene for an actor. He's also in another scene in act 1, at the very end of act 1. But I wonder if I need him in the second act... Somewhere... There's a bit of a problem with having him in the second act, which I don't really want to divulge right now since it's the hinge that the play operates on...

And I know, I KNOW, I shouldn't be worrying about any of this right now and should just be writing scenes, building on them and letting the energy of the scenes and the discovery of new character quirks be revealed (because every new scene presents something surprising about the characters). The characters will start rebelling against the pegs I've put them into and will start tweaking themselves into different shapes. I should just let them do the work for me, you know? I feel like part of being a playwright is becoming a stenographer for imaginary people. So, I guess I should just let them talk. Shut the computer and open the Moleskine and get gritty. Let's see what happens.

The Point

I'm at the point in my writing "The Brothers Caramillo" that I love to be at. I have about pages written and am moving towards the end. I have a "first act" that tops out at 52 pages and a "second act" that is filled up by scene titles that are acting as placeholders. These scene titles are mostly names of characters that will be in the scenes: "Elian and Alex," "Dimas and Kate." Some are more descriptive of action: "Dimas Breaks into Faith's Apartment." I always put scene titles as placeholders at this point in my writing, when I know what I'm driving towards and know, somewhat, what dramatic holes need to be filled with a scene. How many of the scenes will survive? How many more scenes will I need to write? I don't know. And I won't know until more and more of the scenes are written, and I can see how the play "plays." But I'm moving with great energy and anticipation and NEED. Since I started my new job at a bank call center in the afternoons/evenings, I've taken to hitting this coffeeshop (The Cup o Joe MoJoe Lounge) in the morning (around 10 or 11). I write for two hours or so and get my body moving. The coffee and the friction of typing on the keyboard of my laptop gives me the energy to get through 8 hours of training in the afternoon. I'm finally getting my life back into a semblance of order.

Addicted to Stories

I haven't written on this blog for a good couple months. There are many reasons, but one is the fact that I've been addicted to stories. I've been devouring books and movies and tv shows like never before. I'm not going to list everything I've seen, but here's some of what I've experienced:

"The Brothers Karamazov"
"The World According to Garp" (film and novel)
"1984" (novel and film)
"Capote"
"Casino Royale" (film (in the middle of the novel))
"The Prestige" (film and novel)
"Y: The Last Man" the graphic novels (I'm chomping my way through them)
"Ex Machina" the graphic novel
"Equus" (film)
"The Sound and the Fury"
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

It's been literally years since I've read anything for the sake of pure enjoyment. And now, I find myself hungry for books, hungry for stories. And it kind of makes me wonder if filling myself with so many stories will have an adverse effect on my ability to pour out my own stories, or whether I'm merely adding water to the well. I'm not too worried by this new, healthy obsession. If I'm going to be addicted to something it may as well be something worthwhile, right?