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unadulterated

So here we are again. Now Feb 6, Ronald Reagan’s birthday and I am jobless (Still and on purpose) and attempting to get writing. Men are from mars womena are from shitland is in pretty good shape. People are starting to take an interest in its production. That should be encouraging and in fact it is but there’s just that sense of the whip at my back to try to more to try and make more interesting things happen. I want to write more. I’m really good at rewriting but the writing part always proves to be difficult. I think its that notion where you wrote and you weren’t quite prepared and you feel like your bad writing massacred an otherwise good idea.

 

Things that are filtering around my head today. Johnny had a script purchased. He asked me to help on that script and I told him I couldn’t. He got paid and I didn’t. This is a case where my inability to help him write something that was unpalatable to me cost me money. But that doesn’t really make to upset. Should it? I would love to have made some money and have a script in with New Line, and who knows, perhaps we could have made it really good. But Johnny never showed me the script. Which also makes me suspicious. But I think the ultimate issue is that I’m trying to do something very different than Johnny, which is specifically to talk about something that is somehow truthful to me. I’m not making escapist stuff. Right now.

 

Talking about writing with people is always frustrating to me. Because I don’t feel like I make a whole lot of headway. Except in sharpening the story I’m trying to tell by telling it to other people. But then I feel like I’ve prevailed upon them, rather than giving them a story, they’ve given me an opportunity to tell mine. That exchange of stories issue is a big deal. Because of course I’d rather sit there and ask questions. I’d rather just suck stories out of other people. But authentic boring, detailed stories about life. More life. Rather than sit there and listen to us discuss things like music and film and stuff like that. Pan’s Labrynth. I knew I was in trouble when that topic came up, because all of a sudden I feel like I’m coming across as a world class hater. And I really don’t like feeling like I carry the entirety of the world’s negative energy in my brain. But when I discuss things that I didn’t like I feel like I need to either have my opinion respected or to really make some dents in the other persons opinion. They’ll remember me if for no other reason than I just smashed what they think around.

Opinion as sledgehammer is a really interesting idea.

 

I have a play I have to write. This is my second DARE project, I swear to God if there were a way to make T-Shirts with the DARE logo on them, I think we certainly should. That is a digression. The dare is straightforward. I think I’ve even lost the slip that the Dare was written on (incidentally by dear friend and frequent collaborator Aaron Kliner):

Write a ten minute play with ten lines of dialogue.

 

I love the dare. Within it are questions of what a play is, what dialogue is, why do we talk, why does this task seem so daunting? How many ten line plays have their been?  If this were a film, the project would be very very simple. Since words are the currency of plays just as pictures are the currency of film having only ten lines seems an exceptionally daunting task.

My last dare was to make sense of something nonsensical. Specifically to rectify the juxtaposition of two words “tap dancer” and “broccoli’ into some rational thing. In that case it became a sort of Rorschach test. What do you see when you look at the tapdancing broccoli. And I was glad because I used the entire dare including the misspelling and there was massive misdirection and the play was over all quite sad.

 

So there are several options that I’ve come up with in addressing this challenge. Namely the challenge of telling a story with so few words.

 

1) CHEAT

- this option is to simply redefine the terms.  Suddenly a line of dialogue comes to mean any length of dialogue. So a series of five monologues interrupted by five little lines becomes the interpolation here permitting an entire story to be told. The story is not what is being said but the response to what is being said.

I think of Billy the Bellman and his relationship with his mother and how horrible everything she says is and how powerless he is. There is not really a story here, not in the sense of a protagonist- Billy doesn’t impact this story. He can’t. We like him because he survives this hellacious amount of guilt and horrible story telling. I’d like to tell this story.

The other story would be something based on the virginity story.

 

2) FIND SOMETHING THAT WOULD PREVENT TALKING

this idea began as basically the ‘nudity’ idea which is intended to mean that people would be disinclined toward speaking around someone who was unexpectedly and inappropriately naked. The man who is fired from his office job takes off all of his clothes as a method of protesting the unfairness of things. There are whispers, muted speech the audience can’t hear (doesn’t count, see?), plans being made to remove the person. This does have a story, and perhaps is the most conventionally satisfying of the ideas that I’ve happened on. It also has male nudity as a means of creating audience discomfort.

 

Lots of things inhibit talking or even hearing. I think you could do an interesting piece about hearing loss where you only hear ten lines of dialogue but there are many more. That could be very trying to an audience but very troubling. Also you could replace the sounds of dialogue with other sounds.

 

3) Change the venue of story telling. Instead of avoiding blackouts, lets use blackouts. I’d really like to try to make people feel what torture is like. A really horrible ten minutes. I’m going to try to write that now.