Tiny Play #9/100. (Remember Your Wrists.)
This is the tiniest play of all. So far. It’s also kind of a cheat. I wrote this 2 years ago on a challege from my (then very new) friend Matthew to write a play under 5 minutes long in which a particular thing would happen. But if I tell you what the particular thing is there will be no reason to read this.
As for new plays, I have dozens of beginnings (written + prewritten), + zeroes of ends. Or actually, a couple of ends without middles, or beginnings, or people to cuddle with.
You know how it is.
SETTING: A bus stop.
AT RISE: A sits crossed-legged at one end of the bench, wearing headphones and completely zoning out. B enters, sits down at the opposite end of the bench, gets up again almost immediately, checks the bus schedule, looks at own wrist, which is bare.
There’s a lot of silence on this blog, and I feel bad about that because I keep tossing this URL out like it’s my business card, but for the same reason, I can’t just treat this like any other blog, because I like the notion that it’s something with a relatively crisp purpose.
This is my theatre blog.
I know most (if not all) of the people who actually check up on this thing are my friends who are used to my rambling internet ways and aren’t even necessarily in this for theatrical reasons and don’t mind so much if I get off topic. I know it’s mainly for me I try to keep this relatively tidy.
But I think it’s of value to have something neat, and I’m sad that I haven’t been more regular about it lately, but if I start making posts apologising for the lack of regularity they just turn into plain old rambling, and then I’ve got more stuff to feel gross about.
So. Suffice it to say I have been unwell and it has interfered with my productivity.
I’m working on it.
If you want now you can read some things I found in one of my old public secret journals that are about theatre even though it was officially just rambles at that time.
(P.S. I am interested in the things you/we/people have put on the internet that were kind of secrets, especially when you/we/they were quite young. It’s kind of a novel I’m working on, although I can’t write for shit right now.)
Stratford Nonreviews.
Yeah, I’ve been quiet.
Sneakyquiet, perhaps?
No, not really. I’ve barely even been working.
There’s this thing I’ve seen Tony Kushner quoted as saying in multiple interviews (and I’m pretty sure he was quotatin’ somebody else), that creative people should only expose themselves to Shakespeare once a year, because it will drive them into a profound despair and ultimately destroy them or some’at. I don’t actually feel like that’s the case with me, but I was definitely down for the count this week, and come to think of it did kind of go crazy more than usual that year I had Shakespeare courses in both semesters but WHATEVER the point is I have been in suckmode but now I’m going to tell you some things I have been mulling over about the plays I saw in Stratford.
A couple of things to bear in mind while you read:
1. These are not reviews. Actually they kind of are, but I dislike the whole principle of reviewing, so they aren’t, okay?
2. I was there during previews, so some shows were doubtless more like themselves already than others. So if I am kind of mean about anybody’s performance, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have totally killed my face with excellence had I popped in a little later on in the season.
3. I didn’t choose these four shows of my own accord. I was with a mixed-ages group of folks from the Perth Academy of Musical Theatre, where I am an occasional staff member/volunteer. Not that I wouldn’t have made many of the same choices had I been in a position to choose, but don’t look at these titles and be like, “oh these must be exactly the plays Emmet gets most excited about personally,” because one of the things I’ve always liked about playing/working at PAMT is that I end up deeply involved in shows that have little to do with my own brain’s pre-existing priorities.
4. I am going to spoil shit here. So BE AWARE if that’s something you don’t want. In fact, I probably advise against reading these if there’s any chance you’re actually going to see these plays, but what do I know?
OKAY.
We jumped into this play pretty much right off of our long-ass bus ride, many of us (myself included) operating on sub-optimal quantities of sleep, and here are some feelings I felt:
“Oh shoot best Shakespeare ever maybe seriously how did I forget JUST HOW GREAT?”
“Can everybody I know please start dressing more like these shepherds pleasethanks omigosh.”
“Best child actor ever oh shoot he is going to die isn’t he? Ah fuck.”
“Thanks for the whole bear thing, Shakespeare. It’s a fun problem to solve and oh wow that’s pretty friggin’ spectacular.”
“Can we maybe do something so that when we are having conversations it comes out sounding like Shakespeare wrote them sometimes?”
“Aah long thrust long thrust this is so amazing can we have more theatres like this please aaah I have never been so pleased by anything that took place inside a skating rink in my life omigosh.”
Ahem.
Anyhow. Yeah. The Winter’s Tale is happening at the Tom Patterson, which is in fact a rink converted to a friggin’ amazing theatre for the duration of the festival. It. Is. Awesome. Basically, it’s a big rectangle with audience on two of the long sides and one of the short sides. I was seated in the 2nd row along towards the back end of one of the long sides, and it was a good place to be. There was often a lot of stuff going on at once on the stage, and I was impressed at how this managed to feel very organic — just courtiers being sociable at court or shepherds frolicking in the pastures — while still being very tightly controlled and focused, so that the extraneous activity was always contributing to, rather than distracting from the scripted elements.
Also, costumes: SO SHINY. Shepherds in particular but also the Bohemian nobility. More guys in colourful robe things IRL ASAP, SVP?
Sigh.
Overall, this was definitely my most intimate experience at the festival. Like, ever. I don’t necessarily think theatre has to be intimate to be wonderful, but this was wonderful in its intimacy.
The only thing I was maybe not so big on was the airborne spinning father time guy. Shrug. I was just really digging the whole I-am-in-this-space-with-these-people-having-these-experiences thing, and then there’s this guy on a big fancy crane and it’s very impressive and woooo and kind of takes me out of it. I do think there’s something that’s kind of inherently cheesy (at least to my generation/me) about having somebody speak for Time no matter how eloquently they do so. Not that cheesiness itself is inherently bad, but I dunno I guess this just felt like a misguided contribution to an oops-actually-we’re-all-vegan potluck or some’at. Again I say: shrug. It was one moment and then everything went straight back to awesome and then some for the second act.
YAAAAAAY.
I’m cruelly tempted to give this one a 2-letter response: “Eh.”
But that’s not helpful, so, okay: there are a lot of pretty individual factors that almost certainly contributed to my not feeling this one so much.
a) I was still sleep-deprived, only more so, because this was several hours after the previous show, plus we were seated in the balcony of the Avon, which is a fine place to be, but does permit a certain amount of outzoning you just don’t have access to when Yanna McIntosh is breaking your heart within spitting distance.
b) After the Tom Patterson staging experience, I was probably overly cranky about being told where to put my eyeballs. There was the ordinary proscenium factor, and there was also extensive use of this sectioned screen thing that created very specific sightlines and whatnot. I don’t know what the technical name for that thing is, but I might be prepared to make at least a casual stance Against it. See, I’m actually very into controlfreakiness in theatre (and other art, but let’s not get too big about this), largely because I think it opens up a lot of interesting questions about where one loses control anyways and what happens to the art because of that inevitability, and it seems like not playing fair to put a whole bunch of technology in the way of those sneaky small experiences that audience members can have all on their own when they’re watching something in a room with hundreds of people which I happen to be in favour of but whatever I don’t think I’m about to direct/design a professional production of Evita any time soon am I now?
c) My first experience with Evita happened to be an Orion production — not so big, not so glam, very personal. It worked for me. Maybe I just didn’t want/need another one.
If anybody has nicer things to say about this production, I would f’reals love to hear them. I know there were aspects I enjoyed, I just don’t know how to articulate the good stuff, aside from: yeah, I do dig sequins and flashyflash in the service of a good story, and this was that fasure. Honestly, it’s all about how distracting I find the knowledge that they’re not allowing me to be distracted. Maybe you’re better with that stuff than I am.
I watched this show nestled in a row of six girls ages 10-13 who had just finished bringing their own rendition of it to the Academy stage the previous weekend. This was unquestionably the best possible company to have for this event. I am sorry that you will be unable to duplicate this part of my experience, BUT I SUSPECT THAT YOU WILL ENJOY SOME STUFF ABOUT IT ANYWAYS.
So yeah. Having been so recently immersed in the text via the girls’ rehearsal process and performances, I wasn’t expecting this show to feel super-fresh. Don’t get me wrong: I was excited, and I expected it to be good, but not juicy-chunk-of-watermelon-good. More like old-book-smell-good.
So I’m pleased to report it was both.
As you might gather from the above link, this production has Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy set in France (which it was already) in the 1920s (which is new), with a focus on the artistic movements and political circumstances of that time and place.
To those who feel dubious about newer-dress productions of older-text shows: it’s not my mission to convert you, but this show should do it.
We got the opportunity to have a li’l 30-on-2 chat with actors Sean Arbuckle and Dalal Badr after the show, and Mr. Arbuckle (who has the same unlikely smile as our friend Adam Reid) said one of those obvious-but-totally-insightful things about it. Essentially, that you need a reason for whatever you decide to put on stage. You shouldn’t do Shakespeare in old-timey clothes just because it’s traditional any more than you should do it in bellbottoms just because it’s fun. No production design releases you from the obligation to ensure that the ideas behind it are fully formed.
Which was definitely true in this case. Things fit. The lyrics Shakespeare wrote for this show make fantastic jazz songs (I desperately want a recording of the music from this show, omigosh pleasepleaseplease pleeeease), and it seems entirely natural that Rosalind would be a surrealist painter — like these are just stage directions we’re missing from the old text.
This production takes care of its affairs: it deals beautifully with the weirdness of Adam just not showing up again after the 2nd act, and gives a certain servant who looks to have an exposition-only role on the page a really solid and enriching follow-through. Nothing is throw-away in this version of the story. Even the wonky Hymen-god-of-marriage bit at the end actually WORKED here. And I’m not a person who’s ever seen (or been in) that bit of this play and thought, “oh hey that works.” But turns out all you gotta do is set up the right surrealist elements, craft the character relationships in such a way that everything that goes down in that scene is actually secretly inevitable, and then have a hella fantastic composer and band on that ‘wedlock hymn’ business. Who knew?
So yeah. That was satisfying.
I don’t know how much I want to say about this one. I know it sounds pretty ridiculous to be concerned about spoiling a story that everybody already knows inside and out, but a lot of things I really loved about this production were actually pretty friggin’ innovative, and I don’t want to just be talking about them because they were such THINGS and I can’t talk like seeing them happening.
I will say the following, however:
1. Nanaaaaaaa! is amazing.
2. They found a really good way of dealing with the racist shit. It’s very well-executed and Neverlandy and goes so far beyond just being a political correctness band-aid, particularly in the way it gets woven into the…
3. Awesomesauce framing device.
Surprisingly, the only moment that left me feeling kind of ‘huh’ was when we applauded Tink back to life. And I’m not faulting the production for that. It’s just that as an audience, like I said, we know this story crazywell. We know before we go in that we’re going to be called upon to save a fairy’s life in the 2nd act, and we know how it is done and we are HELLA PREPARED. So when the time comes, we’re too quick. It’s too easy. We cheat ourselves out of being afraid that we will fail. This is not a very usual conundrum, how to foster more audience hesitation, but I think it’s worth asking if we’re going to keep doing this Peter Pan thing (which I think we should).
HUMMMMM.
Okay. That’s enough out of me. What have you seen recently? Or did you see the same stuff I saw and FEEL DIFFERENTLY about it? Do tell.
Keeping House.
Hullo dears.
Here are some things for me to know and you to be made aware of:
1. If you like this project, you could ‘like’ it on facebook if you like to ‘like’ things. I’ll be posting links to the plays as I write them, and possibly using it as a resource to round up the interested for things like…
2. Workshops. I’d like to get some of those going this summer. First on my list of Tiny Plays to play with and polish is #8, on account of there’s been some interest in a student production happening next school year, but this is an excellent time for anybody in a reasonable radius of Perth to say ‘oh hey you know that one about the _____? I kind of have a hankering to play that part/direct that scene/see it get better.” I’d also be interested if you’ve got any short scripts you’d like to bring to a (metaphorical, but possibly also literal) sandbox kinda setting this summer — maybe we can share resources/enthusiasm?
3. I was in Stratford this weekend. I saw four plays which astonished me in different ways and hopefully I’ll be able to talk about that soon.
That’ll do for now.
Love,
yes.
I love my mommy.
Conversation from our living room today went as follows.
MOM: I read your play.
ME: I don’t want to talk about it.
MOM: Good.
…
Okay, so we then clarified that neither of us had bitchy intentions there (and neither of us had thought the other one had either). The thing is, there’s no way you could put that scene in front of 2 actors and not get a bitchy delivery in a cold reading.
Ah, the magic of the theatre.
I’ve noticed this in my writing, too. Whenever I hand something to an actor for the first time, I always hear meaner words than I thought I’d written.
I don’t really want to extrapolate or philosophize on this. It’s just a thing I’ve taken note of.
Tiny Play #8/100 (Boing.)
SETTING: Living room of a medium-nice apartment. The only furniture we need to see is a sofa, a coffee table if desired. The entrance to the apartment is the stage right wing. Off left, there is an unseen balcony.
AT RISE: The MAN enters the flat, dressed for summer, with a messenger bag over his shoulder. Hot, sweaty and exhausted, he collapses on the sofa, lets out something akin to both a sigh and a grunt.
No day but yesterday.
So I was in a community production of RENT that wrapped up a week ago tomorrow.
That could serve as an excuse for my recent lack of diligence in posting here or an announcement that it’s officially time to start kicking my ass if the neglect continues…but I’m not very interested in blogging about blogging (or lack therof), and I suspect that you ain’t either, so this is something else.
[The title made more sense when I was going to spend more space bitching about the kind of boring, ubiquitous plays that make me marvel that anybody thinks this theatre stuff is worth getting off the couch for. It's still secretly about that, but I wanted to keep the whole foaming-at-the-mouth situation in check...and avoid naming names, because as fun as it is to be vindictive, this isn't so much about not wanting to see those plays again as it is about wanting to see plays that I've never even heard of, because people aren't producing them, because people have this misguided notion that if you want people to pay money to see it, it has to be something they've already seen another dozen or so versions of.]
This script came in fragments that got written in different places that got lost and turned out to not mean as much as I’d anticipated when they got found.
I feel like I’m writing a lot of friggin’ death and stuff around here, for which there are reasons, but that doesn’t mean I’m getting at anything interesting. Basically, I’m having a less musical version of this argument with myself every time I start thinking about what I’ve posted on here and what’s next in line. I’m neither as charming in my morosity as Mathias Kom nor as convincing in my optimism as Jenny Omnichord-nee-Mitchell, but that’s a pretty lame excuse for disappearing from this project for over a month. Holy Moly.
Anyhow, it’s a radio play. I didn’t really use proper radio play formatting for it because frankly, I find it annoying to look at, and I figured other civilians might feel that way too. Not to mention getting all the indentations right on the blog would just be a bitch, which is basically why I use the bastardized format I’ve been using for my stage scripts. So this is like a super-bastardization of that format and the BBC’s required format for radio drama.
La.
SCENE 1.
THIS IS A HOSPITAL. WE CAN HEAR THAT. WE CAN ALMOST SMELL IT. IT IS NIGHTTIME, THOUGH, SO THE INTENTIONAL SOUNDS ARE SUBDUED, AND THE INCIDENTAL ONES AMPLIFIED. WE ARE WITH A NURSE AS S/HE WHEELS A CART OF EMPTY PLASTIC WATER GLASSES DOWN A CORRIDOR. S/HE IS WEARING SANDALS, SO THE FOOTSTEPS ARE ALMOST A SHUFFLE, PUNCTUATED BY THE SOFT SLAP OF THE BACK OF THE SHOE AGAINST THE TILE. THE CART STOPS. S/HE GENTLY SWINGS OPEN A DOOR.
Fun Fact Du Jour:
Reston finally posted his short story that correlates with Tiny Play #6.
Also, yeah, I’m lagging. I think the big lesson here is that taking requests was kind of a bad idea, because then this is like school assignments, and I’m notoriously good about blowing those off by way of overthinking them, which is just no fun for anybody.
All of these are meant to be gifts for ‘you’ in an editorial sense, and I very sincerely hope you in the specific sense like them, but if I try to make them for you specifically they just won’t be happening for any you or me.
Tiny Plays Not For The Stage
1stly, while the original intent of this project was to write a buncha stage plays, I’m currently gearing up to output something a little bit different. So you know. You might want to get your ass ready. Not that I’m going to tell you what I mean by “a little bit different.” But it certainly couldn’t hurt to stay up nights pondering it with great anxiety until it comes.
2ndly, in the spirit of -plays (with prefixes) that are available for you to read on the internet, I draw your attention to this wacky fun project where actual factual famously professional screenwriters write 1-page movie scripts.
3rdly, I’m doing Script Frenzy, are you? If so, you should go to my Writer Profile and buddyfy me, because right now I only have one buddy and she hasn’t even buddied me back, which makes me a sad panda. If not, you should decide that you ARE doing Script Frenzy after all, and THEN you should buddyfy me.
[A rough sketch of my screnzy plans: 'winning' screnzy means producing (at least) 100 pages of scriptage in a month, which can be on more than one different project. So a certain percentage of those 100 pages will be ticked off with the plays I'll be posting here during the month of April, and the rest will be devoted to a comic book project which will be SECRET (read: hilariously bad).]
4thly, I’m wading into rehearsals for RENT. And because 2 & 1/2 years of intellectual corruption and depravity in one of our nation’s most pretentious prestigious university learning institutions has left me entirely unable to just do a thing without analysing the crap out of it, I’m putting together a zine of GUSHING RANTING CONFLICTED FEELINGS ABOUT RENT. I’m not sure what it’ll be called, but if you have any relationship with RENT (even if it’s a relationship based on unabashed loathing, or it’s really tangential and totally actually about other things and RENT is just a crunchy candy shell of helpful deception around the way you think about those things), I’d be interested in getting your input. To volunteer to be interviewed, you can email emilythesecond (at) gmail (dot) com. I also (gleefully!) accept attachments of fan art or anti-fan art or pretty much anything you have on the subject. (For the more rambly version of this call for submissions, see facebook.) And of course, anybody who throws something into the pot gets a copy of the finished zine hot off the presses, so long as I get an address from them. Hurrah?
Tiny Play #6/100 (Tired Old Twin Fetish Breakfast Party Time)
WHAT IS UP WITH THIS ONE:
I am not even going to bother with lame excuses for the retardedness (you know, chronologically speaking) of this piece, but it’ll be fairly obvious fairly quick that I was out of my comfort bubble here. That’s because this was a challenge from mon ami Reston, which I accepted on the grounds that he do the same challenge in short story format on his blog. He has yet to deliver, which I gotta say makes me a smidge pleased, since it means you lot get to go over there and jab him inna ribs and ask where his version is, rather than me getting jabbed by Reston fangirls. For serious. Bug the shit out of him until he coughs it up. Because it turns out robot dialogue is roughly as friggin’ annoying to write as Jane Austen dialogue is to listen to. (Oops, now I’ve stated a polarizing opinion. Sorry. I friggin’ hate Jane Austen. In this really bored way that I cannot even justify. Let’s not talk about it.)
Er, yes. The challenge was to write a breakfast scene between two robots designed to pleasure humans sexually. Needless to say, it is not without moments of pervyness of a special fucked up robot caliber. So, you know. Proceed with caution.
SETTING: A kitchen, in the most functional sense of the word. It is a kitchen designed for persons who have no aesthetic preferences whatsoever. Nothing is ugly per se, but any beauty is purely incidental. The materials are primarily metals and plastics — very post-now, although, again, not in a showy way. On the table there is a glass bowl full of grape-sized plasticky spheres in primary colours — the only real colour in the whole room. There are no chairs. The whole scene looks profoundly untouched by human activity — which is of course the case.
AT RISE: Two gorgeous sexbots, SANDRA and CHANDRA enter simultaneously from opposite wings. They are clearly intended to be “twins”, having identical body types, skin tones, and basic hair colour and texture, but with differing “personalities.” SANDRA is presented as very soft in a pastel-coloured négligée, while CHANDRA has the appearance of being a somewhat tougher girl: at least one large tattoo, piercings, maybe a streak or two of “unnatural” colour in her hair, and she wears something like a distressed band shirt and boy-cut panties. Nonetheless, they move exactly alike as they come out of their respective sleeping quarters to meet each other precisely in the middle and kiss each other symmetrically on both cheeks.
Please Remember
2 things:
(1st 16 minutes = speech, last 4 1/2 minutes = monologue.)
Sigh.
Sshhh.
An assortment of nonsecrets:
1) This week I have cried openly at 2 musical theatrical spectacles. That particular brand of emotional lability is kind of a weird new current thing for me, but I can get into it.
2) That play I’m dropping in the mail on Monday? I hate it. But also, if you put it in a blender on the slowdance setting, it’s a work of literature so great it’s astonishimng and unlikely that nobody has ever written it before. But also, that’s one of those things that’s a lie.
3) You could volunteer at Magnetic North Theatre Festival, maybe. I’m sort of undecided as to whether I should apply to do this, so if you’re into it and I like you, that could certainly be a motivating factor, especially if you know (or are?) somebody I could stay with in Kitchener. (Fun fact: I like to wash dishes in other people’s houses.)
4) This is not theatre, but: I sent a college program a note that said I LIKE YOU DO YOU LIKE ME? and it sent back YES YOU ARE OKAY DO YOU LIKE ME? CIRCLE YES and I did and it’s nice to do that in time for Valentine’s day but it’s also a little strange like realizing you inadvertently got married to the first person you ever kissed many years later but after explaining to about six people why you did it you’re like, “O WOW THIS IS ACTUALLY GOING TO BE SO RAD I DID NOT EVEN CONSIDER.”
5) Did you know that there is probably a production of The Vagina Monologues going on somewhere in the vicinity of you TODAY or SOONISH if you are living anywhere on the land-bits of the planet Earth? It’s true! Just ask Facebook. Seriously, the odds that you don’t know somebody who is in this play right now are pretty slim if you’ve ever met anybody awesome at all, especially if one or more of the awesome people you know have and/or are fans of one or more vaginas. On a related note, I’m totally up for hearing how you feel about The Vagina Monologues. Do you like them? Do you dislike them? Are you afraid to go see them? (Don’t be afraid! You get to holler CUNT! in a crowded theatre!!) Do you have a favourite? (I do. Feel free to guess.) Do you have prepared answers for the vagina questionnaire in case you are ever asked? (I do not. This is somewhat embarrassing and could get me in a fix someday, I know.)
Ask me anything.
Okay, so a while ago I signed up for this formspring thing. You’ve heard of this? It’s like anonymous question time. Like the question box in sex ed, except I’m not a nurse…or qualified in any other particular area.
So I signed up for it because I’m naturally drawn to little boxes you stuff secret things into, especially when those secrets are then like, shared with EVERYBODY, and yet are still on some level totally secret and mysterious. I just dig that kind of thing.
But I didn’t tell anybody about my secret question box on the internet because I couldn’t actually fathom what might compel anybody to question me anonymously.
So: experiment. My formspring is now officially open for any inquiries related to the 100tinyplays project that you want to make without me knowing who wants to know.
Questions about my feelings re: ice cream flavours et cetera also acceptable.
If somebody asks a question I refuse to answer, I promise to give you a wonderful/terrible/hilarious lie instead.
Okay. Now if anybody sees me doing this or anything else that isn’t working on a script of some kind before February 15th, I want me shot, stuffed, and mounted in a disrespectful pose on the ballroom ceiling. (Excepting the Into The Woods cast party. I’m going to pretend that I’ve earned that one.)
More Life,
Emmet
Tiny Play #5/100 (No Breakfast)
SETTING: A kitchen table and two chairs in a crappy apartment belonging to the recently deceased. It is the wee hours of the morning. There are a lot of half-packed boxes around, and the table is strewn with photographs: some in old albums, most in those envelopes that photos come in from the developer or just in haphazard piles. There is also a cruddy old tape deck and an assortment of audio cassettes that appear to have been recently dredged out of a dusty crawl space somewhere cluttering the floor.
AT RISE: IAN and JAKE are looking through the photographs. IAN has a new album in front of him, wrapped in impenetrable plastic, which he is making his sixtieth futile attempt to penetrate. JAKE is flipping absentmindedly through an envelope of pictures, and concluding a tirade which IAN is almost certainly not fully absorbing.
Tiny Play #4/100 (Late & Stupid!)
PRELIMINARY NOTICES:
- This was due yesterday and it’s terrible. I am aware of these facts. I’d like to squeal “but I’m scrambling to get props done for a show that opens next week!!” Which is true. However, it is equally true that I had most of this piece in storage for weeks, just waiting for an ending. And that I seriously thought it was going to be a contender for the best thing I’d written, maybe ever, certainly on this project. Yeah, I don’t even know. I funnel my narcissism into weird shit some days.
- Those who ever spent any time in my off-campus Sackville domicile will recognize doorwall. This is kind of an homage to doorwall. Those who ever read the “RULES” we had posted on doorwall will recall that love of doorwall was prohibited. My argument against that is either a) I don’t live there any more and can do as I please or b) can an homage this shitty really be considered an act of love? (Choose one or mix and match.)
- While this is a piece of shit, I still have a weird fondness for these characters. They might show up again later, if I figure them out a bit more. Alternatively, if you find them doing anything less boring than this, tell me about it — preferably in response play (or prose or poem) format. It can be like the opposite of fanfiction.
SETTING: An apartment in what was once a large family residence. There is an arm chair against a blocked-up door frame.
AT RISE: O sits in the arm chair. There is knitting in her lap, but she has obviously been more preoccupied with listening at the undoor.
Baby -> Memory -> Theatre
This is a kind of long non-play post, and what I describe as “this afternoon” sort of became “yesterday” while I worked on it. I’m cutting it for length and certainly won’t blame anybody for skipping it, but if you do make it through, I could use some banter on this.
If you don’t feel like reading this because you’re really only in this for the tiny plays, I’d like to suggest this one, which is by Sheila Callaghan, who is great.
