Write In Plain View

I finally completed the shelves I started six months ago. My wife and I have a third floor with two “bonus” rooms and I’m in the process of turning one into a walk-in closet. I got the idea that if I didn’t finish the shelves today that I’d be sleeping up there tonight, so One-Two-Three will have to wait. I’ve even created a new category named “Excuses” to log all of my lame excuses.

If you’re new to this blog I should mention that this blog is not like other blogs. Even though I’ve given readers the option to subscribe to my RSS feed, thereby suggesting there will be new, super cool posts every day, that is not the case and this is not that kind of blog. If you’re looking for a blog like that, turn back now because I will only disappoint. I can only post here when I write, and I can only write when I find time–one of the bummers of not being independently wealthy or able to support oneself with one’s writing. If I find time to post here every day it means I’m unemployed.

But I do see a break in the clouds…like tonight between midnight and two am–another bummer since the morning is my favorite time to write.

I haven’t thought of a good name for the News Anchor yet, but I have been thinking of her relationship with the Governor.  Their interaction is definitely adversarial, but why?  Ideological differences, certainly, but it has to be more than that.  Why does she want to take him down?

I haven’t decided on the why yet, but I think I know the how, or at least the nature of how she takes him down, i.e. the nature of the scandal she’s about to break.  I think it has to be something ridiculous…like she caught him trying to sneak 14 items through the 13 items or less lane at the grocery store.

Another theme has emerged from the plot point of Rosemary changing into a gigantic locust. This transformation is necessary for the plot and could be the dominant metaphor of the play. It is derived from my observation that mankind’s quest for eternal life has blinded everyone to the cost.

Earlier this week there was a TV show entitled (I’m paraphrasing) “People can live to be 150 years old…and you can do it too!”. I didn’t watch it, but it made me wonder if anyone has considered what this will do to to world economies, or our already dwindling resources, or our environment, or to what will surely become SausageFest 2050 if Asia doesn’t change its male-centric socioeconomic policies. Long life is generally viewed as a good thing because deep down no one wants to die, except for the extraordinarily depressed or extraordinarily faithful. But what will that quality of life be? Rosemary’s degenerative state mirrors, I think, what the state of our world will be if everyone, today, could live to be 150 years old: people would still be breathing, but would anyone be having any fun?

So Rosemary turning into a locust and devouring the countryside is, in effect, what would happen if we all managed to live up to that TV show’s promise. But this idea of metamorphosis gave me the idea of extending it to everything in the play. I think it would be interesting if everything in the play was in the process of turning into something else.

Let’s start with the obvious: Rosemary –> Giant Locust.

It just occurred to me to mention that when I say “turning into something else” I mean in addition to the “natural” character arc. Then again, it may be impossible to separate the two: the changes to a character that are interesting and drive the play and those that serve to strengthen the theme. I won’t worry about that right now.

Michael: will transform himself from the mealymouthed person he is in the beginning to the rational, confident person he was 15 years prior.

Nancy…I’m not sure.

Guinness Book Rep…will come back to him.

Governor Rudolf: he will go from being a governor on the eve of of a major scandal to a true presidential contender.

News Anchor: she will go from being a protector of a free press to a government lackey.

The United States –> we’ll see.

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All right, it’s time for the $65,000 question, the question that is asked of every playwright at every script-in-hand reading across the land: WHOSE PLAY IS IT???

This is usually asked for one of 2 reasons:

1. The audience member can’t think of anything more clever to ask (and it does sound clever, especially if…well, see reason #2).
2. It really isn’t clear whose play it is. This means the play is either terribly flawed or unambiguously brilliant. (It usually means it’s terribly flawed).

But since I’m not at a reading and not even 10% through the first draft, I’ll make my future life a whole lot easier by worrying about that now.

At this early stage, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that it is the News Anchor’s play. I see her changing the most throughout, and I see it as her story. I see her as the classic tragic hero, the one who despite all her best efforts, can’t escape the sheer pragmatism of going to the dark side. Her actions expose the workings of a truly rational mind…at least that is my goal for her. My next goal is to give her a fitting name.

One-Two-Three

By Eric Blair

Characters
Rosemary Gregor (not shown)
Nancy McGowan
Michael McGowan
Governor Rudolph
Guinness Book Rep
News Anchor
Cameraman

In the black we hear sounds of locusts feeding. This low chewing sound will persist in one form or another as background noise throughout the play.

Lights up on the dining room of a middle class home. A banner that reads “123! Happy Birthday, Rosemary!” hangs in the center of the back wall. There are xxx place settings on the table, but no silverware.

MICHAEL enters with silverware and completes half of the settings. He looks sheepishly around and then picks up a butter knife and unsuccessfully tries to saw through his wrist. NANCY enters with a basket of biscottis. MICHAEL sees her and hastily puts the knife behind his back.

NANCY
You’re not done yet?

MICHAEL
Almost.

NANCY
They’ll be here soon. Hurry up! I give you a simple task to do and–boy, I’ll tell you.

MICHAEL
I was thinking that maybe we should use sharper knives.

NANCY
For what? We’re having fish.

MICHAEL
Yeah, but the way you dry things out, steak knives might be better…like maybe some really, really sharp knives, like those Ginsu knives, the ones that can cut right through a man’s wrist yet still slice tender tomatoes?

NANCY
What a thing to say. Stop talking like an imbecile. The fish will melt in your mouth. Now finish setting the table and put a couple of my biscottis on each plate (handing him the basket).

MICHAEL
Why?

NANCY
Because everyone loves my biscottis.

(Pause. MICHAEL stands there, expressionless.)

The governor’s coming. Chop! Chop!

NANCY exits SL. MICHAEL drops two biscottis on each plate. They hit the plate with a sound as if made of stone.

MICHAEL places the basket in the middle of the table, picks up a butterknife, and again tries to saw through his wrist.

Doorbell rings. MICHAEL looks up and then returns to his wrist.

Work was crazy this week–unable to write a thing. Hopefully next week will be better.

Here is my tentative list of characters:

Rosemary Gregor (F) (not shown)- the birthday girl, turns 123 years-old at midnight. I picked Rosemary for her first name after researching popular female names of the late nineteenth century. Her last name comes from Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the name of the main character, Gregor Samsa, who turned into a giant bug. Kafka isn’t a direct influence on this play, but since nearly everyone to whom I’ve described the part about Rosemary turning into a locust have said, “Oh, like in that Kafka story,” I might as well embrace it and give the audience a clue to what’s coming.

Nancy McGowan (F) - Rosemary’s great-great granddaughter. She chooses to ignore life’s unpleasantries, like her quarry-derived biscotti recipe, her marriage that is in ruins, and her grandmother who has formed a cocoon around herself and is on her way to becoming a locust. Of paramount importance to her is Rosemary winning the title of world’s oldest person and her image on the cover of Martha Stewart Living.

Michael McGowan (M)- Nancy’s husband. A defeated shell of a man with all of the visuals to go with it: insecure gait, poor posture, lack of eye contact. Originally McGowan was Rosemary’s last name, but then I saw a CBS Sunday Morning show about the McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine and it seemed to fit Michael and Nancy more. There’s some really cool, futuristic stuff going on in this world–stuff you’d think you’d hear about. But for me, I’d much rather heard about the difficulty of getting Hanna Montana (sp?…who cares?) tickets rather than how scientists can, today, regenerate tissue–heart cells and complete organs like bladders–in the lab and transplant them into patients…today…as in, like, not in 2160.

Governor Rudolf (M)- mid-40’s, ambitious beyond measure. He was the prosecutor who forced Michael to put Rosemary on life support at the age of 108, and it greatly helped his career. Michael views him as the man who destroyed his life. Nancy would like nothing more than to be the next Mrs. Governor Rudolph, which means her break from reality extends to things other than Rosemary.

Governor Rudolf is an oil man, but not for the reasons you might think. The parallel I intend to draw between Rudolph and George W. has nothing to do with oil (the Governor has to be an oil man because of fugacity–I’ll explain later if this piece of the plot survives). The Governor is Bush-like in the way he appears before the camera–tripping over his own words, misquoting cliches and basic historical texts–but with Rudolph it’s all an act (as the conspiracy theorist in me sometimes suspects it is for George W.). When the cameras are on, Rudolph looks like a buffoon. When they’re off, it’s clear that he’s sharp as a whip and is following a well-defined and rehearsed agenda.

Guinness Book Rep (M) - I see this character as almost autistic. He uber-focuses on stats and minute details and entirely misses the context. I hear him quoting a lot of statistics; I picture him honing in on some throw away line and diving deeply into the statistical significance of things, looking for a Guinness Book opportunity. I think he dies first.

News Anchor (F) -I picture her (haven’t thought of a compelling name yet) as the Governor’s nemesis. There is some history between the two of them and she’s trying to bring him down. She is the protagonist, the flawed heroine.

Cameraman (M) -someone has to hold the camera, right? I’m not sure what to do with this character yet. In earlier outlines, I had the Cameraman as the one who pulled all the strings. His motivation was to become the news anchor, and he undermined both the current News Anchor and the Governor to achieve this end. He put his career above all else; rather than trying to affect the outcome of the news (an outcome he could very well control) he instead let things play out and merely reported on it–dispassionately, seemingly estranged from the consequences.

Combining the themes of mindless consumption with the idea that there may be some “diseases” that take 123 years to develop inside the human body gave me the idea for the ending of the play: Rosemary turns into a gigantic locust and devours the countryside.

Sound can be used to strengthen this.

In the black we hear sounds of locusts feeding. This low chewing sound will persist in one form or another as background noise throughout the play.

Lights up on the dining room of a middle class home. A banner that reads “123! Happy Birthday, Rosemary!” hangs in the center of the back wall. There are xxx place settings on the table, but no silverware.

MICHAEL enters with silverware and completes half of the settings, coughing occasionally. He then picks up a butter knife and unsuccessfully tries to saw through his own wrist. NANCY enters with a basket of biscotti. MICHAEL sees her and hastily puts the knife behind his back.

Michael is the husband of Nancy, the great-great-granddaughter of Rosemary.

It would be difficult to stage, but I’d like the stage and set pieces to collapse as if disintegrating throughout the play, like furniture eaten through by termites. There’s a classic comedy device where something catastrophic happens to a group of people who instead try to pretend like nothing is happening (except for maybe one person with whom the audience can relate). In the present case, everyone could be trying to have a normal dinner while their dinner table, chairs, and room collapses around them. I’ll assume that this would be too expensive to stage.

Over the past week I chose the story idea that I will try to fashion into a full-length play on this blog. It is an idea for a comedy that I’ve had milling around in my head for close to a year. I think it is a good candidate, and I’m anxious to see where it goes. There are definite absurdist elements to it, and the major challenge I immediately see for myself is to decide the degree of the absurdity. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go too far into farce-land, and I’m equally sure that, whatever the degree, I’ll have to let the audience in on it early. Here it is.

There are three observations/thoughts that went into this idea, and I think they will represent the three dominant themes of the play.

1. The American obsession with longevity of life and the widely-held belief that life should be extended by any means and at all costs.
2. The planet is running out of resources and consumption has not been curbed.
3. If history is any indication, there are probably some funky new diseases that we can only observe in people who are 150 years old.

The third point may require explanation. If you go back to the Bronze Age (3500BC to 2000BC), the average lifespan was only 18 years. People back then would know nothing of the types of cancer that come with aging since everyone died of something else before they could live long enough to get it. In Medieval Briton, the average lifespan was between 20 and 30 years, so people back then would know little about dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. It stands to reason that we have no idea what kinds of illnesses lie dormant inside all of us, waiting to be triggered by the passage of 123 years.

I chose 123 years because it is one more than the longest documented lifespan on record, that of Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122. Calment attended Victor Hugo’s funeral, enjoyed long walks on the beach, and became the beneficiary of one of the worst business deals in history when she signed a reverse mortgage with a man whom she survived despite his 50 year advantage.

That’s the title, by the way. “One-Two-Three”. The play is set at the beginning of a very special birthday party held in honor of Rosemary McGowan, the woman who will become the oldest living human being in history when she turns 123 at the stroke of midnight. What’s so funny about that? She’s been on life support for 15 years.

Who’s at the party? The owners of the house: her great-great-granddaughter and her husband, who took her in when she was in her 90s. Like the man who sold Jeanne Calment the reverse mortgage, the husband agreed to take her in because he thought she would die soon.

Certainly someone from Guinness Book would be there to validate the claim as well as for publicity.

A political figure of some kind could be there, someone who is very much in favor of keeping supercentarians on life support.

Perhaps Rosemary became ill and the husband and wife were split on what to do with her. The wife wanted to save Rosemary, the husband wanted to let Rosemary die a natural death. Perhaps the wife appealed to an ambitious politican at the time to keep Rosemary on life support, similar to the Terri Schiavo case. Maybe the politician used his victory to advance his career and maybe now he is Governor of the state.

What would be the motivation of the Guinness Book Rep? Maybe sales are down and they need some publicity. The Governor and the GB Rep could be united there. Maybe the Governor is looking to run for president, or maybe he is trying to bury a scandal (timely) with something he’d like to highlight from his past. Both he and the Rep, and probably the Wife as well, would want media coverage.

An anchor and a cameraman (too many characters?) from CNN or something similar could be there to cover the story.

Where’s the conflict? Whose wants and desires would be in direct opposition to the Wife, Governor and GB Rep? The husband would, but I’m not sure to what degree he can fight them. For some reason I see him as a comic relief/message character. The News Anchor could oppose this farce of a celebration. Maybe she and the Governor have a history, maybe she’s trying to bring him down.

That’s all for now.

The motivation behind forPlaywrights.com was the desire to create a place where playwrights can upload, share, and develop their scripts. The hope was that it would be a place for both seasoned writers and those who are just starting out. Teaching would therefore be a necessary part of it, and as I thought about the types of content that could serve this purpose, the Writing 101 mantra of “Show, Don’t Tell” popped into my head. That’s when I got the crazy idea of writing a play from start to finish, online, in plain view of all.

Some may say, Hey, isn’t this just a gimmick to line your pockets with advertising revenue and get a play produced? You Betcha!   But seriously…if there is any ulterior motive, it is my desire to work on a play and provide content for the website at the same time.

The process will likely take between six months and a year. In that time, and if I document things correctly, readers will have an honest account of what it takes to write a play and get it produced (or not) when you can’t support yourself with your writing and you must find time to write between the spaces of life’s demands.

So sit back, follow along, learn something maybe, even if it’s what not to do; watch me write a great play, watch me write a terrible play; watch me get published, or simply make an ass out of myself. It could go either way, and that’s kind of what I like about it.