Twunch

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 9:43 am and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.