The new year, a new fable, a new sky

The stress and activities of the holidays have passed, and so has a long-in-the-planning large group family vacation. Vacations are fun, and often filled with stressful hassles, not so unlike the holidays. It seems as if it’s been nothing but go-go-go, and for the past month or more I’ve felt like I was on some treadmill to finals week.

There’s a poorly mixed metaphor.

tangerine sky

Now, though, I’m ready to put my energy toward other things, and take on 2011 for the challenge of a new year. I’ve an itch to find inspiration, to take something and explore it, alter it, enhance it, change it in to something new and unexpected. I want the challenge of discovery and creation, and the exhaustion of hard work.

I have some ideas to examine, which range from a pile of scripts to read, to an original video to shoot and edit, to the all-encompassing endeavor of writing and work-shopping a new play.

The new play revolves around a mystery and the search for the truth. But it’s not just the truth but really a search for what is truth. What defines truth is becoming whatever it is one believes, based on knowledge or facts to which credence is given for whatever credit and value is assigned by the believer. Personal opinion has become its own monetary and marketed system, its own economy, its own actuality.

It’s an exploration of our modern society where my truth and your truth co-exist and each maintains its credibility despite the conflicting facts, and it fractures the world we once knew.

It’s all there in a simple modern fable, just waiting to be written and told.

That may be the tangerine sky I’m seeking.

How to make a 3-dimensional life on paper

I have to admit I may not be very good at this editing stuff. I may not be very good at…cutting.

I’ve spent about the past two hours reading again through the script, and noting changes and rearranging phrases. (There’s still one section I fear is a bit messy and may need some serious re-arranging, by the way.) But what I’m really finding is that I keep wanting to add more! I need to cut about 15 minutes off the show, and all I keep thinking of are things that add time!

What I really want to do is work it, with the cast. Play with the rhythms and tempos and energy. Speed it up, slow it down, make it big, small, angry, flirtatious, funny, sinister…get characters to fight, challenge, manipulate, trick, seduce…..find out organically where this thing lives.

I’m kind of new to this writing thing, so really, these other ways are the way I feel comfortable. I can only do so much in my head, er rather, I guess, on paper. I mean, even when I direct, I’m usually found pacing the floor in the back of the rehearsal room.

I’ll trudge along though. I’ll make this thing work.

I’ll get those bitches to Winnipeg.

Coming together, and a random string instrument

Things are finally starting to come together. Last week we took a step back from our script and took a look at what it was all about. There’s a lot of story in there, but there wasn’t much POV, there wasn’t a statement, a lesson, a viola.

Ok, not a viola. Not sure where that would be. And it’s not a musical. Although…wait a sec…what if there were a musician, on stage to play the strains of music we supposedly hear from across the street?….interesting idea. It might complicate things, though. I digress.

The point is that there wasn’t that - a point. Why are we telling what this story? What is it we want audiences to get out of seeing it? What do we get out of it? etcetera etcetera etcetera….

Having had that discussion we’re more primed for moving in to the next editing phase, which is taking the feedback we got from our read-thru a couple weeks ago, fleshing those things out in a focused manner, in order to present the actual actors [who are expected to bring this thing to life] something they can work with. I feel like we might be on to something. We might actually be doing something here.

And with any luck, it might just work.