Cast list went up last week!  It’s good to have that anxiety over with.  Today was our first “rehearsal” — just a read-through with the cast.  I was rewriting the script pretty much all day until about two hours before rehearsal.  My poor stage manager.

The reading went well, though the second act is so incredibly weak.  It’s kind of embarrassing.  It’s funny — when the play is good, when I hear it aloud I react almost as though I didn’t write the play: I enjoy it on its own terms, I don’t necessarily feel proud.  But when the play is bad — wow, I instantly feel embarrassed.  It’s funny how that works.

So now I have until the 9th of January (when we resume rehearsals) to write the next draft.  Here’s hoping it will go well.  That second act is so darn tricky!  It’s hard to make characters say and do what you want and hide your hand in it.

So general auditions were Tuesday, and callbacks Thursday, and in theory the cast list should have been up Friday.  But nay, it is not so. 

General auditions were surprisingly easy to … audit, I guess is the word.  I had expected that four and a half hours of one-minute monologues would get old fast, especially since many actors are inexperienced.  How could I have doubted them?  Most everyone did a great job at auditions, and even those who didn’t do a great job didn’t totally suck — in other words, everyone showed at least a spark of potential.  And nobody totally blanked (a few pauses, a couple of restarts, but no “Oh, crap, I can’t remember the rest.”)

Surprisingly, callbacks were a little harder to sit through, and it’s not because of the actors — it’s because of me.  Or more specifically, my writing.  Or more specifically, we spent three hours listening to the same four excerpts over and over again. And that’s tiring, because I always feel like I need to be a giving audience member, even if it’s just an audition, and it is hard to laugh at the same joke that you wrote six months ago and have heard several times since then and 20 times that night. 

Everyone did such a good job at callbacks.  I wish we could cast everyone, honestly.  There was nobody who read that provoked a reaction in me of “he/she’s totally wrong for the part.”  If only we could cast the show three or four times!

So Alien Invader is in rep with Sasha Bratt’s MFA directing thesis Mystery Plays.  This means that we cannot have any overlap of actors.  Of course, we anticipated some degree of negotiating, and as it turned out there were a few actors that we both wanted.  I know that nobody reads this blog, but I don’t want to go into to much detail — let’s just say that we’re waiting on putting up the cast list until we’ve got the finalized list for both shows.

So yeah.  It’s frustrating, and frankly causing me some anxiety (why?  I don’t know, it just is), but it’s the nature of the beast.

Once it’s cast, rehearsals don’t begin until January.  More waiting!  Yeah!

I haven’t updated as frequently as I should be.  Let’s see, what’s happened:

Most significantly, we had a reading of Alien Invader last Monday the 21st.  I think it went pretty well, though Tom couldn’t be there because of a family emergency.  My friend Bobby kept raving about the play afterwards, and he’s got a critical eye.

Something I found a little disconcerting is that there were several lines and moments throughout the script that I didn’t think were delivered how I intended them to be.  Obviously I don’t want to direct the actors in the script, but I think I may have to until I find a way to make the dialogue clearer.  I need to make the script “Actor Proof” as one professor told me: if I can make the play clear enough, then the actors will have no choice but to get out of its way and let the words speak.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-actor, not at all, they’re an essential part of theater (obviously) and to me they are absolutely necessary to creating a new script.  I just don’t want actors to take my words and intentions and take them in the wrong direction—which is possible with the way my script is now.  Looks like I may have to Albee it up with a bunch of parenthetical stage directions.  That’s right, I’m looking at you, Edward.

So tomorrow night (I can’t believe it) is the initial audition for my play and the other two plays of the semester.  Tom and I and the other folks from the other plays will be sitting there behind a table, coolly regarding something like fifty students deliver their two one-minute monologues.  We will be there from six until like ten thirty.  It is going to be exciting but tiring.  I hope that the casting decisions will be obvious to Tom, and that Sasha (who is directing his thesis play The Mystery Plays in rep with Alien Invader) won’t want the same actors that Tom will want. 

Call backs are Thursday night and then I think the cast list goes up Friday.  I am hoping, hoping, hoping that I get an excellent cast who just gets the characters.  I want actors that I can work with to help develop characters — it’s a truly collaborative process and the next crucial element is about to fall into place!

We had the first production meeting for the rep plays.  Long story short, the plays will be in the Hartke Studio, with the risers against the back wall facing out into the house of the Hartke.  Good.  That’s all that I have to say about that.

Jon sends the MFA playwrights emails quite frequently that detail playwriting opportunities: contests, festivals, theaters looking for submissions, the like.  Tonight he sent us a call for submissions for a literary magazine (which I won’t mention).  I went to their site and was assaulted at every corner with dis-likeable things.

First of all, the magazine gives an award for the best poem, best short story, and best one-act play.  The best poem and story get $500, while the best one-act gets half that ($250 for those of you non-math people).  That’s outrageous.  Who knows what their reasoning is, but it made me immediately dislike them.  Perhaps they have fewer one-act submissions, and therefore the lower cash prize is only fair; but it just makes it seem like they don’t value drama.  I’d argue that writing a good one-act play is so disproportionately harder than writing a good short story that it’s laughable.  And don’t get me started on poetry.

At any rate, I decided I would read what they’re looking for.  They say “Many readers have abandoned contemporary literature, discouraged by the frequency with which they encounter work that proves either meaninglessly glib or disappointingly trite.”  Aside from being a huge generalization, this sentence made me mad.  It’s not that I like trite or glib stuff.  I guess I just don’t like it put down in so many words.  Maybe I write intentionally glib plays.  But I don’t think they’re glib, they’re just sincere, they’re funny, they’re absurd, they refuse to take the seriousness of life seriously.  When I write a play, I like to imagine that what is important in the world is no longer important.  The stupid, inconsequential things become of supreme importance.  I think writing plays about day-to-day struggles or bigger (perhaps political) serious things is tired, old, and deadly to American theater.

So I read the play that won last year, and let me tell you, I was not surprised.  It was a play of such literary style that it was almost as though the writer took a short story and rewrote it in script form.  A two-character play consisting of one character giving long monologues.  If this is the best play they could come up with, I fear for the future of theater.  When you get literary types who are unfamiliar with theater, they will be attracted to plays that are more literary, and less dramatic.

This post is going to go off the rails if I don’t stop soon.  What I mean to say is, I have a distrust of people who set themselves up as judges of drama when they seem to be more oriented towards literature.  Plays are not literature.

Alien Invader is going to be in repertory with The Mystery Plays by Robert Aquirre-Sacasa, which is Sasha Bratt’s MFA Directing thesis.  Yesterday Sasha and I met with Dr. Tom Donahue, our set designer and CUA teacher who I’ve known for several years, to discuss informally the seating options we have for the shows.

The Hartke Theater at CUA is a moderately large theater with something like 570 seats. Usually we only use the full theater if we are doing a big (set-wise) or well-known play.  Otherwise, we do the Hartke Studio, which means that risers are set up on the stage, creating a more intimate theater experience.

In all the years I’ve been to CUA (since September 2005) none of the MFA playwriting theses have been “full Hartke.”  It’s simply too big of a space for an unknown playwright and a brand new play to even come close to filling.  However, there have been quite a few MFA directing theses staged in full Hartke, usually because the set is large or a lot of playing space is needed.

When I write plays, I actually imagine it in a theater, I don’t imagine it being real life (which I assume is how most playwrights write; if not, perhaps they should write movies instead?).  Furthermore, if I have a reasonable idea of where the show will be performed, I simply imagine it in that space.  So, as I wrote Alien Invader, I imagined it in the Hartke Studio space.

As we threw around ideas yesterday, Sasha brought up the idea of doing the rep shows in the full Hartke.  His play takes place in a void, and he wants to create a sense of vastness on stage.  My play is not necessarily intimate, it’s got explosive personalities on stage; but still, the thought of putting it in the huge auditorium makes me nervous.  I worry that the off-beat humor of my show will fall flat when actors are trying to project to fill a 570 seat auditorium.

I told Dr. Tom and Sasha that the full Hartke made me nervous, but I wasn’t totally opposed to it.  On Monday we have a production meeting, and Tom Prewitt will be there, and I hope that he and I will be in accord with preferring the studio space.  I already know that Jon Klein fully supports the studio space (and told Tom Prewitt so).  So, we’ll see.

We’re starting to make choices!

Saturday was the deadline that Jon Klein gave me for my third draft.  He chose that date because that’s when the Alliance Theatre’s deadline was for their Graduate Playwriting Competition (which I was required to enter).  I spent all day last Tuesday locked in my office, rewriting the script, and spent good portions of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday rewriting as well.

Friday I printed out a copy of the script and made edits with a pen, then went back through with a computer and changed the script.  I would say 90% of the pages had some kind of change, whether it was something as slight as an addition of an ellipsis between words, or something as major as cutting half a page or rewording entire passages.

The most major rewrites came at the end of the play.  Actually, the ending was totally scrapped and rewritten.  I think it’s much better now.  Darker, but with more resolution. 

The length of the play is the same, but I think what remains has more forward motion.  The second draft had like 124 pages.  As I cut and cut for the third draft, I got down to as low as 116 pages.  Then, as I rebuilt it, and especially because I expanded the end, it’s back up to 123 or 124 pages.  But it’s worth noting that the new material is actually new, and not just reformulations of old lines.  The play goes in some new places, has some more developed plot points and themes, and has more interesting characters now.  What I think is especially interesting is that Grant and Sophia have more dramatic journeys in the play, almost switching roles as far as who the audience views as “good” or “bad.”

First production meeting is Wednesday!

Yesterday, I sat down in front of my computer with every intention of drastically cutting down Alien Invader.  It is currently 123 pages, which isn’t bad, but I wanted to see if I could cut it down to at least 100, if not more.

I couldn’t.  Alien Invader remains a solid 123 pages long.

“Killing your darlings” is the term some writers use to refer to editing out passages, phrases, words, characters, scenes, in a novel or play that you love, that you have grown attached to, things that maybe were in your mind from the beginning of the project, but just add flab and are better in the wastebasket.  These are things that when you wrote them, you gave yourself a pat on the back and congratulated yourself with a chuckle, “Oh, Frank, you’ve done it again!”

These darlings may in fact be well-written, clever, laugh-out-loud funny.  In the end, however, they weigh down the work as a whole or interrupt the flow of the scene.  That is what makes them so hard to cut.

I was heavily influenced in the writing of Alien Invader by Albee’s three-hour masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which contains many side-bars, paragraphs of characters going on about things that don’t advance the plot necessarily, but are still fascinating to watch and listen to, and develop character deeply.  So I tried to do the same.  

Alien Invader does have a plot, but it is more character-driven, and so I have pages at a time where characters argue with each other most entertainingly, and at the same time manage to advance the plot an inch at a time.

Here’s the problem: the play has grown deadly stale to me.

The answer, obviously, is major cutting, which will be freeing and exhilarating.  Yet I’ve gone over Act I of the play twice and could only manage to cut a few lines here and there.  Either the play has come so dead set in my mind that I can’t imagine parting with any of my darlings, or I wrote a solid first half.  The former is more likely.

What to do?  I may try the tactic of one writer (who I forget the name of now) who would rewrite in the following way:

After writing her first draft, she would print it out, and then delete the file from her computer.  In order to revise that draft, she would have to retype every line, forcing her to make a conscious decision to keep each line.  I may very well have to do that in order to make the necessary cuts.

Well, I’m gonna go try to kill some darlings now.

So I haven’t done a whole lot on the play as of late.  Well, I have and I haven’t.  A couple of weeks ago I went through and rewrote Act I, but I did not really rewrite so much as reword.  You see, after having lived with Act I for six months or more, several lines which once were witty and fresh have become stale, cumbersome, annoying, and/or ineffective.  So I went through and reworded several lines, probably a majority of the lines, sometimes just changing or deleting or adding one word, other times completely rewording the line.  

In other instances, especially when a character has a monologue of sorts, I’ve generally cut phrases and sentences.  I have a tendency to be wordy in first drafts, in order to be crystal clear.  Now I am in a mode where I try to cut as much as I can before the meaning of the line starts to get too muddy.  I figure that since I am going to be in rehearsal with the actors, any lines that do not have obvious meanings on the page will still be “safe” because I could just give the actors the “answer.”  Though, I will only do that as a last resort, if the actors ask.

An unexpected obstacle or setback is that I have lost the hard copy of the play that I had when we had the read-through back in May.  This is not too terrible because it’s not like I completely rewrote the play during the reading, but it did help a little because I circled lines that were awkward, and starred lines that got laughs, and wrote little notes.  Hopefully I’ll find that soon, but if I don’t it’s not the end of the world.

The next step is the dreaded second act, which I hope will resolve itself in my mind soon.  Right now Act II fails in many respects, and doesn’t follow through with many of the “promises” that Act I makes.  Not that Act II is a total mess and needs to be rewritten from scratch—in fact I’d say most of it is usable—but the problem is that is sometimes runs out of dramatic fuel, or moves at an uneven pace, and doesn’t reach the extreme high-tension that it needs to.  Most importantly, some of the characters’ arcs aren’t really resolved at all, or are resolved in a quick the-author-is-running-out-of-time way.

I’ve put off rewriting because of other writing projects I’ve had, the biggest of which was writing a one-act murder mystery, but that’s done, so now I have no excuse to delay it any longer (except, perhaps, that I have no answers to the questions that remain).  I will feel much better going into rehearsal if I know that I’ve got a solid, excellent second half written.  

Time to gear up for some serious thinking and rewriting. 

So The Ghost Train, the play that I directed and has demanded most of my attention for the last six weeks, closed on Sunday and my schedule is free.  Free to do two things: read as much as I can, and begin the tedious but rewarding work of rewrites.

As Stephen King pointed out in his book On Writing, a writer cannot be good unless he is constantly reading.  King says he reads 60 to 80 books a year, which I think is a tremendous number that I won’t be able to reach: firstly because I read at a leisurely pace, and secondly because I have a habit of not finishing books that don’t grab me within 100 pages.  I have no intention of changing my first habit, because there is no point in reading a book if you’re speeding through it just to finish it; the second habit, however, I am trying to change, and am sticking with books all the way through even if I find them boring.  This stick-to-itiveness is essential, according to King, because a writer must read a wide variety of books, covering a wide range of styles, voices, and qualities, which means that a great deal of books that a writer reads may not even be that interesting.  King says that it is just as important for a writer to know what makes bad writing bad than to know what makes good writing good.

So I’ve been reading a lot of stuff, mostly classics.  I am trying to read at least five books at a time, which I’ve discovered is not that hard to do.  Here’s my “currently reading” list, some of which (Nickleby and Grapes of Wrath) I’ve been reading nigh on six months:
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
A Seperate Peace by John Knowles
The Stranger by Albert Camus 

I found inspiration in an unlikely source, too: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  I finished it a few days ago.  I’m not in love with the book and thought it quite boring for the first half, but found the various reactions that the Bundren children have to their mother’s death to be interesting.  It made me realize that I have not given enough weight to the deaths of the White children’s parents in Alien Invader.  Faulkner’s characters also reminded me that each sibling will react differently to the same trauma.  As I go into rewrites, I expect to develop this aspect of their characters, and hope that it will go a long way to informing their actions.

Now it’s just a matter of taking a scalpel, or perhaps a chainsaw, to the words that I have grown attached to over the last six months.