Tag Archives: Plays

June 1, 2011 · 7:03 am

Choosing Character Choices: Remembering How Different We Are

Aristotle called it “the imitation of human beings in action.”   Working on my latest project, a new play with the working title, Lost Cause, I’m again learning the old saw that the only way to learn to write is to write.  The writing teaches you if you just show up.

Just now, the characters in my play are teaching me, big time.

Sure…we’re all different.  We get that hammered into our heads daily.   But we also resist that, thinking, “Surely people see this the way I do.”   Truth is, a lot of people don’t.  Working on Lost Cause, the moment-to-moment work is slowing to a crawl, each moment pivoting constantly, deliberately, these five characters determined to see, receive, interact, and desire through their own explicitly different lenses.  My temptation is to skim this water too lightly, through a rapidly flowing intuitive process, but previous results convince me that too often I end up with multiple characters who each feel a bit too much like me.  What does this particular man want in this moment, and what choices is he having to make?   What does he sense, intuit, think, and feel when he hears the words coming at him?  Where does it land in the lightning fast life of the character’s mind?   Hold that thought, pivot now to the woman he’s in action with, not to look at her, but to get inside her mind, to see through her eyes, and she sees everything differently.

Here’s the kicker: every moment opens a window on multiple choices demanded of each character.   Over and over again, these choices present themselves  (not just two forks in the road, but a dozen or more at least) and characters have to choose.   As writers, so do we.

Don’t you wish we could sit all our characters down over coffee and hear them talk about how they go about making choices?

Actually, we can. We must…

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May 14, 2011 · 9:18 am

Learning to Work on Your Work

So I went from full time to half time to all-the-time.  From lots of people everyday to hardly any people any day.   From interactions with people focused primarily on what some would call “spirituality” to interactions based on whatever happens to be flying around the human experience at the moment.   From intense Biblical study to intense Civil War study and on into the psychology of memory, adult children of alcoholics, and racism.   From being present in the moment with folks trudging into a church to being present in a thousand imagined moments with characters with potential lives trudging into my imagination.  And the result of all this?  From a solid sense of knowing you’re doing something significant because people tell you that pretty often, to wondering what in the world you’re up to, and whether it will make any difference.

Why shouldn’t life as its actually lived challenge your assumptions?

I’m reminded of Annie Dillard’s notion that to work on a novel (and in my case, a play) is to face down a beast that waits in your office every day.   A lion, I think she called it.  One of my students this past January called the process of creation “facing the white tiger.”   Eric Maisel likens the long walk to the writing place to a hallway lined with demonic voices; you have to walk the gauntlet, telling them simply and sincerely to shut up. “Hush!”  Clearing the mind, focusing attention, following lines of thought and character over an hour or eight.   And at the end of the eight hours, maybe you’re holding something really fine, or maybe it’s nothing but  a fistful of sand.

So what is the work?

It’s to show up.  It’s to check in, clock in, sit down, stare at the page, at your notes, at your books, at your previous day’s writing.  It’s imagining you’re on an airplane for a long ride, and you can’t up anyway, so you might as well dive in. It’s finding pace, acknowledging the deadlines without rushing past the detailed, nuanced thinking that has to inform the beats and the events.   Characters must be listened to.   I’m learning that to coerce them to do things they don’t want to do just because it would be fun to see them do it is to violate them and create lousy, false worlds.  Makes me think of God watching us, wanting desperately to overthrow our sovereignty and make us to just what He wants us to, but I wonder:  does He feel as badly about that as I do with my own characters?

What is the work?

To keep going, to learn humanity, to see what’s inside us, what’s working on us, to resist that ever-present thought that you know much.  I walk the neighborhood many mornings, seeing those same old colors, same old flowers.  I know where the tulips are, where the poppies are, where the rhodies are.  Truth is, they’re as spectacular as ever, and it’s a temptation to think I’ve seen them already.  It’s the same with people.    How in the world to stay alive to each one’s mystery and fascination?  Who knows what we will really do when we’re standing in our life’s defining moment.   There’s so much comedy and drama in the world…no wonder we tell stories.

The work is the cultivation of faith through beads-of-sweat living.   Standing firm when your chin shakes and  your chest is tight and tears sit in the edges of your eyes, and you plow on, working, pushing back on the curses that stretch all the way back to the garden.   And the wave of panic passes, and you clickity-clack away on the keyboard.   And then there are words that fit just right, story events that become obvious, and characters leap off the page, anxious to get what they’re after.   Their beauty is their honesty, their brokenness, and their humanity.   Such is your beauty as well.  And mine.

The work is to lay down pride.  You know the kind of pride I mean.  The kind of pride that destroys listening, blocks sight, removes presence, and makes getting through a day as hard as swimming in armor.  Pride that presents itself as fear that you will never breathe the air of God, because it’s an air that is only attained with achievement, popular acclaim, and fawning.  If we’re lucky, the work shows us (dramatically) how dumb we really are, and that the air of God can be had for a simple inhale, and categorically has nothing to do with all that other stuff.   To hear any of that, though, we have to be ready, open handed, receptive to being worked over.

What is the work?

Let’s say the work is a Jesus kind of thing; get up from the comfort table, take off the outer garment, wrap the towel around your waist, and offer cleansing, relief, comfort, rest, hospitality, even if it means having a sore back a lot. And you artists out there?  Things in the imaginative world aren’t much different that that of the real world.  The work is to wash the feet, imagined and real, of all who come onto our kingdom plot of ground.

Time for words…

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May 11, 2011 · 8:36 pm

I Need Words

Tonight, some words.

The dryer’s running, and it’s hot in my office.  How the rain outside asserts itself into my space is hard to say, but it does.  I like rain, but I’m tired of it.  ”No grumbling,” God’s word says, but grumbles pour in and out of my head before I hardly know they’re there.  I’m drinking too much coffee, too much sugar, scarfing too much bread, trying to squeeze out plot elements to make audiences weep and transform, writing rage and malice and that Christian word that sells best–hope.  We’ll see.

Now the dryer’s stopped, flashing an error message at me; F:03, which translated, means “too much water.”  I’d explain, but you’d be bored.  Bores me just to think about it.

Words.  Words are saviors of a kind.  It’s the oddest thing; until I type a thing, I don’t really know what I’m thinking.  At least not in a form as concrete as words reveal.  Writing is magic, pulling rabbits out of hats without knowing there are any rabbits in there.  Give me a subject.  Astronomy: a hundred billion galaxies traveling away from us and each other forever.  Coffee cups: It’s the hardest thing to find the one I want each morning.  There’s only one of them, and it wanders while I’m asleep…I’m sure of it.  Cell phones:  they’re mostly good as cameras and wasters of time.  Friends: better saviors than words, mostly because they use words.  Words that are not coming out of my own head.  Lots of folks have better words in their heads than I do.  Most folks, probably.

There are seven old messages on my phone, my ears are ringing, the taste of cracker’s in my mouth.  My foot is arched, I’m gritting my teeth (just noticed), and my hands pound away on the keys (people laugh at how hard I hammer my keyboard.)  Sentences built on three phrases seem to work pretty well.    As in: I’ve been looking at old pictures, reminding myself that God’s work’s been pretty good in previous years.  I’m hoping he keeps it up.   That wasn’t three phrases in a sentence.  Oh, well.  Sue me.

I was telling someone about my play.  He said, “Middle age white male has mid-life crisis.  I’m not spending my entertainment dollar there.”  He sounded like he was speaking for all America, for all theatre goers everywhere.  He’s a good friend.   It’s a sort of sucky time in history to be a middle age white male.   No sympathy?  Well, there you go.  As they say, and as my study of the Civil War tells me again, I guess we had it coming.  But here’s the thing: I didn’t think I was writing a play about a middle aged white guy suffering a mid-life crisis.  I thought I was writing a play about…oh, well it doesn’t matter, does it?

Hold on, I’m getting a cup of coffee.

If anybody’s read “Leaving Ruin”, does this sound like Cyrus?

It really is magic, though, isn’t it?  Some reality exists inside someone’s chest, and its a physical sensation with substance, and there’s no word for it, it’s just what it is.  So out come the words, comparisons, metaphors–for God’s sake, in God’s name, for God’s glory even, somebody give me something that can set this reality inside out there.  I want to stick it into your head, into your consciousness, into your experience so that…so that what?  Oh, who knows what this thing in my chest might do if I could sneak it over into yours.  Love, pain, joy, loneliness, dry mouth…are life’s felt realities common to us?  ”No one feels like me.”   That, I don’t believe.

The magic of words.  Why am I so astounded?  I have no idea.  I cannot wrap my head around this all too common thing we do called communication.   Seems dumb to think about it; it’s pervasive and normal.  But it’s miraculous.  Water-into-wine miraculous.  Nothing-into-something miraculous.  If you are reading this just now, it’s a miracle, the most common thing in the world, that you’ve stumbled here, and you’re getting a bit of metabolic stuff to chew on and digest, or spit back out depending on how full you are at the moment.  Miraculous when we find things that pull us up off the floor, off the mat where we landed after the day’s haymaker.  (I’m mixing metaphors at the rate of a southern cook dropping ingredients into a casserole, but I don’t care.  I’m just making words tonight, looking for a couple to save the day)

So you’re wondering what’s the feeling inside my chest tonight?  Well, if you’re intuitive, you might think I’ve been knocked the mat, or wading through something I need to be saved from, or maybe just suffering from too much caffeine and sugar.   You’d be right about all that, but if I were you, I wouldn’t worry too much.   The God I visit with fairly often no doubt has my back.   In fact, it’s probably Him telling me to go get some words.   Get some good words, the best words I can find, produce, spit out, and toss your direction.

There you go.

Me trying to connect.  That’s what it means to sneak a word over to you.  A lifeline, a tether, a slim hold on togetherness.  Connection.  The great wide internet, the unseen racing of X’s and O’s so that we can have that sensation of not being alone on the planet.   It doesn’t quite have the oomph of skin to skin, eye to eye, and words landing on the physical structures of the ear, but something vibrates with all these words.  Resonates.  Connects.

Have some words…

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July 3, 2009 · 5:28 pm

OSF’s Equivocation

The Cast of Equivocation at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The cast of Equivocation at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

So I’m home from the short journey to Ashland, Oregon.  Anjie and I took off Sunday night after the A Cappella time at the Northwest Church, stopped in Portland for the night, and drove another four hours Monday morning, arriving in Ashland just after noon.  After a relaxing afternoon and evening just wandering the shops, Tuesday and Wednesday were to be full-on theatre going days.   Tuesday it was Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing, both strong productions, thought there was little in Macbeth even remotely frightening, save the towering sound effects.    Peter Macon’s portrayal of the the Scottish King was interesting, and fiery, but for my money,  the fire never really came from a real furnace.  Robin Goodrin Nordli was tremendous as Lady Macbeth, though, and when I got to the Much Ado performance that night, I noticed that Nordli was understudying Beatrice.   I secretly hoped whoever was slated for the role would have the flu so I could watch Nordli again.  But no, Robynn Rodriguez went on as schedule (first witch in Macbeth), and while she was fine, after it was over, I was still wishing for Nordli.   David Kelly’s Benedick kept me laughing the whole evening, though, so overall, at the end of the first day, I gave the best play of the day nod to Much Ado.

Then came Equivocation.

“The use of equivocal or ambiguous expressions, esp. in order to mislead or hedge; prevarication.”  So says dictionary.com.   And in short, that’s what the play’s about: the ability to tell the truth (or not) in difficult circumstances.    How does a playwright like Will Shagspeare (variant spellings, I guess?) tell the truth about current events relating to a terrorist plot against King James without ending up bankrupt, or worse, shut down?

From the get-go, I was hooked.

I suppose part of it was just the ease of language.   After 5 plus hours the day before of listening to the heightened language of the Bard, it was just easy to listen to Bill Cain’s crisp dialogue.  But beyond that, these characters were dense and richly drawn, and as we watched “Shag” (Anthony Heald) pursue the truth of the so-called “powder plot”, we agonized with him over how to give the Prime Minister what he wanted.  Jonathan Haugen’s portrayal of Robert Cecil, limping Prime Minister who wishes he was king, was absolutely brilliant.  By turns loathsome and affecting, Haugen’s force was palpable.   The other characters were equally fine, and to listen to the amazing voice of Gregory Linington was particularly satisfying.

Two things and I’ll wrap this up: 1)  I loved the theatricality of the piece.  The actors slipped between characters effectively and unexpectedly.  The stage was sparse, but beautifully designed, it’s open platform and moving props plenty to create the 17th C. world we needed.   It challenged me to think again of how to create scenic flow and structure with theatricality and surprise.  2)  The questions surrounding truth-telling in politics, in religion, and in art challenged me, compel me to think pretty carefully again about what it means to let your “yes, be yes,” and your “no, be no.”   What question is really being asked when the hard questions come?  Are you answering the question being asked at face value, or are you searching for the question underneath?  It’s worth thinking about.

At the end of the play, the audience stood virtually as one to thank them for the show.   One of the few standing O’s in recent memory that made any sense.

And of course, those costumes…oh, those costumes…

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