There’s too much in the play, and I know that now. I tried to write thirty pages into nine, which is maybe challenging but still self-defeating. There’s just too much in there to wrap up in ten minutes.
Yet the production was dirty, gritty, flawed, perfect. My faith in my director was not only well placed but exceeded; she took a mess of a difficult script and made it funny, funny, funny, headkick. It was better than I had any right to hope for. It was exactly right.
The critique afterwards was honest and accurate, with more compliments than I expected and a clear and firm analysis ofthe problems–again, that it’s overstuffed. That was pretty much the only thing they found wrong, though, and I was a little surprised by that, but it gives me hope. Last year I wrote a real ten-minute play, spare and tidy and clean in form. Afterwards I was worried that I couldn’t write anything longer, but now I have something that’s going to be a one-act, and it’s going to be full.
I’m still too close to the play to rewrite it while I’m here, but rewrite it I will. I think when I have a real ten-minute and a real one-act I can start sending them to competitions. Maybe going to grad school for comp sci doesn’t mean leaving drama behind after all.
Meanwhile I’m going to read a lot of Atwood and play Diablo on my borrowed laptop (shh!) and maybe go to a workshop or two. I make the joke that I’m the one who doesn’t have to do anything here, but I don’t think that’s true now. Everyone else is networking, interviewing, getting ready to earn their pay at this; I’ve got a play and a half and the email address of a director who’s going to shake the world up in a few years.
I’m not going to post the play as I have before, because it’s not done yet. When I was twelve, I read about David Eddings in Something About the Author and I still remember a quote that disturbed me: he said you had to “write a million words, the best you’ve ever done, and then throw it all away,” before you could consider yourself a writer.That scared me, because even then I had a hard time letting go of anything I’d written. What if the best you’d ever written turned out to be the best you ever would?
He’s right, though. Maybe this play is part of those first million words, and maybe it’s not, but I’m going to throw it away and start over and do it right, and then I’ll let myself post it. I’m looking forward to that.
| Kit: | See? This is a play. You can’t leave because I didn’t write it in. | |
| Cricket: | This is real life, Kit, it’s not fiction. | |
| Kit: | I’m in an Irish pub in Chinatown! How much more fictional can you get? | |
| –David Clark’s “Last Call” | ||
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