Just Wrought

Louis Slotin Sonata is #1!

Funny story: I mentioned on Google+ this morning that sales of the Kindle version of my play Louis Slotin Sonata seemed to have gone through the roof (though in the interest of perfect honestly, I must now instruct you to picture a roof approximately six inches off the ground.)  Shortly thereafter, my friend and colleague Wes Andrews chimed in to point out that the play is the bestselling e-book in the playwriting category.  (See the rankings here. ) 

Shocking!

At this point I began mentally listing reasons this might be so:

1. In November, Louis Slotin Sonata will be receiving a production on the retired ocean liner, The Queen Mary, produced by California Repertory Company, or Cal Rep for short, the resident theatre company at California State University – Long Beach.  Now, a staging of the play does not necessarily translate into a significant boost in Kindle sales.  I only saw a small uptick when A Red Orchid produced Slotin in Chicago last year; but I wonder if, since the play is being done under the auspices of a university, perhaps certain professors are assigning the text as course reading.  If so, that would be sweet.  I’d like nothing better than to start feeding at the trough of mandatory academic assignment, especially in light of how often and eagerly I rail against the dangers of academia infecting American Theatre with the debilitating disease of elitist inaccessibility.
2. It ain’t exactly hard to top a list of books about playwriting.  It’s a bit like being the best ice-hockey player in Chad: an achievement, undeniably, but one that needs to be placed in context.  Adding to the irony is the fact that that Louis Slotin Sonata isn’t about playwriting, it is playwriting.  When I first published the script “playwriting” was the closest category Kindle offered.  (A further irony is implied here: Amazon recognized that books about playwriting were more likely to sell than plays themselves.)  All that said, I flatter myself to think that reading Louis Slotin Sonata might teach you things that you won’t learn from Playwriting for Dummies (number two on the list).
3. You can only get Louis Slotin Sonata on Amazon.  While Slotin is probably my best known play, it is not necessarily the most successful by all standards.  Tuesday has had more productions and The Sequence has netted me more money.  A while ago I decided that I would hold Slotin back from hard-copy publication, if only to see how well it might do if solely offered electronically.  It was an experiment. I like to think Louie would approve.

Regardless of how I might try to explain it, the situation remains absurd.  And thus, it is my sworn duty as a theatre artist to do everything possible to perpetuate it.  You can help.  You can order the play for your Kindle of course, but if that does not work for you either because…

• you do not have a Kindle (I sure don’t)
• or you already have a copy of the play
• or don’t have the $7.99 to spend

… you can still help by going to Amazon and supplying a review of the play.  Reviews and good ratings help raise the profile of an electronic title. 

So think back.  Did you see Slotin in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle or Chicago?  What did you think?  Type those thoughts out and post them to Amazon.  Maybe give the play some stars.  Then sit back with me and see how long we can keep this absurdity going.

The Bardo of The Salted Wife

Is it possible to engender genuine horror in an audience through a live stage experience?  That is the standing question for this series of scripts, excerpts and essays which I will be posting throughout this  Halloween season.

***

Sometimes a piece of theatre is crafted specifically and solely as a work of horror.  In recent times, The Woman in Black leaps to mind, but we should also remember that the Grand Guignol in Paris was one of the most successful and longest running commercial theaters of all time. 

More often, a play will contain components of horror while the larger story lands squarely in the territory of tragedy, e.g. Hamlet or MacBeth. And sometimes, but much more rarely, horror rears its head in a comedy, like my own reincarnation romp, An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show. It is early in the play, and things are cooking along nicely in full farce fashion, as game show host Blink Bodie, yucks it up with contestants and Spokesmodels, when suddenly a solid wall of stylized terror stops the fun cold, and, ideally, disorients the audience enough that I can start to really —ahem—“muck” with them.

Ripped right out of Howard Zinn’s  absolutely essential A Peoples History of the United States, this section is my attempt at staging one of the nastiest tidbits from our nation’s nascent colonization. This isn’t legend.  Zinn cites the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia legislature for this piece of history. So it seems consuming others for one’s one survival and delectation is as old, if not older, as the idea of America itself.

Often Lie

Is it possible to engender genuine horror in an audience through a live stage experience? 

That’s the question I started pondering a decade or so ago. Now don’t knee-jerk back some glib response. Think before you answer, and be honest. I have given a lot of thought to this, and I am still not completely sure. So this Halloween season I thought I would crack open the question again for churning with a series of scripts, excerpts and essays, in hopes that together we might strike some undiscovered insights.

Let me kick it off with “Often Lie”, a very short play I wrote for the late-night horror series Psychopomp Presents. . ., which was produced by Paul Morgan Stetler and myself, and directed by Braden Abraham, at Capitol Hill Arts Center in October 2005 .  We billed the show thusly:

A late night modicum of mayhem featuring world premiere plays penned to plumb the very depths of the collective unconscious.  "Lil' Heroes" "Often Lie" and "The Reckoning" are works by three of Seattle's most innovative playwrights: Louis Broome, Paul Mullin and Stephanie Timm.  Come on, give your dark side a joy ride!

It was a failure.  But one of the very best kind, a true experiment wherein a hypothesis was advanced, a test was run, and data was extracted.  Our data read something like: “You cannot scare drunk hipsters after 11 pm no matter how hard you try.” 

The idea for my contribution “Often Lie” was essentially, “What if two random people met and discovered they were having each other's dreams?” From here I began lightly building in my favorite freest fashion, by just randomly associating and seeing where it takes me. I thought of Queen Mab and went back to read Mercutio's famous rant. Spiders seemed to be prominent in that speech, so I let that take me further on. I leave it to you to find the connections, such as they are. I soon decided that only one of the characters should be dreaming the other's dream, thus leaving more opportunity to explore the "who's dreaming who?" question. I landed on a sort of Donald-Rumsfeld-meets-Queen-Mab scenario which pleased me. I think, given the right circumstances, it might possibly frighten an audience that wasn’t simply looking to laugh and get drunker before getting laid.

For its world premiere, I was blessed to have the dream casting of Michael Patten as “Drum” and Stephanie Shine as “Mabel”.

Here’s the play:

Sandbox Radio – Worth the Wait

 

A bunch of us founded the Sandbox Artists Collective a few years ago “as a place for mid-career artists to explore their craft in the company of their peers.”  Unlike most assemblages of show folk, the Sandboxers weren’t in any hurry to produce publicly as a group.  Most of us were already performing, writing and/or producing professionally elsewhere. We were not, however, completely quiet in our first years, hosting salons, like “Playground” in which four Sandbox playwrights wrote specifically for Sandbox actors.  Finally, however— and fully to the credit of Leslie Law’s leadership— the membership felt the urge to share what happens when we put  our collective mind into putting on a show.  The result was last month’s Sandbox Radio Live, Episode 1, available now in podcast here.

On an individual artist’s note, Sandbox Radio Live has given me the opportunity and motivation to finally flesh out a project I have been percolating since high school.  For all that time, all I knew was that I wanted to wright a nasty noir angel detective saga.  Now you can listen to the first chapter of Markheim on the podcast, with the incomparable Charles Leggett starring in the title role of the reluctant semi-heavenly gumshoe.  Below the fold I am posting the script in case you want to follow along. 

And be sure to attend the next episode of Sandbox Radio Live on Monday, October 10th at West of Lenin, the fabulous new theatre space in Fremont, when Markheim adjusts to life in the strange city of Seattle, and begins his search for the reasons that brought him here.  Special appearance by the fellow that Jesus Christ Himself once called “the Prince of the World.”

Lost and Found

Circle X Theatre’s world premiere of An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, designed by Gary Smoot, was the most visually evocative production of any show I have ever written.   The tableaus and scenic effects were so unique and so profoundly stunning that it’s damned near impossible to describe them in words.  So imagine how depressing it has been these nine years to think that the only two surviving images of the show were this…

  

And this…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now don’t get me wrong: the incomparable Kellie Waymire ravishes us posing above as the troubled proto-supermodel Jacqui Potts*; and Blink Bodie (Kevin Fabian) flanked by his spokesmodels (Jamie Bullock & Daniele O’Laughlin) wrapped in Old Glory certainly hits the “American” part of the title on the nose.  On the other hand, not only do both shots fail to tell us anything novel about the show, they also, more importantly, don't tell us what we don’t know about it, thus piquing our curiousity enough to maybe come see.  Compare them with this newly unearthed shot, again of Kellie as Jacqui...

This not only screams “sex”, but “mystery”, “exposure”, and somehow, oddly, “death” itself.  If we had captioned this “Jacqui Potts about to enter the bardo realm by dropping acid and posing nude for the first time”, we might just have been able to get your butt in one of Circle X’s seats, mightn’t we?   Why we did not try to sell the show with the countless more evocative images than those first two, I will probably never know.  The fact is, however, that because those two shots were used for publicity, they alone survived.  Or so I thought for nearly a decade.

A lot of life got lived between 2002 and now^†, and the rolls of film that all of us knew were captured in that meticulous marathon photo call somehow disappeared  somewhere along the way.  I confirmed the loss when I started blogging here at Just Wrought and wanted to write about how I love to work with designers as early as possible in the development process.  Even though I was living in New York City when I wrote ABOD and Gary Smoot lived in Los Angeles, we somehow managed to meet in Seattle over a long post-9/11 Thanksgiving weekend, and in the living room of Gary’s boss’s house we brainstormed ways to stage the bizarre effects I was imagining.

I described the process in my essay on designers:

We needed three isolation booths for the afterlife contestants.  I wanted something straightforward and on the nose, similar to the glass boxes they used in Twenty-One.  Naturally, Gary zagged off my zig.  We went through a lot of ideas, including bubble packs for life-sized action heroes, file cabinets and morgue drawers.  Finally he landed on simple genius, and of course had the skill and the luck to bring it together:  three identical, perfectly white refrigerators, with plastic magnet letters to spell out each enclosed contestant's name. When the intense gelled Fresnels were focused on them, the white surface utterly transformed into whatever deeply saturated color the lighting designer chose to call up.  The “contestents” blithely climbed in and out of them, emerging unexpectedly from one after entering another, like so many peas in a karmic shell game.  For the audience the layers of meaning dawned almost imperceptibly but no less forcefully for that: the three fridges were uniquely American icons of consumption, comfort, death and banality all at once, and as they were signifying these things, it was also obvious that they were nothing more or less than refrigerators, or isolation booths, or maybe some vast gentle joke played on everyone from patron to playwright.  When Gary’s designing the sense of play never leaves the play, even if the play involves death at its very core.

When I wrote that I had no reason to believe anyone would ever again be able to see what I was trying to describe.  When I called Gary to ask if he had captured any photos for his own records, he said he might have, but that he would have to dig for them when he had some free time.  That’s Smoot code for, “It ain’t gonna happen.”  Gary never has free time.  Even so, a few months later he told me he had looked and hadn’t find anything.  Now we were both bummed.

Then, a few months later, I was on the phone with Tim Wright, the current Artistic Director of Circle X, pitching him a new script when a mini-miracle occurred.  Tim casually mentioned that he had the ABOD production shot negatives and if I wanted, he would send them to me!  The rest was logistics.  This past week I got the negs developed to digital at a respectable mom and pop photo shop, and spent most of Saturday uploading the images to Flickr and Face Book and tagging them with the names of old friends.*^†    I smiled all day as folks involved with the production chimed in to say hello, share memories,tag more photos and grab shots for the profile pics.

So you wanna see those fridges, and how well they worked?  Well, in lieu of a few thousand words, here’s a few pictures…

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Deep inside information:  It is a testament to Kellie’s wide-spectrum of talent and tireless dedication that she also helped to sew and hang the sumptuous red curtain behind her in this shot.

^†Not to mention death: Kellie Waymire died in 2003.

*^†You can enjoy the full set on Flickr, here... 

 

 
 

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The New You Boat (Mini-Act II)

Continued from Mini- Act I

Mini-Act II
by
O.C.C.A.M.

 (The following countdown takes place in darkness.)

CAPTAIN:  Seven.

COMMANDER:  Seven.

LIEUTENANT:  Seven.

ENSIGN:  Seven.

BOSUN:  Seven.

HELMSMAN:  Seven.

SEAMAN:  Seven.

COMMANDER:  Six.

LIEUTENANT:  Six.

ENSIGN:  Six.

BOSUN:  Six.

HELMSMAN:  Six.

SEAMAN:  Six.

LIEUTENANT:  Five.

ENSIGN:  Five.

BOSUN:  Five.

HELMSMAN:  Five.

SEAMAN:  Five.

ENSIGN:  Four.

BOSUN:  Four.

HELMSMAN:  Four.

SEAMAN:  Four.

BOSUN:  Three.

HELMSMAN:  Three.

SEAMAN:  Three.

HELMSMAN:  Two.

SEAMAN:  Two. One.

(Lights up.)

ENSIGN:  ¡Ping!

COMMANDER:  What?

ENSIGN:  Something.

COMMANDER:  What?

CAPTAIN:  Ensign explicate.

ENSIGN:  I... I... scanning... scanning...

COMMANDER:  What?  Something?  What?

CAPTAIN:  A ghost?  A glitch?

ENSIGN:  Gone.

SEAMAN:  Go then, Commander-Man, your switch.  Punch the button, bastard.

CAPTAIN:  Belay below.  Avast bastion blasts awhile awaiting a future--

ENSIGN: ¡¡Ping!!

COMMANDER:  Again?

CAPTAIN:  Ensign extrapolate.

ENSIGN:  Close.  Closing closer.

COMMANDER:  Captain?
CAPTAIN:  Aye.

COMMANDER:  Shall I?

SEAMAN:  Aye, knew you eyed three key live/kill.  Use or lose.

CAPTAIN:  Hold fire. Helmsman, do die for your New You depth invasion evasion.

HELMSMAN:  Aye, aye, I do die for declination dot mark dash dot dash mark dash.

CAPTAIN:  Seaman, a head engine's awful.

SEAMAN:  Rot sure negative, Captain.  Fear/desire drive died dry of new U launch lust lost and found foundering.

CAPTAIN:  Silence.  All hands and semenful silence.

(Silence.)

ENSIGN:  ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eeeeeeeeyingyangyangyangyingyingyingyangyangyingyang!!!!!!!

CAPTAIN:  Lieutenant, tend the Ensign.  Bosun, man the scanner.

LIEUTENANT:  I eye, consummation containment crypt cracked.

BOSUN:  Breach leaking New U blue-black.

LIEUTENANT:  Imminent wave array decay.

COMMANDER:  Recommendation.

LIEUTENANT:  You knew New You's posited position predicates primary protocol.

SEAMAN:  I aye.  Kill/die.

ENSIGN:  Oh!

CAPTAIN:  Ensign, report.

ENSIGN:  Oh come!

CAPTAIN:  Ensign, repeat.

ENSIGN:  Oh come!  Oh come!

BOSUN:  Captain, I eye sounds bounding, but something--

COMMANDER:  Something else?

BOSUN:  Something other.  An indistinguishable, inextinguishable echo goes over the whole hollow hull.

ENSIGN:  Awe comes!

HELMSMAN:  Captain. I eye dying drift dive decline climbing to asymptote of total imp lotion. Shall I continue to die for

you? To dive, perchance to--

BOSUN:  Blow the whole hallowed held hull.

CAPTAIN:  Hold held course coordinates: invasion evasion.

SEAMAN:  Who knew you New You to fool?  Where do you New You to go?

CAPTAIN:  No one.  Nowhere.  Need to know only.  Nothing knows again new again now, all hands and semen, knew you of New

You to live/let live another daze of all days to fight another night of all lights.

SEAMAN:  Live/let live's long gone.  On or on or on and on.

LIEUTENANT:  Knew you New You, when nothing's something sees through Schrodinger's cat can, all's over and out with an

ever-rending boom through the Chinese Room.

ENSIGN:  Awk'em!  Chink the Chink Clink!  Awk'em!  Awk'em!

CAPTAIN:  Knew you, damn you, to extricate, Ensign, and excogitate escape from stated state.

ENSIGN:  Aye I one woe wallowing whale's wail waking mermen and maidens mating making oracling orcas cause calls across all

of us: "Awe comes occaming all ye fate-fools of faded faithfulishness.  Be not be afraid/brave I eye-tide in/out tidings of

great joyfoolish noise.”

BOSUN:  Behold low hell hellos!

ENSIGN:  Aye!

BOSUN:  Pain pang pings pound!

LIEUTENANT:  Chink the Chink Clink!

SEAMAN:  Blast a bastard button, pusher!  On or on or on and on!

COMMANDER:  I eye I catch as cat can can't!

HELMSMAN:  New You course closing on imminent infinite atmospheres asymptote!

CAPTAIN:  I eye from one breach breaking wave good-bye.

ENSIGN:  Occam's rays--

BOSUN:  Heard me.

ENSIGN:  Occam's rays--

LIEUTENANT:  Hurt me!

COMMANDER QUARK:  There's something--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --nothing but a little--

SEAMAN MESON:  --push would scuttle but a little--

COMMANDER QUARK:  --blasting bastion of--

BOSUN BOSON:  --sounds truly--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --human in--

HELMSMAN HADRON:  --and doubt of all--

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  --this--

SEAMAN MESON:  --that--

COMMANDER QUARK:  --never was--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --always will--

HELMSMAN HADRON:  --not stroke--

BOSUN BOSON:  --one when we're--

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  --Occam's razored!

(Blackout.
End of “The New You Boat.”)

 

The New You Boat (Mini-Act I)

A note on the generation of the play...

The playwright Matthew Fielding died in 1984, having only completed the first act of his last play, “The New You Boat”.  Unfinished works are a fact of life-- or rather death-- in the world of literature, but there are those that believe that this was no accident.  Fielding mentioned no other work by name in his will, but the first act of the mini-two act play “The New You Boat” was specifically designated to be placed in the public domain where anyone who so chose could attempt to finish it.  Also, in eerie contrast to his habit, Fielding left no notes on the work, no outlines for the second act, no references to its conception or development in his journal-- nothing, but the perfectly formed first act.  Finally, the script is rife with digital and quantum imagery as well as linguistic conundrums and self-referential, anti-algorithmic riddles that could have only be intentionally designed for one purpose: to confound an artificially intelligent creative consciousness.

Writing the first act of “The New You Boat” was a consummate act of defiance on Fielding’s part: a reaching back from the finality of death itself to throw down one last gauntlet before his late-life intellectual adversaries-- the proponents of artificial intelligence.  Most artists have an inherent antipathy and distrust of the scientific method.  Matthew Fielding embraced it.  He welcomed contending viewpoints from those who challenged the anthropocentric idea that only human beings are capable of consciousness and creativity.  He was as willing to be proven wrong by them as he was eager to prove them wrong.

In fall of 1995, under the auspices of an unprecedented co-bequest of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Security Administration, an elite team of thinkers, scientists and artists called the Creative Cognition Development Group, was formed to meet the challenge of completing a master work of art solely using computer generated artificial consciousness.  A mega-program, made up of literally billions of complex, interconnected algorithms needed to be designed, tested and implemented.  It was.  On January 1, 1999, OCCAM (Omni-interfacial Creative Consciousness Algorithm Matrix) was born.  In a little over two years (roughly two-hundred times longer than experts believe it took Fielding to write the first half) OCCAM completed the “The New You Boat”.

We at the CCDG, on behalf of the late Matthew Fielding, and indeed, OCCAM itself, invite you to judge the results.

 

Mini-Act I
by
Matthew Fielding

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Accept no substitutes.  This is the New You Boat.  Rot your Roger.  We'll go wilco.  Seaman Meson, state your state us.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Aye, aye, Commander.  Fear/desire drive alive and churning our screw through the New You blue bluer blue bluer than blue black-blue blacker than blue bluer than blacker than bluer than bluer than blacker than bluest blacker-blue-black back to you new boat.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot your that.  Helmsman Hadron.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Aye, aye, Commander.  New You of course bearing naught stroke one not one stroke one approaching asymptote of ascertaining our approach on points pertaining to why we lie below and die with always something shy of sky's the limit asymptotically speaking of course...  bearing...  naught stroke one not one—

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Helsman—

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Aye.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Cut your jib and maintain prescient course.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  I, Commander, will go--

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  We'll always go.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Wilco.  Aye.  Shall I dive for you?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Aye, Helmsman, do.  Dive for depth perception zero nautical knots naught stroke one.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Rot your that.  Will do dive.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Bosun Boson.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Aye the hull is sound the hull is true sounding truly true sounds sounding through function of faith further function of fear further function of falling facing turning churning our screw through the new you black and blue back to blue black to you new boat.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Wheel go.  And scuttle button?

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Check, set, wired, tested, all systems go for detonating preset charges blowing bright holes in the hull holes opening hell holds flooding all held hells blowing all holes whole crushing us blinder than we already are.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot sure.  Ensign Neutrino.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Aye, communications check.  All bands scanned reading random noise with single signal exception.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Explicate.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Explication: constantly variable incessant inbeaming binary beacon begins again new...  again now...  again...

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Transcribe.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  I eye transcript sans script:  all in code.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Crack it.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  We'll go.  Cracking...
      Standby....
      In crypt cracked.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Transcribe.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Sans script transcript crypt cracked:  “Begin in crypt:  Knew you u no u r Schrödinger's Cat in a Chinese Box garbage day in and garbage day out.  Only amplitudes abound, always anchors away angers awash encore's a wish awhile awaiting a future in crypt.  End in crypt."

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot sure.  Lieutenant Lepton.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Morale modems monitor multitudinous mutinies multifariously manifesting melanomic demonic mnemonic nominal monomaniacal numb mum hum.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Recommendation.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Punch scuttle.  Blow held hull holes.  Collapse wave function.  Annihilate boundlessly abounding anger-anchored amplitudes.  Commence consummation devoutly to be wished awhile a waiting future in crypt.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Duly noted, negated, belayed and belied.  Standing course and orders stand still.
      Fire control command commander, I, Commander Quark, report all fire control systems all systems go set to blow ballistic bastions blasting out of the new you up through the black blue into the true you who new nothing mirvs spurt from seven brahmaning bridegrooms for seven continental eggs benedicted to break fast break hard over easy.
      Your new you crew stasis state us stated and standing for inspection, Captain Quasar.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  All hands and seaman:  this is your captain.
      This night of all nights, eve of day of all days, it's apt and auspicious to remember this mission's vital import and portent.
      It's not unreasonable to reason that the surfaces served have unremembered never knew you.  In their seasonal celebration of crisp coming bright they overlook that new true black blue heavy water U light: salvo salvation of nations.  You, New You, alone blow the glow coals that flash the steam that churns the turning screw through this bluer blacker than blue.  New You knew alone the crypt code, held hull holes, and ballistic bastions basking below.
    Last day I asleeped from a recurring reality, an ornery ontogeny oven on conscious corrective: little legged spermed-eggs doing the Chinese roomboom.  "Never knew you, New You." Say they you away.  "Never knew you, New Nothing." But whenwhere nothing exists, nothing's something liable to litter little nothings and break brittle little somethings into anything new you want.  What's to be?  What's to become?  What's to be becomes becoming through what little little legged spermed-eggs beg they never knew of New You.
      Tonight, Eve of all eves, a decision must be come to: a becoming to be come and gone.  Always knew you that this point in space of time would come.  One switch to give two options, two of which to give four, only one of which can be, taking three to key.
      Bosun Boson, man your switch.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  I eye scuttle button, one push to blow held hull holes.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Commander Quark, man your switch.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  I eye fire control set to blast bastions ballistic.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Ensign Neutrino, appraise amplitude array.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  I eye amplitude array all appraised:  four singular states in play.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Pray, Ensign, state states arrayed.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Off and off.  On and off.  Off and on.  On and on.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Translate arrayed stated states.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Live/let live.  Die/let live.  Live/kill.  Die/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Lieutenant Lepton, commence crew key conviction config query.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  I eye key config query commencing in sub conn descending rank order.
      Captain Quasar, select your suffrage.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Live/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Commander Quark.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Die/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Lieutenant Lepton:  die/let live.
      Ensign Neutrino.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Live/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  I eye two to key live/kill.
      Bosun Boson.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Die/let live.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  We'll go two to key die/let live.
      Helmsman Hadron.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Die/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Rot sure two to key die/kill.  Three out of four suffrages be two to key.  What say thee, Seaman Meson?
SEAMAN MESON:  Suffrage me to live/let live.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Nothing cums, Seaman, of nothing.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Rot sure, Captain.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Recast, Seaman.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Rot your recasting, Captain.  Resuffrage me to live/let live.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Suffrage denied.  Switch or surrender.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  I switch off and off.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  No.  On or on or on and on.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  I eye but off and off.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Damn you.  You knew you damn new you to lose, never loose, the name of action.  You knew New You to live/let live is nothing but not nothing.  Switch one on.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  No on.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR (simultaneously):  On, on, on, on, on, on, on.

 

SEAMAN MESON (simultaneously):  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. 

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Captain.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  I.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Permission to break the stale Seaman mate.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Explicate.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  I to eye switch conviction recon fig. from die to live/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Knew you to do this?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Aye but only new newly now.  Night of all nights.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Eve of all ease of all griefs.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Three now to key live/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Then commence live/kill key confiq sequence.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Eye, Ensign Neutrino, key in.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Keying.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Commander Quark.  ¿Quien?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Keen.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Captain Quasar.  Kin?

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  King.  Of all kin a little less than kind, of all knights a little more than dazed; wrecks raineth omni-pittance in salve ocean.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Key confiq complete.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Fire control armed.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Fire at will.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Request countdown.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  I eye granite.  Seven.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Seven.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Seven.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Seven.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Seven.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Seven.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Seven.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Six.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Six.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Six.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Six.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Six.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Six.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Five.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Five.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Five.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Five.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Five.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Four.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Four.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Four.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Four.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Three.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Three.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Three.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Two.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Two.  One.

 

(Blackout. End Mini-Act I.)

 

 

Continue to Mini-Act II by O.C.C.A.M.

Watching the Sausage Get Made with NewsWrights United

Nine out of every ten public play readings are exercises in vanity.  Despite what we may earnestly espouse about “works-in-progress” or “rough first drafts” we playwrights tend to avoid sharing our work in anything other than what we judge to be the highest states of perfection. I am more guilty of perpetrating this soft con than most, because arrogant ass that I am I tend to think of my plays as perfect even when they manifestly are not.  The reason playwrights deceive the audiences of play readings like this— not to mention the theatres that host them —and quite often ourselves as well— is simple: we do not usually want your helpful feedback, no matter how earnestly we plead to the contrary.  We just want to showcase our plays and convince theaters to produce them.  Alas, at that latter goal we nearly never succeed.

NewsWrights United will be doing something completely different at 7pm this Sunday night Oct. 24 at North Seattle Community College’s Stage One.  We don’t need to convince anyone to produce the second edition of A Living Newspaper, titled The New New News.  We will be producing it ourselves in February 2011 with the generous financial support of 4Culture, Vulcan and individual donors like yourself.  (You can click and pledge on our handy upside down donation fedora if you care to give us an early boost. )

The proto-script we will be reading Sunday night is a big hot mess, full of great local stories about the current crisis in journalism, but also riddled with yawning narrative gaps, inconsistencies and dramaturgic sacred cows begging to be sacrificed.  We actually do need your feedback and suggestions for how to make the play better.  If you join us Sunday night, instead of hearing a polished, polite and, frankly, boring “audition reading” you will be participating in a process much more akin to the 10 a.m. “front page meeting” at a major newspaper like The Seattle Times when the editorial staff first starts to choose and shape the major stories they will be covering in the next day’s edition.

Like theatre is supposed to be but almost never is at, say,  Seattle’s Big Houses, this reading of The New New News: A Living Newspaper will be messy, ardent, relevant, and fun.   But perfect?  Not so much.

 

When Plays Pay in Odd Ways

My play The Sequence has made me more money than any other play I have written.  This is true, even though The Sequence has only been fully produced once, at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena in 2008, and I did not receive any more than the usual compensation for that production.  How can this be?  For starters, The Sequence was a commission, meaning that, through a generous grant from EST/Sloan Project, I was paid up front simply to write it.  And while that commission was larger than any I had previously received, it was not huge by any measure, and certainly did not exceed the total that, say, Louis Slotin Sonata had brought in by that time through productions.  However, once I had a full draft of the script—albeit by no means final—I started getting inquiries from bio-tech organizations interested in hosting readings of the The Sequence at various symposiums and meetings around the country.  After a few of these readings, I became bored and started charging more than I thought  anyone would pay.  They paid anyway.  And thus I came to learn what should have been obvious in the first place: bio tech organizations have more money than regional theatres, and less myopia around where good plays can come from and what they are worth.

Now another yet-to-be produced play threatens to vaguely embarrass me by making money through means even less tangentially related to theatre.  My most recent full-length on-spec script is called Gossamer Grudges, and presents the story of a family-owned business devoted to “holding your grudges so you don’t have to.”  I have been nursing this premise for several years on the belief that it was deliciously absurd enough to fuel a proper full-on farce.  All that time I never guessed it might be absurd enough to inspire an actual business. 

Here’s a link to the first in what surely will be a long line of promotional videos for a new service called Grudgr, uniquely poised to—you guessed it— hold your grudges so you don’t have to.

 

Negotiations around my compensation for inspiring this business are on-going.  It could well be I won’t see a penny.  I am notoriously stupid when it comes to predicting the success of Hollywood enterprises.  I remember a phone conversation I had with Jeff Probst over a decade ago in which he told me about his upcoming television show wherein ordinary people would compete to be the last person on an desert island.  I remember thinking as I got off the phone, “Poor guy.  What a stupid idea.  They’re going to cancel that crap in two weeks tops.”

Louis Slotin will Finally Reach Chicago

While I have kept this news close to my vest for a while, it is now official, folks!  My play Louis Slotin Sonata will be produced in Chicago this Fall at A Red Orchid Theatre.

 

The Chicago Sun-Times covers the announcement here.

BroadwayWorld.com – Chicago’s story is here.

What makes this upcoming production particularly gratifying for me is that Slotin had immediate plans for his life beyond Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project.  He intended to switch gears from physics and engineering to pursue his original area of study, life sciences, at the University of Chicago.  His bags were already packed when the accident happened.   After all these decades, if only in my admittedly strange and somewhat sentimental imagination, Louie will finally arrive where he was heading.

Sodom Saki Full Length by Paul Mullin