Every work of art is a message in a bottle, a hope that whatever it is you were trying to share when you created it makes its way to someone who can use it, ideally to make their lives, if only for a moment, a little bit better, clearer, nobler, happier, or more hopeful or truthful, or at the very least, more fun.
One of the greatest raw delights of writing is getting to name things: characters, imaginary places, titles for the work itself. I can’t remember how long it took for me to come up with the name of the main character for my play Tuesday—, a few days, weeks, half a year maybe?—but I’m so pleased with the baldly Joycean result, “Audie McCall,” that I still use it sometimes as an alias. I think my favorite coining is “Waldric Rasutabula”, the name of an utterly absurd fellow from my utterly unproduced farce, Gossamer Grudges. Here he is being introduced to another strangely-christened character.
'RATIO: Waldric, this is Quince from Rubicon Consultants. She has agreed to an initial tour to determine whether her firm might assist ours in the coming transition.
WALDRIC (bowing egregiously): Waldric Rasatabula. (heel click) Majordomo of the Pneumotubes.
QUINCE (tilting her head like a curious terrier): Quince.
WALDRIC: Just Quince?
QUINCE: That’s right.
WALDRIC How mysteriously titillating.
QUINCE: Not remotely.
'RATIO: Please show Quince every hospitality.
WALDRIC: (suddenly and alarmingly lecherous): Every hospitality?
'RATIO: Every hospitality she requires.
WALDRIC: Requires?
'RATIO: Requests.
QUINCE (Offering a hand): Pleasure, I’m sure.
WALDRIC (molesting it): All pleasure is mine.
I often begin a piece— script, poem or essay— with just a title. A lot of the essays I’ve presented here at Just Wrought over the last few years started as nothing but a few scribbled words. I keep a slush fund of them on my computer, and with me stepping away from the fray, I have a surplus I can’t hope to ever flesh out. So I present them to you here and now, gentle reader: your dubious inheritance, reward for years of reading, to do with what you will: surplus titles for a free, fresh theatre.
Why Craft Won’t Save Us
Change the Culture
Go After the Boards
Is it Really the Audiences’ Fault?
It’s not about Money, it’s about Power
Live Girls Quickies Makes me Wish I Were a Woman
When Expansiveness Equals Retreat
Preferably Dead: The Lives of Playwrights in America
Is Actual Human Speech Impossible to Stage?
How do We Hold the Boards Accountable?
Since When are Directors Indespensible?
Museum Theatre: The Whiff and Grip of Necrophilia
Reasons to Be a Playwright
It is Our Job to Be Foolish
You have Spinach in Your Teeth
Why Trolls Troll
I like Intermissions
Things are Important
I am Not a National Playwright
On Guts and Assholes
Experimental Lip Service
An Open Letter to the Minority of Journalists We Managed to Piss Off
(This one is from the Newswrights United days, when we covered the demise of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in It’s not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper.)
Keep the Dark Night Sacred
Plays are Finicky Fragile Seeds
The MFA Virus
Quit Bingeing Fear
Pay us Shakespeare’s Royalties
Food for the Minotaur
Live by the ____; Die by the ____
Upping our Numbers
Buddhism versus Theatre
Bergson Essay
Seattle, Theatre Town of Many Hats
Glen Gary Glen Wrong
The “Let’s-do-that-Play-I-didn’t-get-Cast-in-Back-in-College” Syndrome
Stop Trying to be Respectable
8/7/07 - 5:0? PM
If I do this grudge play it has to be in the spirit of Wilder. It has to seem silly and overly earnest and then cut to the bone and then throw up its hands and say, “Oh, no, no you misunderstand. Forget that last part. I really AM just silly and overly earnest.” It has to ring a bell true and then say, “Who me? What? Ring a bell? Well, yes, I guess I have. But I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest.”
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.”
Just wanted to give Seattleites advanced warning that there will be a reading of my very latest play, Gossamer Grudges at the Seattle Repertory Theatre* on Tuesday, June 8 at 7 pm in the PONCHO Forum.
For over a hundred years Gossamer Holdings has delivered faithfully on its simple pledge: “We hold grudges, so you don’t have to.” Times, however, have changed, and Horatio Gossamer knows that in this “go big or go home” world, the family firm must grow or die.
Gossamer Grudges is a fast, funny, furious six-actor comedy with its feet firmly planted in classic farce and its head swimming in the intoxicating clouds of instantaneous celebrity, money, and sex.
We will have an amazing cast amazingly directed, and maybe, just maybe the play will be worth hearing. I have been working on the idea for over three years. Farce is easily the most difficult form I have ever attempted. So please come because I’m going to have lots of questions on how to make this bird sing.
This reading series is co-sponsored by the Rep’s New Play Program and Northwest Playwrights Alliance. Special thanks to Jerry Manning, Braden Abraham and Bryan Willis for making this program possible, and letting a pain-in-the-ass like me participate.
*Yes, they’re letting me in the building.
Recent Comments