I'm working on a play right now - but really, I'm not working on it so much as taking dictation. This is as close as I've ever come to having a play appear of its own volition. Always before, there has been a germ, a seed, an idea, picture, character, something acting as the spark plug of a new play, but in this case, scenes just keep pouring out of me - or rather, into me - without me giving the slightest thought to either the parts nor the whole.
These scenes or lines of dialogue always come when I'm dancing in the evenings. That's when I take diction, scribbling in a purple notebook with an erasable ink pen. The next day I'll type those pages into the computer in play format, and each time I end the session thinking "This isn't really going anywhere, it's not very good, I have no idea what to do with it". But every time more of it comes to me, it comes on a deeper level, revealing the characters to me, making them more real and full.
The characters are Roben Lee Gunder, a rock star sensation, and Doll (Dahlia), his sort of wife. It has never occurred to me to write about a rock star. Just doesn't feel like my sort of milieu. Until day before yesterday, the characters and situation seemed flat and pointless. Then a long expository monologue for Dahlia came to me, and even though I think long expository monologues are almost never a good idea in a play, I dutifully wrote it down and then gave up on the play again.
Last night, I saw how to break that monologue up into different scenes in different settings and time periods for the characters, so that the information will still be made available to the audience, but in an active way, a way that fleshes out, not just the situation, but the personhood of both Roben and Dahlia.
What's sort of great and squishy about how this play is unfolding is that I have no particular investment in how it turns out. I'm sort of assuming that it's not going to be very good, which gives me all kinds of freedom and could possibly mean it ends up being one of my best and most popular. Funny how that works sometimes. And if it does end up being no good, well, I'm still writing, and any writing is good writing because any writing contributes to the foundation I'm standing on when the play turns out all right, or good, or great.
If this ends up being something I can be proud of, I'm going to try making it a companion piece to This Almost Joy, because both of them are about characters being forced to play roles which end up diminishing their lives.
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