Streamer, Confetti, Champagne!

A toast to 2007! And another to 2008!

Ringing in the new year with two friends, we ordered in pizza, and has been a wonderful night. Just what I needed.
Off now, midnight is less than 4 minutes away where I am.

HAPPY NEW YEARS!!!

just wrote this...

Just wrote the following, it's for my 3 Hander (which is currently titled: "The Three Hander (a working title)"...quite meta-theatrical I find). Not sure where it's going to go yet, but I know it's the Actresses'.

ACTRESS:

Words of the moment
Words of mistakes
Words of mis-steps

Words can promise the world, then turn to dust in the shake of a head.

Words are an actor's pushing mechanism.
They can drown your opponent. Embrace your lover. Spit in the unwanted one's face.

They have laced the poison in the tip of Laertes's rapier.
Lauched George Bailey's desire to lasso the moon.
Sent Eliza Dolittle dancing all night.

But sometimes words become cowardly, shirk their responsibility, head off to the tropics for a beach vacation somewhere sunny. Sometimes words fail.

I love it

I love being like this...where everything sparks lines, ideas, thoughts, moments, words. Where possibilities stem from shadows. Where I'm always thinking when I'm not creating and writing. Where the blank page is not terrifying, but a chance for exploration.

inspiration does often strike in the most unlikely of places

You know the creative & eccentric juices are flowing when you write the following at work
(and when work right now is a mall at christmastime, won't be for long though):

Something about the red balloon, resting the crown of its round head against the mall ceiling, is contemplative and quiet. In the midst of endless holiday shopping hordes it balances.

p.s. Hours later and the balloon is still there. And so it will remain for the rest of time (or at least for the rest of holiday shopping)

p.p.s. Also need to look at changing time zone on here

Some of these days

Some days you're up and others you're down...not sure exactly how I'm feeling about this particular holiday season considering how much I'm working: give or take about three jobs, two of them seasonal retail; hence A LOT of time on my feet. One of them is front of house at a theatre, which I thoroughly enjoy heading to for my 6:45pm call no matter how exhausted or not exhausted I may be. The third show of the season closes this Saturday, so after that I will just have two jobs to deal with till around mid-January.

Some point in the new year I'm jetting off to work as a stage hand with Royal Caribbean Cruises. Getting back into working the twisting, dark corridors of a theatre; albeit on a ship. These theatres on the cruise ships, they're fully fledged members of the profession, let me tell you, the equipment, the lights, the rigging, the works.

Writing, and writing, and more writing away. But it's hard to concentrate on that when I'm practically working nonstop and on my day's off I only have energy to read, nap, and watch tv. I can do this, I have to take one day at a time, one shift at a time. No day but today.

Missing Montreal, and all the crazy and beautiful gang there. It's a constant. I will return there and work and create and produce.

Missing the backstage ghosts and headset conversations.

A little bit of everything in tonight's post. That's all for now folks.

Good News!

I have some glorious fantastic good news [now it's only a possibility but a pretty darn good one]. A friend of mine who's now living and doing theatre in St John's Nfld has asked about producing my play "Josephine (a love story)." Just talked about it a couple of days ago, still very fresh and prancing around in my head. "Josephine" is a play I originally wrote in my first year at Concordia for a playwriting class. It's about Josephine and Napoleon and their relationship. It's a play that crosses boundaries and times and places, mixes memory with the present moment, and an intimate look into the beginnings of a legendary relationship. It has been produced once before, at the 2004 Youth Infringement Festival (a theatre festival entirely run by youth) and can be done with a female and male actor, and a female voice.

So superduper excited about that!!!

Off to bed, I go. I'm so tired, working too much over the holidays (I'm too nice and say yes to things I shouldn't, let there be a lesson in that) and have a shift tommorrow at noon. And I just got home, oh about, 25 minutes ago.

A meditation on scenarios

"The art of the dramatist is very like the art of the architect. A plot has to be built up just as a house is built--story after story; and no edifice has any chance of standing unless it has a broad foundation and a solid frame." BRANDER MATTHEWS, The Principles of Playmaking

I have both a love & hate relationship with scenarios and charting out the story of a play before and/or while writing it. I have found them useful, especially in regards to writing what was essentially my big final project/thesis of my BFA in Playwriting (Little Dancer) but right now we're not doing so well.

I know they're not the absolute of all, I know I can stray from a scenario completely or even by a little idea or too, and they can be VERY useful. But still sometimes...writing one seems like such a chore and something I'm forcing out just to have a scenario. And tell myself I have one. I always jot down notes and ideas, things about characters and the like, but more often than not lately I want and do get into the writing of it.

Beware the fifth of march...or something like that

Just wrote this speech/monologue, it's from my new play which is still without a title. I like it a lot, and am posting without essentially editing it. As always, all work on here is copywrighted to myself. And without further ado, here it is...

UNDERSTUDY: The soothsayer in 'Julius Ceaser', personably descript and with the right amount of gumption;comes right up to Ceaser, newly crowned emperor of the Roman Empire (by his own hands of course) and says "Beware the ides of March."

Now in layman's terms, the ides is the fifth of any month. If this soothsayer had said simply: Beware the FIFTH of March. It wouldn't have had the same effect. That Bill Shakespeare certainly knew what he was doing. In a nutshell Ceaser brushes him off, and then on the ides of March is stabbed by many blades inthe Senate chamber by a group of men hellbent on bloody assassination, including his best friend Brutus.

Then one day a modern day soothsayer had stumbled up to me on the corner of Broadway and 46th Street and said "Beware the ides of March", I'm not sure what I said to him. He undoubtedly afterwards tried to ask me for money. Geez, why was he panhanlding in the theatre district, but at least he has the dramatic flair.

In the back of my mind, as that day approached, I did wonder. Then came the fated date and it was almost over when... I met the Producer, and oftentimes Agent for Evelyn. Mr Jonathon Myers. Perhaps mythics do still exist.

Quick hello

At work, but it's rather quiet right now.

I'm really enjoying the new play I've just started writing, the ideas and inspiration just keep on coming...keeping me awake at night. Although I suppose that's because I'm still in the honeymoon stage, full of overflowing puppy love (or something like that).

Where I am in the grand scheme of theatrical things

I have decided to leave off naplwrimo* for the year, and that may be me being a coward (so be it!), I was just plowing on through and at a certain point that didn't work. I loved the play too much to try and hurry along to finish it, and get to about 70 pages, by the end of the month. I was starting to hate Bred In Your Bones, which is the worst feeling in the world for me. I needed to take a step from the work and look at other plays, including starting a new one (yes, that's right, you heard right, a new one). I will come back to Bred In Your Bones, and this month I've gotten so far on it, up to 35 pages, and I'm tremendously pleased and proud of what I wrote' thanks to naplwrimo for that. I just need to set it aside, give myself and it some breathing space.
And on to another-- it doesn't have a title yet. It's a three hander: two women & one man. And the following is it's 'tagline', for want of a better word, the first ideas/ideas/words that came to me about the play.

"An Actress, Her Understudy, and the Producer in their lives. A comedy about biting thumbs, breaking legs and the proverbial dirty dressing room."

The following is what dialogue I have written...will look at characters/questions/scenario later, but needed to start this one with dialogue, they just started speaking and I started translating. (The following is copyrighted to Mary Davidson, November 2007).

(Dressing room. The Actress is putting on her makeup. Her Understudy is knitting.)

Actress
What are you working on tonight?

Understudy
It’s another sweater for my dog.

Actress
That poodle—

Understudy
Actually, it’s an alasa apso—

Actress
Like I said, that poodle must have a positive plethora of knobbly knitted doggy clothing to choose from in the morning. Goodness knows, he must have a larger wardrobe than I do.

Understudy
I find knitting calming.

Actress
You can just stick around for the first half, darling, and leave at intermission.

Understudy
Really?

Actress
Yes. I don’t think I’ll drop dead.

Understudy
It’s just that I heard…

Actress
Heard what?

Understudy
Nothing.

Actress
Everything is about something. Was it a rumour about me?

Understudy
No. It was about after the show tonight.

Actress
Ah, yes, the usual curtain calls and flowers, the clamouring fans and the martinis.



Back to the words. And got to get on that vacuuming.


*National Playwriting Month

some quotes for thought

32 pages, about. I'M HAPPY ABOUT WHERE I AM IN THE PROCESS RIGHT NOW. (Had to write that capital letters, not sure, don't ask me why.) Have the day off tommorrow, and Tuesday I start work at 5pm so this is good. My schedule will be the following: clean room, writing, back to room, back to writing, and as it goes on.

Some quotes for thought, digestion & inspiration--

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." ~Ray Bradbury

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."~Anaïs Nin

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. " ~Charles Peguy

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." ~Sylvia Plath

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. " ~Vita Sackville-West

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. "~William Wordsworth

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."~Vladimir Nabakov

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. "~Anton Chekhov

"Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum." ~Graycie Harmon

I am slowly going crazy...1,2,3,4,5,6...switch...

I don't know if I can do this, writing a first draft in a month, or at least of this particular play. I've done it before, just never in this context, I feel so uninspired, or just blah, I'm really not sure. I absolutely utterly hate when writing feels like a chore to me, and I have to do it, and then I come up with crappy writing. Or maybe I'm just thinking about it too much, harping on the negativity that it keeps on expanding and expanding and getting worse.

(Breathe.)

Okay, than stop thinking and just write. Stop all that unpredictable, ridiculous worrying and just write.

About my play...

I want a write my great grandfather’s life, for the stage: Daniel Maloney, an ordinary man, ordinary hero, but extraordinary at the same time. How everyone’s life with worth telling and exploring. A mythic retelling, across two continents— love, family, freedom, identity, hard work, determination, pride and passion and balancing all this…everyone has a life worth telling and exploring. There are still stories to be told.

Bred in Your Bones is about a man’s life, how only the sum of the parts makes up the whole. A tale repeated in a million variations— an immigrant brings himself and his family to Canada.

As part of this mythic retelling the play is non-linear and jumps to different points in Daniel’s life, as he recalls it from old age. Playing with the idea of how a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch, a voice, a word, a recalling, a story can bring something to the forefront; even from the very back of one’s mind, something one thinks is forgotten. And how ‘there are really only five people in the world’ and everyone is interconnected.

Playing with different forms of memory…different takes on one incident…how even chance encounters can affect and/or change someone forever.

Since this is a man’s life it ends as all lives end.

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.”

-Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones

I want a write my great grandfather’s life, for the stage: Daniel Maloney, an ordinary man, ordinary hero, but extraordinary at the same time. How everyone’s life with worth telling and exploring. A mythic retelling, across two continents— love, family, freedom, identity, hard work, determination, pride and passion and balancing all this…everyone has a life worth telling and exploring. There are still stories to be told.

Bred in Your Bones is about a man’s life, how only the sum of the parts makes up the whole. A tale repeated in a million variations— an immigrant brings himself and his family to Canada.

As part of this mythic retelling the play is non-linear and jumps to different points in Daniel’s life, as he recalls it from old age. Playing with the idea of how a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch, a voice, a word, a recalling, a story can bring something to the forefront; even from the very back of one’s mind, something one thinks is forgotten. And how ‘there are really only five people in the world’ and everyone is interconnected.

Playing with different forms of memory…different takes on one incident…how even chance encounters can affect and/or change someone forever.

Since this is a man’s life it ends as all lives end.

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.”

-Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones

Grappling

Note: I just posted this in the daily check-in section of the naplwrimo forum.

November 7...about 20 pages...so far so good, at least I think so but that is partly not telling myself the truth. In the sense that mine is a semi-memory play I'm worried I guess about its drive and above all else I don't want it to be a bad crappy play. Bred in Your Bones is so important to me and I know why I'm writing it. I'm passionate about the subject, about the characters, specifically Daniel & Edith (my great grandparents), but I'm finding it hard to translate. Maybe I'm coming at it from the wrong way, the wrong point of view. On the stage it is always the present moment, the razor's edge, even if the play is "a memory play" or a stem off of this form.

The saga continues...

The play I'm writing is Bred in Your Bones, a retelling of the life of my great grandfather Daniel Maloney. He was a gunrunner in the Irish War of Independence and fought on the Anti-Treaty side in the following Civil War, immigrated to Canada in the late 1920s. I did meet him when I was young, but very young, there is a picture of him holding me at almost a month old. He passed away about a week after the picture was taken.

It's a joy to be telling his story, the idea for the play has been mulling around my mind for sometime and his life has always inspired me. But currently I am stuck, which is annoying. I've focused in one why I want to write this play, its focus and yet...I'm finding the outline difficult. But I must remain positive and push through, and write. For NAPLWRIMO I must have the first draft finished by the end of the month. I can do this, I can do this, I really can.

The following is from Margaret Atwood's "Negotiating with the Dead/A Writer on Writing"; talks about it mainly from the point of view of a novelist but it pertains, I think to all writing:
"Specificially, I asked novelists , and I asked them what it felt like when they went into a novel. None of them wanted to know what I meant by into. One of them said it was like walking into a labyrinth , without knowing what moment might be inside; another said it was like groping through a tunnel; another said it was like being in a cave-- she could see daylight through the opening, but she herself was in darkness. Another said it was like being under water, in a lake or ocean. Another said it was like being in a completely dark room, feeling her way; she had to rearrange the furniture in the dark, and when it was all arranged the light would come on. Another said it was like wading through a deep river, at dawn or twilight; another said it was like being in an empty room which was nevertheless filled with unspoken words, with a sort of whispering; another said it was like grappling with an unseen being or entity; another said it was like sitting in an empty theatre before any play or film had started, waiting for the characters to appear. Dante begins the Divine Comedy-- which is both a poem and a record of the composition of that poem-- with an account of finding himself in a dark, tangled wood, at night, having lost his way, after which the sun begins to rise. Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway. Margaret Laurence and others have said that it is like Jacob wrestling with his angel in the night-- an act in which wounding, naming, and blessing all take place at once. Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey-- an inability to see one's way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision-- these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing. I was reminded of something a medical student said to me about the interior of the human body, forty years ago: 'It's dark in there.'
Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light. This book is about that kind of dark, and that kind of desire."

Writing a play in November...this shouldn't be too hard

Well I am now six days into NAPLWRIMO or National Playwriting Month (http://naplwrimo.org/writetheplay) and I'm not sure about it...of course I'm still going forwards with it, no point to going back. Besides I don't want to be known as a coward. No matter how many plays I have written, been produced, had praise and/or criticism about; even as I get older and my career and life continues each play is a new journey and new process. And oftentimes a terrifying one.

Signing off for now, must head off to bed (I know it says this was posted at about 8pm, but I guess I'm in a different timezone because it's 11:30 where I am). Job interview tomorrow and more writing!