Pardon Me While I Write this Play

Not much of a blog today because I am writing a play! I signed up for the 72-hour play writing challenge with the Red Octopus Theatre Company. Participants have three days to write a play. The play has to include 5 prompts that are randomly drawn from a hat or a bag or something. The five prompts that were drawn for this challenge included a prop, a sound effect, a character, a costume piece and a setting. Actually I don't think the setting was randomly picked as is is "an on screen communication," a video call etc. That seems a little spot on for the current situation if it is to be performed in a quarantined world. There are no guarantees that any of the 72 hour plays will be performed. But if they are, it will probably be via Zoom or some such.

I have done this before (write play to a deadline). The last time I did this I had to write a Christmas play in a month. And one time I did the 24 hour theater, which means I had eight hours to write the play. It's amazing how time expands and contracts to change your perception of whatever deadline you may have. Creativity comes in fits and starts, and having a deadline gives creativity a kick in the pants. I am not sure I spent more actual time writing my first draft for the one-month-deadline play than I did for the eight-hour-deadline play. I certainly had more time to revise the former, and that may have produced a more polished final product. But the real heavy lifting as far as creativity is concerned is that first draft.

Okay, back to it. I will finish by saying deadlines don't work for everybody, but for me they help me get things done. See you onstage (maybe).

(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Link to Star Liner

Comments

The Trip Home

My wife and I recently returned from a trip to New York to visit my son and his wife. What follows is an excerpt of my notes from that trip. Departure day. So we and the kids (adult kids) leave by 5:30 AM. These “kids” are night owls. They rarely wake before 10:00 if they don’t have to, so we appreciate the sacrifice. Daughter-in-Law (DIL) drove us the 30 minutes to the train station. Hugs and good-byes for her (we love DIL. DIL is an irresistible force). Son navigates us a route to the platform with fewer stairs than the way we came. We get a ticket and get on the train headed for the big city and Grand Central Station. I soon realize that this train is not an express train like the one we took coming out. Instead of taking a little over an hour like we did before, this one would take a little over an hour and a half. We stop at places with names like Cold Springs and Peekskill (on this trip we saw a lot of place names that ended in “kill” including Kaatskill, i.e. Catskill, and

That 70's Decade

Can a decade become a caricature? My teen years were in the 1970’s and none of us who lived through the 70’s thought our decade was going to be a figure of fun. When you are a part of it, you don’t realize what people are going to make fun of later. I think there are two reasons why people snicker when the 70’s are mentioned: clothing styles and Disco. Both things could be called extensions of trends that started in the 60’s. When the hippy styles of the 60’s became more formalized for the dance floor, the result was (in hindsight) rather bizarre. They did not seem bizarre at the time. People following present fashion trends never understand that they are wearing something that will be laughed at in ten years. Yes, I did have a pair of bell-bottom blue jeans (are they making a comeback?) The mere mention of the 1970’s conjures up someone in a ridiculous pose wearing a disco suit. We who lived through the 70’s just went about our normal life. There were quite a lot of things that ha

Tyranny of the Masses

I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority. The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect representatives at the federal and local level t

A speculative mind

Search This Blog