It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

It has been a joy to pick up the play again this week, and hanging out with the strange, volatile, yet funny, characters who’ve discovered my pen. The new play’s structure is the most linear play I’ve written in a long time. MBH says the characters have very clear goals and desires, which is his way of saying that most of my characters are not usually so simply defined or constructed. The structure, the characters, the plot-lines nag at my Editor’s Mind. Far too often the Editor yells at me, What the hell is this? I suppress the Editor’s noise, and keep writing. That’s all I know to do. More to be revealed, as someone says. When the first draft finds completion, only then will reconstruction commence.

Normally, whatever the hell that means, I manage to break structural rules, which confuses literary managers used to reading sitcoms or tele-movies passing as plays. Someone once suggested to me that one of my plays was missing a, uh, thunderous moment between the main characters. Having witnessed the power of the play on stage, well, I believe that comment said more about the commenter than the play itself. The comment was true, yet not the point. The conflict in the play, as in most of my plays, is between the characters and the world around them. I wish I had had this quote from Marsha Norman at the ready:

I really do think that men who run theatre classically want there to be a chase and then some kind of event, and then the thing’s over, right? Whereas women who write plays tend to be not so involved with what the big event is, but what it is that the people know in the story; how the people are let to each other; what they do for each other. There may be a distinctly different gender view of what’s a story and what’s worth telling.

from an Interview with Marsha Norman by Gary Garrison, The Dramatist, Nov/Dec 2007, p. 40

Instead, my retort was more pithy like, Well, yeah, dat’s da point.

I expect my pen to be down tomorrow, while we feast at the Parental Unit’s home. I’m thankful for so many things in my life, from the roof over my head, the Beloved, free wi-fi, good friends, to those who’ve paved the way before me, and even to those younger who pass me along the way. Gifts of plenitude.

Don’t forget to feed those who are hungry. Some of them are theatre people.

Marsha Norman, by the way, is from Louisville.