The Ocean Breathes Salty (In Performance)

Hannah Woodside & Adam Harry

Writing has always been my superpower. First, I harnessed it as a tool against my enemies. I thought that was okay. I was wrong. When I learned how to use it as a force for good, things came into focus. I could tap into my mind, my heart and my soul, and I started to understand what I was meant to write about.

What is writing as a tool for good? Having an agenda, knowing what your agenda is, and that it is true. That it harms none. You put people you love onstage. You learn something.

Anything you might have to say to someone you love which might be harmful? Say those things in person. Or decide that it is not important. Know that about yourself, at least.

This was the first weekend for the 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival, which featured two ten-minute plays – mine (The Ocean Breathes Salty) and one by Eric Mansfield – and a one-hour work by Gabby DiDonato.

Mine was the weird one. Mine is always the weird one. The others were clean in their narrative, mine was abstract. My wife approved but even she suggested it may be a bit underwritten. I was pleased with the results. 

Emmett Podgorski & Clare Scott

It was an experiment, I would normally have chosen to do one, single scene, instead opting for five short scenes which allowed characters to bounce off of each other in twos and threes. Perhaps more suitable for a full-length, but who knows. One of my professors commented that they liked the short scenes, these vignettes. I like them, too.

I saw the performances on Friday and Saturday night. There was a post-show talkback on Friday which, for my play focused entirely on the bunny. There’s a bunny in the play. What was the significance of the bunny? That was pretty much the entire discussion. There were also four human actors in the play who played characters with emotions and lives and things, but everyone was confused about the presence of the bunny.

I think my brother put it best when he said, “Sometimes a rabbit is just a rabbit.”

Thing is, there were several audience members who spoke to me, during intermission, after the show. They wanted to know what happened in the play, because they were unsure. I asked them what they thought happened, and each of them, somewhat hesitantly, told me what they thought had happened. And each of them were absolutely correct. They did understand the play. It just wasn't made obvious.

This week we're reading Sheila Callaghan, and I am digging the way she plays with reality. I need to decide what story I want to tell this semester, and this experience with The Ocean Breathes Salty has inspired me to move further in this direction. Playing with reality might be my new superpower. 

Many thanks to KR Jones, Adam Harry, Emmett Podgorski, Clare Scott and Hannah Woodside, who did beautiful work on my short play! 

The 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival continues next weekend at convergence-continuum with plays by Laura Barbieri and Justin Lazor.

Process LII

Kelsey Jones, Director (with bunny)

Fact: Americans do not like dollar coins. The dollar coin that is most memorable to me, the Eisenhower dollar, was only minted during the 1970s. It is an absurd coin, in its size, weight, and depiction of the (at that time) bizarrely shorn countenance of the 34th president.

A dollar coin plays a significant role in my ten-minute play The Ocean Breathes Salty, and one of our performers was able to find an Eisenhower dollar in their dad’s coin collection. Flipping the coin, an important stage direction, apparently does not come naturally to people under forty. Just another skill we have lost in the advent of a cashless society, alas.

The writing exercise in our workshop this week took me into a deep, subconscious space. Normally, I write plays by hand, or have done for almost a decade. Because our in-class exercises are timed, I choose typing and the words fly out faster than I can think what they mean.

I’m not saying it’s any good, just that it took me to a place I never thought I would go. These are good writing days. Mine your mind.

Actual size.

I left a notebook somewhere on Thursday. It’s just an old pad of paper I use to take notes on the actor-teachers, in rehearsal or in class. But, it also happens to include two pages of my densely-packed block lettering, notes I took on Wednesday night during a dramaturgical meeting with the team for The Witches. That aspect was particularly distressing.

Do I know what I wrote? Yes, I do. It was a wonderful meeting that night with three of my favorite people and theater artists, in the world, all of whom expressed a great deal of enthusiasm and care for my script.

They have also given it a critical eye, and I took down every comment and concern and question like they were precious gifts. They gave me so much to think about and I have been inspired by all the revisions I will be making.

These thoughts are with me, in me, I know what they are – or I think I know? Unless I could find those notes I could not truly be certain, and on Thursday nght it was driving me to distraction.

Anyway, the notepad was found and returned. Not exactly a Hadley Richardson moment. But whew.

The 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival will be produced at convergence-continuum, February 10 - 19, 2022.

"The Ocean Breathes Salty" at the 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival

Hatchet Cove, Friendship, ME

The Ocean Breathes Salty was originally a writing exercise for a class, but I was happy enough with the result to submit that for my entry into the 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival.

I was unable to attend the first read-through on Wednesday, and so attended the second rehearsal on Thursday. The company inquired about backstory. I asked if they had any ideas about that themselves and they, the four-person cast, director and stage manager, said they had plenty, ideas that had come up the night before in my absence.

This was fine with me, more than fine. Any “backstory” I was to provide at that moment would have been stuff I was making up off the top of my head. I asked them to tell me what they had thought of, and objected to little, if anything. They had read the script, and were inspired by what was there to create more or less psychologically correct histories.

In his book True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, playwright David Mamet opines that “backstory” is pointless bullshit, that there are only words on a page. Play the words and the play either works or it doesn’t, bringing your own ideas to the work is irrelevant. That is one very simple way to look at it.

Human beings think backward and forward in time and space, and just as the words I say (or write) are informed in the moment by what have experienced and what I expect, so, too, an actor wants to know what they have experienced and what they expect in order to speak a line or perform an act. It is, as they say, in our nature.

And this is a ten-minute play. How to interpret a line, any line, requires a little imagination. You could just speak the words on the page but it might not be very interesting. Like, you know, any of Mamet’s recent work.

The original title of this short play was brief and alliterative, but I didn’t feel it captured the “gothic romance” which I believe best describes the story. For this first production, I changed it to the title of a song by Modest Mouse, the lyrics of which are a direct address to one beloved who has died.

It wasn’t even a song I had been familiar with, I just Googled songs about death, and this one resonated with me, the mood and also the title, as this play takes place in a town on the coast of Maine. It's a bit of a mystery (as which of my plays are not) or as I have called it, a gothic romance. Director Kelsey Jones promises to make it weird, and I am here for it.

The 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival will be produced at convergence-continuum, February 10 - 19, 2022.