Process XIX

Homework companions.

The annual new play festival will be different this year, of course. We have all written ten-minute plays to be produced for video. So it’s really a short film festival, which is an education in that I have never written a screenplay before, not even a short one.

There are rules, however, and by that I mean legal safety guidelines. Adapted from my ten-minute play The Children Who Played at Slaughter, I have been through several drafts making the thing even filmable. The cast size needed to be brought down from six to four, their ages needed to be changed (we can’t safely work with children) and several instances where the actors would come into contact needed to be rethought, if not eliminated.

Then the director and my advisor had a brilliant idea: What did I think of animation? I love animation! For my latest draft I was able to restore the original ages for the characters, and the original setting (it had moved from a municipal dump to a firepit in the woods) but I also kept many of the other changes from the re-writes which made it a tighter, nastier piece of work.

You gotta say yes, you know?

Meanwhile, I finally got out onto the road to time out my twenty minute quarantine play. The assignment is to create a play script which could be produced under current conditions of public safety. I plan to write a script which can be performed uninterrupted via Facebook live. So, I needed to see how much time it would take to get from point A to point B ... and C and D and so on.

It’s the first time I have gone running on my own since January, and hey guess what, I pulled a muscle in my calf. But not before I timed out the distances for the play. 

• 00:00 Scene begins at Monticello & Taylor
• 03:15 Near-accident at Mt. Vernon Road
• 07:00 Enter the park at Forest Hill Blvd. and Lee
• 11:00 Enter the woods
• 12:15 Encounter at path diversion
• 13:30 The Bridge

Which leaves some six minutes for this scenario to play out. Bags of time. So far I am thinking of five actors, the runner, the girl, the bicycle rider, the guy in the boat house, and the old man. In practice it would also require a support team, to provide security and assistance -- and light.

My wife asked me, do you need to film this or just write it? I just need to write it. But I’d love to make it happen some time this summer.