Process XXXVII

“It is as though she’s saying I’m not giving you a happy ending just because you want a happy ending. I’m showing you the world as it is. If you want a different ending, you need to change the world.”
- Me, in class, responding to the works of Adrienne Kennedy

Yes, I said earlier this summer how much writing I anticipated doing. That did not happen. No, instead I prepared for residency rehearsals. I did a great deal of running. And I spent time with my children, one of whom is now at college.

And that is all okay.

But I have to have fifteen pages of a new work prepared for reading on Monday, and so I have been writing flash scenes. One written page between two characters that establishes the atmosphere in which the play is going to take place.

Me, storyboarding my new play

Each scene is like a short play. And I am going to see how many interactions I can create between the six characters. How much exposition can casually be revealed, how much tension I can create, before the shocking conclusion of the first act.

One handwritten page a day is two-and-so typed pages. I have written ten since last Saturday. That’s at least fifteen pages. Each scene defining the relationship between two people, which will ideally expand into larger and larger scenes as the action reveals itself.

My notes are all over the place, though. Notebooks, the drawing pad … I thought I had sketched the entire thing out, but if I did, which I’m not sure I have, I cannot find it anywhere. But, you know? So what. I’ll do that today.

Also: I decided that Waiting for Godot is a comedy whereas Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a tragedy, not merely because one ends in death and the other does not (though that is not unrelated) but because while they are both about the individual made helpless against forces beyond their control, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the protagonists fail or choose not to push back against those forces and are destroyed by them, while Vladimir and Estragon do, and are not. In spite of the terrors and senselessness of everyday life, they choose to stay. They never lose hope.

"There must have been a moment at the beginning, where we could have said — no."