Play a Day: Girl Becomes Bone

Callan Stout

Monday morning I read Girl Becomes Bone by Callan Stout, and available on New Play Exchange.

Science fiction! My first play this month featuring science fiction. Yesterday, docudrama, today science fiction. Or speculative fiction. The wife will set me straight later.

The play originates on the planet Threa, which in an anagram of earth, also a near-homonym with "three" or third from the sun. The name reflects the degree to which its human inhabitants have been unable to emotionally and psychologically leave their abandoned planet behind.

A religion evolves on this new planet, one inspired by the mystical poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Its tenets and rituals are, depending on interpretation, fixated on an eventual return or the acceptance of no return. At least that is how it appeared to me.

Like Christianity, there lies at the very edge of consciousness the anxiety and terror of having been utterly abandoned by God, which is a kind of perpetual mourning. The insatiable need to comprehend and cope leads to ritual, which, when you are watching someone else do it, appears nothing more than obsessive compulsive disorder.

“Should not our ancient suffering have been more fruitful by now?” Indeed.

Last night I dreamed I walked into a Theaterplex. It was a like one of your suburban "big box" movie centers with popcorn and video games, except inside every theater there was a play going on.

Callan Stout's new work, you do not look, will be presented later this week as part of Columbia Stages New Play Festival.

Play a Day: Encanta

Shawn C. Harris

For Wednesday I read Encanta by Shawn C. Harris, available at New Play Exchange.

This is an absurd tropical adventure with amorous pirates, heartbroken witches, and murderous church ladies. Our heroes literally dance on the edge of a volcano.

They dance on the edge of a volcano.

The stage directions make the audience complicit in the action of the play. We are beachcombers, members of a costume party, a mob of kidnappers. I want to see the production where these things actually happen.

The piece wears its inspirations proudly, though I am curious as the whether the pirate Penzima and the sorceress Katrina are an intentional nod to Petruchio and Katherine, because they certainly could be.

This morning I woke from a particularly vivid dream; we were in a small club where Bryan Ferry was performing, He was seriously old and unshaven, and writhing on the floor. He found a fat potato chip and crushed it in his fingers as a metaphor about love.

Slumberland: It is happening again.

My mother-in-law loves me.

2:58 PM - Another day, another Donkey. Today the wife is not feeling well, but the kids already have a date to check out Monsters Inc. in 3-D with their aunt and grandmother, and so I have persuaded her to make our third journey into the Writers' Warren.

I have been storyboarding scenarios from Little Nemo, some of which are taken wholecloth from the strip, embellished from my own imagination and unhealthy nods to other McCay-inspired entities which include (but are not limited to) Sandman, In The Night Kitchen and maybe even Twin Peaks.

Also, too: This.

But they are disjointed and incoherent, as in a dream. Did I say that, or only imagine I did? In any case, that is the plan. Having just made stuff up off the top of my head, I will now make notes to put it into a logical, plot-like narrative. Which is the opposite of what I usually do. And that can be fun.

Did I mention my mother-in-law got me a proper, leather satchel for Christmas? Since I got my laptop, I have been permanently borrowing a prop from the Great Lakes Theater production of Julius Caesar (2004) where all the workers in the street  at the top of the show were vloggers and bloggers. That synthetic, black man-bag had a nametag reading "Nick K." in it.

4:01 PM - Bryan Ritchey will be my Carel Struycken.

And the owls are not what they seem.

 The Dreaming:

Recently I was rehearsing for a professional production of one of Shakespeare's lesser-known works. Don't ask me which one it was, but I was a Lord. As part of the rehearsal process, the director was conducting a kind of free-form, staged read-through, where we walked into the middle of the rehearsal space and performed our particular soliloquy. It was one of Shakespeare's works where none of the characters talk to each other, they just just take the stage and share part of the narrative with the audience and exit. I read my piece twice. Each time I reached the word "egg" and then completely lost the thread of what I was saying. "Egg" was entirely out of context for this character, it didn't mean anything.

After my part of the rehearsal was through I went back to the Arden and looked up the longer notes, which I was embarrassed to learn I had not yet done. I assumed I knew what the words meant, but I was woefully unprepared. "Egg" was the most important word in the monologue. It was the core of my character, I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

These things are true. All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

4:43 PM -  Did you know Little Nemo visited Cleveland? Crazy, right? I have not yet read all of the comics as late as the 1910s. But I must, I must!

Today is a day for letting my mind wander and discover. Running this morning I came up with several ideas which I have tossed around and made note of. And now I just spinning some nonsense into script form.

5:44 PM - Time for dinner at Casa Nueva, suckers.

Talespinner Children's Theatre presents Adventures In Slumberland by David Hansen, Nov. 30 - Dec. 22, 2013.

1. Trying to sneak across an international border. I was supposed to hand over the I.D. of a colleague, was supposed to claim she is my wife. The crossing guard began asking questions, first off all, what her birthday was. I said, "I don't know," and started laughing nervously to myself. I was entirely unprepared for this and was going to be arrested.

2. A vicious house cat -- that talked. Everyone was terrified of it. There was this sweet old tabby that was going to reason with it. They were climbing a rope together. I could not get to either of them, they both went down the rope and the innocent, old cat began to scream horribly, the other cat had gotten into its face and was doing something unthinkable to him.

3. A large, volcanic eruption in the water just off the shore of a major city. We ran, terrified, as one of our party described exactly the fate that awaited us, in grotesque detail, if we were subsumed by the lava. We got into an office building however, and jumped a futuristic escalator to safety. I did have friends on a day-cruise ship just at sea. I could only imagine their fate.

Promoting an upcoming project, I am one of my fellow artists were on a local radio program. We were being interviewed. One of the questions pertained to someone I knew a long time ago, a very good friend. I was asked to say a few things about them, I can't remember how this related to the subject of the interview, but I did my best to say positive, cheery things about their personality and about their work. The person being interviewed with me and the host threw in a few comments of their own which, for the purposes of humor, were even more cheeky.

After the interview I received a phone call from this person, hurt, they said, but also apparently angered by the description. This person laid out in detail all the recent work they had done (which I guess I knew about -- they had made a short film?? -- but I wasn't sure) and took particular umbrage that I had said that they had once done work as a clown.

Worked very hard to pry open a flashlight battery. Scooped out some of what was inside, a translucent white paste. spread it on a Ritz and ate it, and almost immediately wished I hadn't.

We were in some unfamiliar part of town (it may have been Lakewood) for an event arranged by the wife's workplace. In the next yard, some young girls were setting up an elaborate tea party with tables, tablecloths, hanging flower baskets, it was lovely. My kids were going between the yards, the girl was getting to know the children next door. inevitably she was invited to the party, a birthday party.

Looking at her ... she was dressed in some kind of white, flowing dress, wearing feathery, pasteboard angel wings, and someone had given her a garden hat. What happened to dress-ups, where did that time go? She's already left so much of that behind.

The candidate offered to share a beer with me, which was odd, because I thought his faith forbid him from drinking alcohol.

The President was behaving somewhat clownish at the groundbreaking for a community food center. He had a set of enormous, red cafeteria forks wrapped in plastic he was trying to extricate. He used them to "break ground."

Later, my son and a number of his friends were all playing together on a public playground, which looked more like a series of roots and tree stumps, they just kind of clambered to the top and had great fun "falling" back down.

There was also indoor bowling, which was more like grown-ups rolling rubber balls at other rubber balls. I admonished this sulky guy who refused to play well. He had been ashamed of not being able to bowl, but the game was boring him.

A local improv comedian of some renown announced an open, head-to-head competition between area improv companies.

Walking home through the snow, a stylish looking automobile came to a skidding halt dangerously close to me by the curb. The distinguished looking, middle-aged gentleman at the wheel (he had at least three other ladies around his age sitting in the passenger seat, they also look refined) first admonished me for having something as immature as Scholastic novels so obviously visible through the windows of my home. Explaining that I actually have small children who read in my house, the conversation turned to one of recommendations of good children's books. I had to admit that I hadn't actually read most of what my kids read ... but I was pretty sure they were inoffensive books that teach good morals.

Meanwhile, some hipsters were checking unpasteurized eggs they had. They all smelled horrible, but one did contained a live goldfish. They named it "Fish".

My children, and one of their friends were looking over a book I had only just received in the mail, the oversized 'Little Nemo in Slumberland Vol. 2 (Many More Splendid Sundays)'. They were handling the book properly ... but they were also eating orange slices. The cover was stained with spots of orange juice. I went on a tear, lecturing them sternly about the value of this book -- it cost seventy dollars! I looked my boy in the face, asking "Do you have seventy dollars?" He said that he did not.

Fortunately, as I held the book in my hands and looked at it, the stains began to dry ... and fade.