My first curated dramatic piece is going to be staged as part of Red One Collective's Sing for Your Supper - Monday Feb. 2 at 8 pm. I'm so excited! Some details here. It's at the Storefront Theatre @ 955 Bloor Street West, Toronto. If you are an actor looking to do one of the cold readings (they generally do 6 or 7 of these pieces), you should show up at 7.
I would call this my first curated dramatic piece. I've actually set up staged readings of my work, and they went well, but I arranged for everything, even renting the space. I came very close to having another short piece read in Chicago, but it didn't quite make the cut for American Blues Theatre (and ultimately I included it in my staged reading series). But just a bit of external affirmation is so cool. I intentionally made this piece just a bit more raucous, given the audience, and I guess that paid off. I really hope the characters work, since this is actually a chapter that I just wrote that is a midway point in the novel. If it goes over well, I can definitely see this spurring me on to do more. And who knows, perhaps I will turn a later chapter into another short play, if it is another "talky" chapter. The discipline of cutting it down to 9 pages (in performance style which is even shorter than standard text) was very useful. Even if I relax it a little bit and put back in a few lines that I liked but cut for time, it is still a tighter piece of writing than when I started.
I will circle back Tues. or Wed. to give an update on how it went, and also if I made any useful contacts at the event. I'll go ahead and post a link to my play then. For now, I don't want to spoil the surprise.
Edit: I think the reading went quite well. Most of the jokes came across, though it had somewhat serious moments. I think the characters were reasonably believable. Two of the actors said they really liked the script, so that was very cool. I might follow up with a few folks that were there and saw it. Perhaps I should have mingled a bit more afterwards, but it was late (and a school night!). I didn't actually get home until 11 pm. Now the real question is do I keep working on the novel one scene at a time, or only focus on the ones that involve this trio. It probably wouldn't quite rise to the level of doing a play of just the left-over bits and back stage shenanigans of minor characters (aka Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), but there is no question the novel per se follows the male character around. Maybe if I felt up to it, this could focus on the lesbian couple, including times Jonathan is not around. But I can only do that if I think I make them real and not some absurd fantasy projection of what a straight man envisions a lesbian couple to be. But enough of that for now. I need to take care of something else and hopefully get some rest.
I'm currently debating whether I put up only the script that was performed or a slightly expanded script that reflects some of the input I got from going to the reading. Or I could do both, as it wouldn't really take any longer to post the script that I submitted.
I'll decide in the next day or so. One thing that I realized is that the actor playing the male role (Jonathan) had just a twist of (Jack) Lemmon. I think that was a good choice, and I might play that up just a bit if the next piece I submit is a continuation of this scene or at least something else extracted from the novel.
Edit #2: I decided to upload only the slightly expanded version. I added in about half a page of dialogue that sets up some of the later action (i.e. another minute of stage time), but this is for all intents and purposes what was put on at Sing-for-Your-Supper.
No comments:
Post a Comment