Well, I hadn't heard anything about the Sing-for-Your-Supper and whether my very tardy piece had been accepted or not, so I decided to go up to Tarragon anyway. I figured I would leave at intermission if my piece hadn't been taken. Well, it turns out that the event had been cancelled. Back at home, my wife managed to find one Facebook posting that said November was cancelled (on fairly short notice I believe), though I still didn't find it in my searching, so there is no question their main Facebook page leaves a lot to be desired (and it wouldn't have been remiss to at least email me and tell me the theatre would be dark). At any rate, the main person who reads the scripts is moving on (to Ottawa of all places) and is hoping to recruit someone else. I don't really think I have the time to take that on, and even if I did, then I would no longer be able to have my pieces read at SFYS, so that definitely wouldn't work! Maybe one of the actors has a bit more time and can pitch in.
In the short term, this means that I will probably pull my piece from consideration, tighten it up a bit more and add the coda. Just last night I thought of a fairly saucy punchline, though it only works if enough people are in on the joke. It runs "Just another American Juliette looking for her Canadian Romeo. Except for the bloody ending, of course. (Beat.) I mean unless you're really into that kind of thing."
Almost any phrase can be given sexual connotations, so I think most people (with a moderately dirty mind) would get what she is talking about. But just to underline the point, I added a definition of "bloody ending" to the Urban Dictionary, and we'll see if it spreads. It's not my finest moment as a writer, but I thought it was funny enough.
I'll send the piece to Toronto Cold Reads instead, even though I have never had much success there. Then I'll work on one or two more pieces for the Dec. meeting of SFYS. One piece is about a man who can be guilted into just about anything, so he ends up with one homeless guy living in his living room and he'll probably have another before the piece ends. This could be interesting, but I'm not quite sure how dark to go. The other is a piece, inspired by Pinter's Betrayal, about the unravelling of an affair. I hope to have both pieces ready in time, though that is more of an aspirational goal, given my recent history.
I very briefly considered entering the Fringe lottery, which closes on Nov 10. If I won, this would definitely force me to finish the rewrites and extensions of my SF piece about a couple and their two AI units. But I realized 1) I'm not entirely sure it will work as a full-length piece and 2) I'd like to travel this summer and I don't want to be responsible for whipping a troupe into shape for Fringe. So I'll pass this year at least. Maybe the following year I will finally have recovered enough to give it another go.
That's pretty much it. I've been seeing a lot of good shows, and I'm going to see Trout Stanley at Factory this week (with good reviews so far, so fingers crossed), and I'll try to check out Night Watch most likely next week. Some info here. If I do go, it will probably be next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment