Act, then Write. Or, the Reverse.

I'm attending another open call today, this one for

The Folger

. If I and my esteemed readers have learned anything about auditioning this month past, it is that it doesn't really matter in a direct sense. Certainly, people have joined casts by finding their way through the open-call process, but it's such an unpredictable blend of circumstances that it would make a statistician wince. No, the way to get work is to know, and thereby work with, lotsa folks. Open calls are a part of that, of being seen and staying on the ol' radar, but not direct lines to the President, as it were. Still and all, every so often one comes up that provokes some dreaming. And, as I've also iterated numerously at the Aviary, dreaming's an important part of the process.

The Folger is one of those D.C. theatres that I grew up visiting. Between that,

Arena Stage

and

The Little Theatre of Alexandria

is the space in which I was formed into a young acting enthusiast. I've actually performed there before. They hold an annual festival of short, high school Shakespeare productions, and I was a part of one

Winter's Tale

that graced their Elizabethan stage. As I'm sure you can imagine, at age fifteen it was quite a thrill. And, lest you be duped by my omissions: It would be quite a thrill today, tomorrow, and when I'm eighty, too. As something of a topper, they're doing two favorites next season --

Much Ado About Nothing

and

Hamlet

. My favorite comedy, and my favorite tragedy (though in recent years,

King Lear

has been giving the Dane a run for his money in the racetrack of my preference). So, I dream. I'll pop in midday and lay out my Romeo for them-what-make-the-tough-choices, and I'll do my best to enjoy the rush.

In the meantime, I'm plenty busy.

T.S. Eliot wrote

that April is the cruelest month, and I've often wondered how much his opinion had to do with taxes. In addition, work gallops apace, unrelenting in its demands on me as the new office-manager/HR-coordinator/assistant. Finally, I'm traveling for the next two weekends, to such far-off and fanciful locales as Pennsylvania and Virginia. Yet, yesterday, as I was writing Friends Mark and

Davey

to break the bad news of feeling unable to contribute much to a new writing project . . . I got an idea, and wrote a story for it. Because, dang it, nothing is more motivating than being told, "No."

I love that the universe keeps throwing writing ideas -- nay, entire fictitious worlds! -- my way. Thanks, universe (read: friends).

* * *

Well. That happened. It was fine, apart from some nit-picking on my own part. The start went better than the end, and I thought I'd at least get a chuckle. Alas, no, but I can hardly blame the casting assistant. I lost a little breath control toward the end (it

is

an awfully long line to carry through) owing to, I think, nervousness and not enough abdominal stretching, but overall I feel pretty good, and it's always nice to know one's resume and headshot may now be occupying space in someone else's files. I don't believe they were casting, however. Maybe a few roles, but I doubt it. Couldn't say exactly why, really. Only the casting assistant was there, and something about her "thank you" -- just a feeling. Of course, as we've already learned, Dear Reader,

my "feelings" rather suck

.

Lately I've been fantasizing quite a bit about what it might be like to be a professional writer. Fortunately, I just read a book on

Neil Gaiman

that disabused me of some more fanciful notions. It is hard work indeed, becoming a paid writer, and then even harder work still to stay one. Heck: The high degree of fame and accomplishment that Gaiman has accomplished only makes his life more chaotically busy. The only advantage over acting I see is that most of the rejection that happens is written rather than spoken (and seemingly it actually gets done, instead of letting one drop off the face of the earth, tied to one's own sense of expectation). It would even seem that writers need to do as much networking as actors. Who could have imagined that an acting career would be so much like so many others?

I

should have, for one. Art imitates life imitates art, etc.

Still, it is a nice fantasy, this idea of doing work that I want to, when I want to, and receiving compliments and praises left, right and center. Plus, I could sit at a nice desk (you can justify the expense and cost of a "nice desk" when it supports your primary income) and drink tea and dream about more fantasies, and more teas, expensive teas, teas that defy you to resist their calming, meditative influence! Dear God! It would be beautiful! There would be affectionately attended potted plants during the day, not the neglected, lonely aloe I have now! At night, candles with subtle musky scents, that I could monitor regularly enough to make them of actual FLAME, and not a flickering LED! I would read and write and read and write and write some more!

And man, oh man, but I'd miss acting. *sigh* Anyway, it appears that fantasy is based largely on soothing things, and if I've learned anything at all in my life to date, it's that soothing things don't generally pay the bills.

Hugh McLeod

is of the opinion that staying busy with the business of living actually aids one's creativity. Maybe I should teach yoga.

There'd be mats, and Vinyasas, and chanting, and . . . !

It's a Gas

Years ago, I promised you all fart jokes. To date, I think I've delivered two. Here, then, is something to make up for it:

John Robert Wilson

(via

Twang of the Void

). WARNING: Some language and concepts may be deemed odious, and I don't mean the odorous bits.

Here-Ever-After

Most of the work I've been doing on my play-in-progress,

Hereafter

, has lately been confined to my noggin. In particular, when I'm walking the few blocks from the train to the ol' office job. Then I get to the ol' office job, and most if not all of those thoughts go whizzing from out my ears, displaced by insurance rates, supply vendors and other undesirables. So I thought,

Hey,

thought I,

hey, why don't I do some of the same thinking on the Aviary? That way I'll not only better retain it, but open it up for other people to badger and criticize me about it as they may see fit.

So here we are. Badger if and as you will.

Interesting to try to communicate my thoughts for people who know what I have written, and them what don't (read: most everybody). I held

a reading

in December, from which

much was learned

. Those who participated are about the only people on earth so far who know what my play is about, and odds are it will be about things altogether different once it passes through this nascent stage of revision. The over-arching theme of the various stories has to do with what happens to our bodies after death, and how we separate sense of identity from physical evidence. It's also a comedy, largely; or anyway, it's supposed to be funny. I've got roughly six characters in ten inter-related, but not necessarily inter-connected, scenes, some of which are much stronger than others. The biggest question I had prior to the reading was whether or not this wanted to be a play, rather than a sampling of scenes. It turns out it rather would like to be a whole play, which is great, and also means way more work for me.

Some scenes just don't work, and it's that simple. I have two such set in a gastroenterologist's office (which should have been my first clue, right there) that flounder and waffle mercilessly. These, and their companions in dysfunction, I believe I will rewrite from scratch with new ideas that are influenced by an improved sense of continuity to the whole thing. More importantly, the characters they particularly address are weak. It's going to be a lot of re-imagining, which is fun, even when it's frustrating. This is what got me started on day-dreaming about it, anyway -- the possibility of that freedom to do more than revise, to rewrite.

Along those lines, too, I realize an immediate need to rearrange what scenes I do have fairly strong. As they are arranged now, my eye was more on structural symmetry, not enough on organic cause-and-effect. Which is actually pretty funny, since one of the philosophical arguments I have going in the thing is between linear and holistic perspectives. Philosophy is another little facet that needs rearranging. Just now, some of the characters have perspectives that are too similar for anything terribly interesting to happen between them. This, and the aforementioned, leads me to contemplating the cut of one (or more?) of my dears. The whole thing could really benefit from an outline of some kind, which, again: funny. I'm not very good at or about outlining. I don't like doing it, and I'm pretty crap at it, generally imposing too much logical control and not enough intuitive exploration. Then again, maybe I'm just doing it wrong, somehow.

Expatriate Younce

and I, in our recent

brainstorming phone call

, got to talking about ideas and our rather different relationships to them. To put it mildly, I have a love-hate relationship to my ideas. My ideas have burned me before and, though I try to forgive and forget, I am holding on to the odd grudge, or seventy-eight. Ideas are as malevolent as they are beneficial to me, some resulting in a well-deserved sense of accomplishment, and other resulting in a tremendous amount of wasted time and effort. Of course, as I write this, I realize that I'm a little too focused on product over process here. Younce points out that my urge to fulfill a creative idea's potential is what enables me to get creative things done, but the flip side of that coin is frustration over delayed or (in many dreadful cases) aborted projects. Take, for example, this idea I had of incorporating the three fates into my play (

in a gastroenterologist's office, for

Pete's

sakes

). Thought it was great, ended up screwing the story into places it most certainly does not belong.

So outlining, free writing and cuts. Perhaps I hate acknowledging how little I've accomplished on a first draft, and that's why I generally avoid the revision process? Whatever it may be, I'm determined to make this project the one for which I break that habit. Then I am sure I will have still more revisions, but hopefully I'll be slightly more capable of them.

Then, too, maybe Youncey can finally get his werewolf story.

Dead on my Feet

Last night I participated in

a developmental reading

of

Steve Deighan

's work-in-progress,

The Last Stand

, which was held at his gorgeous apartment on the Upper West Side. I won't say too much about the play itself here, as it's none of my business to go about spilling other writer's ideas. I mean, steal all of mine you want, but Steve's are off limits. I will say that it's a very funny script that takes some familiar stage tropes and turns them lovingly on their collective ears.

The people of this little reading were great; just great.

Daryl Boling

directed the night and read stage directions (gleefully intoning them with a '40s radio personality's spin), and my fellow actors for the eve were

Hank Davies

, Carolyn Gordon (Carolyn, if there's somewhere I can link for you, please let me know),

Ryan Michael Jones

and

Laura Schwenninger

(Laura: McFadden: WHAT?! I just spent five minutes of my life Google-searching "Schwenninger"! How do you expect to

receive anonymous feedback from casting directors

like this?). It was largely a reunion. I have worked with Steve, Daryl and Laura on several occasions, and Hank on one. Mike was in Daryl's admirable production of

All the Rage

, with Steve and Laura, and I believe Carolyn had worked with folks too, though I never got the skinny on that. In other words, all who weren't already friends made strides toward it through the course of the work and discussion.

It was only a few hours, but it was a few hours I very much needed. Just a little contact with theatre work, when I feel somehow deprived of it, can go a long way, and even longer when it's with a group that I enjoy and trust. It was a late night for yours truly. (As an interesting [to me] side note, I don't think I've ever had so much attention paid to my Facebook status as when I wrote this morning that I was too tired for push-ups.) I didn't crawl into bed until midnight, and that's at least two hours past any usefulness from this little bear.

Sometimes, though, more than sleep, one needs the company of a few friends and a play.

Curses: Foiled Again

Lately I've been wanting to write in my 'blog using the voice of

Rorschach

from his journal:

Had phone conversation with

Expatriate Younce

last night. Brief, but good. Wonder why doesn't happen more often. Talked of writing, ideas. Must remember notes later. PS, senseless debauchery and depravity of malignant tumor of a world makes crave cold beans again...

Doubtless this is due to the really wonderful performance by Jackie Earle Haley in the movie. Definitely in the top-five best interpretations of comicbook characters in cinema. Probably in the top three. Probably commie.

All right. That's enough of that.

One of my more irksome writing habits has to do with creating characters that are mere foils. I believe I can create some really developed, interesting characters, but more often than not I end up with a foil in there somewhere -- someone who fills gaps, quasi-antagonizes broadly, and generally exists as a sounding board for the rest. (Benvolio, for example, is largely considered a foil.) It's weird to me that I'd be inclined toward this, because I've played many foils in my career, and it's always a bit, well, irksome. In fact, when I was younger I was often cast as the "foil character." Not all of these were foils to a fault (i.e., folks devoid of development or consequence; e.g., Benvolio), but they were there to serve the needs of other characters in advancing the plot. I think Frankie in

A Lie of the Mind

is a fair example of this. If you disagree, then you may have some insight into why I did such a shite job playing him (see

4/5/07

).

Perhaps it's my proclivity for such characters that lends to their presence in my writing. It's hard to say. What's easy to say is that they are often burdened by concept. Take for example Jude and Angelo, characters from two plays of mine. Jude is a Mormon cast out of his church for numerous breaches in personal behavior, who continues to believe and do mission work whilst using drugs and foul language. Angelo, from

Hereafter

, is a former gang-member with a dead son who lives with him in his paranoid delusion. It's as though having a concept answers too many questions about the character for me, in a way, so I feel there's nothing left to explain or develop in its writing. Yet simultaneously, I feel clueless about what the characters need and where they go from where they are.

This habit and its connection to my acting came to mind for me out of last night's discussion. We talked a bit about the writing and idea-generating processes, and in particular I was intrigued with the possibilities and challenges of creating the characters Youncey was contemplating. Of course the discussion eventually touched on my as-yet-owed (and as-yet-written) werewolf story, and talking about it helped me realize that I stalled out in a previous attempt because I had all these exciting concepts for characters . . . but no real ideas about who they were, and where they were going. Well, two of them had direction and identity. Two that weren't remotely werewolfy. *sigh* So I thought the problem was that I just didn't actually

want

to write a werewolf story. Now, however, I have some ideas (hopefully not mere concepts) about what I do want to write about in a werewolf story. Now it's a question of time and keeping it foil-free.

Wherefore the foil? It's not laziness. Often time I spend much more energy on what turns out to be a foil character than I do on a fully realized, interesting one. Perhaps it's a problem with my perception of structure in a given story. It's true that I've never outlined a plot in my life; the closest I ever come to that is when I somehow know where I want the whole thing to end up. Writing is improvisation to me, or (perhaps more accurately) like just such a conversation as I had last night -- ideas piling up, going exploring down one path or another, accepting everything I can and using it as best I can. It's funny. Younce will continually make claims to not being a writer, yet the very stockpiling of ideas we do equates to the writing process for me. It isn't the same, of course. I take for granted whatever actual writing skills and instincts I may have acquired over the years. Yet that idea-hashing, that collaborative energy, that's what keeps me writing. That's what I really love about it.

When I was a teenager I was quite obsessed with my writing voice, and unique little turns of phrases. Early teachers of mine would kindly describe my prose as being "poetically dense." Thankfully I've rescinded my former enthusiasm for linguistic frippery and syntax of a winding and convoluted manner, the which is not dissimilar from a verbal slalom track (not to mention [since it bears repeating] a certain appreciation for [parenthetical] asides). But seriously: When I was a teenager, it was even worse. Now I value a certain amount of clarity and efficiency in my writing (not too [too] much, mind). Similarly, I want to make efficient stories, with necessary characters, not just cool concepts and dramatic tensions. That's the mysterious quality of really amazing stories, for me: structure. Lean, mean and beautifully functional.

Something made of steel, rather than foil.