No Artistic Inclinations

Hi.

So that last post was a thing. Feel free to ignore it.

This bit of Epic Theater is finally coming along nicely. My friends and I are going to put it up (hopefully) next semester.

I don’t know what else to talk about… except that it’s starting to become very clear to me that I have a long process of editing ahead of me once I get this done. I say this because my scenes are very long, and there will be a lot of them. If everyone is okay with a longer play, I feel the plot can be sustained regardless.

My real worry is that the beginning is far too complicated. I tried to separate the characters by highlighting them all at different points, but I’m not sure if a reader or an audience will catch on as quickly as I’d like. I need to tweak and specify some lines that will establish character and relationships in the first few lines of a character’s debut. Honestly, my first scene does this the best.

My two main characters (both college-age boys) are getting ready to have sex. One, named Scott, goes to get a condom. While looking, he finds a box of “for her” condoms in the boy, Dave’s, drawer. Scott freaks out and storms out after Dave tries to assure him that it was just experimental. This scene is one page. My next two scenes, which were once one scene, are practically twenty pages. I’m exaggerating, but it’s still too much, but I don’t know how else to make this work with the way I’ve always wanted to start the play… at a party. It’s the only way it can work. I’ll figure it out… for now, TO FINISH THE PLAY.

How am I supposed to know
how to act around you?
I don’t know what you’re thinking,
I don’t pretend that I do.
Sometimes you’re really sweet
to me and it’s great.
Other times you put me down
which I tend to see as hate.

Deep down I know it’s not,
however there are times
when I doubt
myself, and I simply don’t know anymore.

I feel like a high school girl,
blubbering over some boy who
is rude to me,
and I don’t have a clue
as to how I’m going to
figure out if this is true
or not.

Now, I know
This is all in my head.
Who knows-
he may be thinking
the same
thing,
and I’m just paranoid.
Or maybe this is another
spout of boy-craze
that seems to happen to me
far too often.

Are my feelings real,
or am I simply projecting
all of my insecurities
onto this one person?

I think that is half of it.
The other
deals with my true feelings
for this boy,
that I should no longer
work to destroy
by getting so overworked
and distraught
over something
not even worth a thought.

What I mean is
I shouldn’t be thinking,
I should be doing.
I’m finally going to act
but I’m far too terrified
to even consider how
he will react
when he finds out
that I really really
really like him. 

I want to write a one-act play, possibly entitled “Wonderland,” that is about a man who talks about his dreams and ambitions. These are not huge ambitions, though. He just wants to move out of the city and away to New Hampshire where everything is safer and simpler. His girlfriend lives in New Hampshire. Once he saves up the money, he’s going to go live with her. It’s gorgeous up there. He can walk around outside at four in the morning and not have to hide from gunshots. “Seven gunshots in the past week,” he says, “The projects is a bad place to be.”

All he wants is something better, he has no materialistic greed or unquenchable lust, just a yearning for open spaces and the mountains. In the end, however, he discovers that New Hampshire is no more. He’s stuck in the city, with the gunshots and the fear and the uncertainty of money. (My characters aren’t allowed to be happy.)

A man on the train inspired me to write this… and when the time comes, I will write it. Just not today.

It’s called City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare. I’ve heard mixed reviews about it, and even though I’m really close to finishing it, I don’t know how I feel about it.

The characters are kinda annoying, except for Isabelle and Alec, who aren’t even main characters in the sense of the word that the entire book serves as the foundation for a another stupid love triangle. I mean, they’re so much more interesting than the openly vain and self-involved romantic interest and the nerdy horny teenager of a best friend (also kind of a romantic interest, he completes the triangle) and the fucking MAIN CHARACTER, THE PROTAGONIST is literally the worst of all of them. She’s unnecessarily sarcastic and obviously was constructed to seem “cool” and “hip” and “young,” none of which she comes off as. She’s just obnoxious.

Maybe I really don’t like it, but I’m dealing with it because the plot is interesting. Does nobody know how to construct realistic or believable characters anymore? I mean, the fucking FOCUS is the characters. The plot is almost irrelevant at points when Clary (the protagonist) is contemplating her feelings. Which is a lot. Also, there’s a lot of narration. Too much. “This is happening now, and Clary feels this, she’s conflicted, feels that emotion, and sees this happen, and blah blah blah.”

Okay I guess I really don’t like this book. But there’s a gay character. I might stick around just for him, it’s terrible, but true.

Also, it’s obviously meant to be edgy cuz they start at a “club” which is not even a real club, and I don’t think the author has even been to a real club. Maybe once. And she saw people with colored spiky hair. Honestly, she should have never considered this story to be a young adult novel because it really takes away any punch or weight it could ever have. They can’t even swear. WHAT THE FUCK. It’s not cute when you rhyme asshole with anything. It’s just the wrong genre for the kind of ideas she has. She mentions guys being stoned on stage in the beginning, and I don’t know.

I’m just ranting now. UGH.

I have this idea for a play. Or a series of plays.

It’s been ruminating in my head for a while, and it just needs to come out.

I really want to write a series of four (or five) gothic one-acts… Each within a different kind of goth. I’d like to really do research on it, but I guess some options would be Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, southern goth, whatever.

It would be really cool and I want to base each one-act off a stop on the Blue Line in Boston: Wood Island, Orient Heights, Suffolk Downs, Beachmont/Revere Beach, and possibly Wonderland.

They would deal with the idea of mortality and how frail life is in comparison to death… and that we should not be afraid of the “great beyond”… But I also want to scare people shitless.

This is what I’m going to work on once “Heartbrokerz” is done. Goddammit I like big projects too much.

It’s cool shit. Sometimes a little too much like a sermon for me to consider it real research, but if you get some “scholarly articles” it’s actually cool.

Just don’t go to eschatology.org… Unless you’re into that shit.

Also VERY applicable to the play: it’s the study of the end of days. YES. PERFECT.

Why do I keep getting the feeling that ever since I decided I would be more outgoing, everyone doesn’t want me to be?

I guess it’s just a silly schema.

Or am I right in suspecting as much?

I don’t know.

UGH.

Honestly, Mockingjay would be a million times better if Suzanne Collins didn’t analyze her metaphors for us.

Seriously. She poses a really interesting parallel, then Katniss goes in and picks it apart for us. I am an intelligent human being, and I refuse to be spoon-fed. I’m still fascinated by the plot. I think it’s really why these books are so popular. Definitely not the subtlety of the writing style.

At least Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson are gorgeous.

So there’s this play I’m writing.

I got the idea when I was directing “Grease Junior” over the summer. (I know, Grease… junior? It worked because it was just a bunch of adorable little kids singing 50’s jukebox music. I had a blast.)

I know the characters of the original “Grease” were originally written to be raunchy and obscene, but it just doesn’t do it for me. There’s something missing, a feeling of the reality of their world that’s needed in order to bring us to catharsis. Hell, the ending consists of Sandy changing her entire look just to fit in. I can attempt to justify this as much as I want, but in the end it always falls flat.

That’s when I started thinking of how I would improve these characters, make them believable somehow. Maybe Danny and Sandy should be a gay couple, with Kenickie and Rizzo being a lesbian couple?
That’s a place to start.

Then I started thinking of how intricately I could entwine the six other characters in the show that hardly get any real character development. That’s when the ideas started to flow. What if Sonny was a horny bisexual, and Marty was an all-around slut? WHAT IF DOODY WAS IN LOVE WITH DANNY? What if Roger, instead of eating all the time, drank and constantly cheated on his girlfriend? What if Jan was terribly depressed? What if Frenchy was a fag hag who kept dating guys that turned out to be gay?

All of thee things popped into my head as this idea germinated. And I only say “germinated” because it really did grow in multiply in my head. I had so many character ideas that it wasn’t funny.

Then I came to a dead end: what would be the plot? I can only have characters running around for so long. Also, I don’t want to write a play that is just a character study. That’s boring. That’s when the Apocalypse popped into my head.

I had written a short scene for my Ensemble class that dramatized the Prophecy of Judgment Day in Revelations. This was met with some resistance, but I really like the idea and had been thinking of turning it into a play where the Four Horsemen would be main characters. Then I realized that combining my re-worked Grease characters would fit in perfectly with an Apocalyptic setting because the drama that I had planned between these people could be heightened by the literal ending of the world, as a metaphor for the world that they know also ending? It was a super-epic coming-of-age story that I knew I had to write.

So here I am, writing it.