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I’m writing the script for the 2010 NYIT awards ceremony….and you guys, it’s HARD! But an interesting challenge. Basically I’m just writing the words out of the presenters’ mouths before they announce the nominees and winners. When I first started thinking about it, I was like, wait, so I am going to write things in my own voice, and then other human beings who are NOT me are going to say the words?? How is this going to work?? And then I was like: oh wait. Bekah, that’s pretty much playwriting. Duh. As I work through the categories I suddenly feel like I know nothing about theater, words, or people, but blast it, I’m trying. Why, I even have a joke: the moment you set out to write ‘a hit!’ is the first nail in your IsherWood coffin. See what I did there?

Kind of like the character in the play I’m working on, for like five years I’ve been meaning to volunteer with New York Cares, and I FINALLY attended an orientation.  In the play, the character gets involved for sort of selfish and strange reasons, it turns out, but does badly want to help.

There, in the weird theater in the children’s room at the West Village public library, I felt like I was INSIDE of my own play, inside of this fictional person I created that is also sort of myself. And when we had to share with our neighbors why we wanted to get involved, I opened my mouth, and out poured some nonsense about being a playwright and doing research kind of, but wait, ALSO WANTING TO HELP, and my neighbor looked at me like I was insane, and there I was, inside of my own play. But for real: it’s a really amazing organization and I can’t wait to get started.

The Lark invites playwrights they’ve worked with to come in and talk to their interns about their experiences, and yesterday, I did that! I had forgotten how nice it is to talk about playwriting. It always reminds me that in a world with vast amounts of information about places and things and theories that I strive to understand and know, but oftentimes fail, there is one thing DO know a lot about, and that is the writing of the drama play. And in talking about it, I feel like I learn even more about it, and my own relationship to it. So please feel free to invite me to talk to you, anytime, and I will surely say things.

That Mr. Gaye provides the most spectacular, least distracting, most invigorating background to writing music ever? It could be. And also, it is.

Runners-up: Fleet foxes,  instrumental /baptist hymns, Joe Pug, animal collective, bonnie prince billy, Merle Haggard, Punch Brothers.

/ ‘Heaven must have sent you from abovvveeee’

I’m finding it very very useful to go back to the first draft of plays and just take a look. Usually my first drafts are short and messy and insane, but ALWAYS, somewhere in there, there is the nugget of the story I wanted to tell, the thing that was lighting me on fire to begin with. After months and months and drafts and drafts, this nugget can get buried beneath my attempts at ‘plot’. The play is getting better, hopefully, but the nugget: sometimes lost. It’s always refreshing to go back to the beginning, when I was naked, and hanging out with some forest animals. When I was pure, before things got nuts.

I owe my overuse of the word ‘nugget’ to Blaine.

…or two.

But of the non-corporate world variety! But definitely 100 percent, and some shadow figures. After weeks of wrestling with playwright-y self doubt – I think I have written a good play. Or at least: I stuck with my guns in terms of the way in which I wanted to tell the Maxwell’s story, this seemingly undramatic telling, this odd mix of humor and tragedy, a portrait of a town. AND BY GOSH, I THINK I’VE DONE IT. Celebrate good times, Come on! Hopefully the 4 performances go as well as the dress rehearsal did. If so, I will give myself a pat on the back, in the form of pink persecco, or perhaps a dress. Or a nap.

I like to do this really mean thing to actors in which I make them be ghosts all the time. There are only so many active things that ghosts can do (stare, observe, hover, haunt.) But I like to force them to also interrogate, poke fun, violently remember, maybe a little puking here and there, touching but not touching, the stealing of hats, entertain romantic crushes, experience sandwich and ice cream envy, and be beautifully haunty, generally. Because I just like to think that this is what they do.

It is truly incredible what fight choreographers do. They know the ins and outs of pistol whips, gunshots the head, blood bursts, and other horrifyingly real things. We’re so so so lucky that the FC here for THe Last Goodbye donated a bit of time to help us stage the murder / suicide. It was an absolutely brutal event that we’re trying to infuse with some peace and beauty. WHAT? I just don’t want to go there, in terms of how awful it REALLY must have been, to be in that house. But so, we are choregraphing it as best we can. And it’s completely surreal: a bunch of people sitting a big theater, walking through the steps of each family member getting killed, with a man instructing: alright Dad, after you kill Mom, go to Son – Son, fight your Dad, Dad, push him off of you, shoot him in the head. It’s chilling. It’s terrible. Because, these kids didn’t get the chance to choreograph, go back, or fight. (Hopefully I’m in some way giving them this.)

Our Town is an incredible play written some 70 years ago by Thorton Wilder – detailing the seemingly ordinary lives and ordinary moments in the lives of a fictional small town in Massachusetts. It is totally perfect that it’s currently being produced at Williamstown: A – because Wilder himself played the stage manager Here in a production in 1959:

And B, because, well, it’s creepily, embarrassingly just like House of Home, in so many ways (the play I am currently crafting here.) OR RATHER: house of home is just like IT. I saw Our Town my freshman year of college at Playmaker’s, and hadn’t read or seen it since. I could barely remember it honestly, except for loving it, and being deeply moved by the ghosts in the graveyard. Also remember a small pretty Asian girl on a ladder. Who’s with me, fellow UNC CDA hobbits?? Anyone??

I think I must have deposited this play, structurally and viscerally, into my subconscious.  I think I will choose to be encouraged by the similiarties between the two plays. NOT THAT I COULD EVER WRITE OUR TOWN, it’s so flawless, BUT – maybe I am writing, MY Our Town? Our town, but with Baptist Hymns, casserole parades, murder and Meth? Also, not that I’ll be inserting a narrator character, rattling of lattitude and longitude, and giving myself the role. But. Just really, really happy that the play exists, and that I got to see it.

Also, my favorite line: ‘People are meant to go through life two by two. ‘Tain’t natural to be lonesome.’