"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."

~Frank Lloyd Wright

Hello again! I would apologize for being lax in posting lately, but it's my blog & I told myself I wasn't apologizing anymore for that kind of thing, so I'm not going to. ... yeah... so there.

Some things that have captured my attention lately! (aside from every shiny object that crosses my path--I swear I'm not ADD!)

It's a youtube video, and it's funny, and made me laugh really hard. You should see it! Thank you Kathrene! :) ( I think I did the link thingummy right... if not, I'll be editing this later...

Also, Backstage Badger is a wonderful, beautiful place--but be warned! If you are not a theatre tech, don't go there! If you are an actor, you may well be offended... I warned ya! And thanks for this one go to Mike. :)

'Kay, one more. Hyperbole and a Half is wonderful, and you should all go read it. No seriously, right now, go! Thank you Bea for giving me this fantastic happy. :)

Alright, I think I played around with the links on here enough. See what happens when I don't have rehearsals every night? The interwebs suck my life into their black void of ... time-suckingness... yeah, that sentence kinda got away from me a bit...

Hmmm... what else to write about?

I started writing a new play! Scene 1 is finished (the first draft of it is at least, many more drafts & revisions will have to happen before it's "finished", but I made it to the "lights out" part & I always feel so accomplished when that happens!) and the stage directions and first line of Scene 2 are on paper.

Stage directions are funny things. I'm generally against them in principal--directors throw them out (we were actually told in both my directing classes "toss out the stage directions, they don't actually pertain to you"), actors are told not to pay attention to them (why bother, the director's just going to tell you something different anyway), designers only use them as a spring-board for coming up with a ton of other stuff (to try to fit the director's "vision"), and stage managers just see them as wasted paper that could have been used to record the ACTUAL blocking and cues (because they never really correspond, directors toss it out right away).

Shakespeare being one of my playwright idols, I thought the "right" way to write a play was with minimal stage directions, ex.: "enter", "exit", "they fight, Rosse dies", "Exit chased by bear", etc. He never went on and on and on about the surroundings of the characters, or about the state of the dining room and how many glass figurines were in the cabinet and what they looked like & how significant they were to the mental health of the frail-looking girl who sat polishing them every day because she has self-esteem issues and never got over her high-school crush (alright fine, I confess, I'm not a Tennessee Williams fan. So hate me, it's MY blog and you're still reading aren't you? Who really wins here? :P).

So anyway, I've never been a fan of stage directions. But one of my mentors challenged me to try it out, to give my designers and directors something to play with (or throw away). Because, he said, if I don't give them anything to work with they'll get "bored" with my work. Heaven forbid I should be the cause of anyone's boredom! That's been one of my not-so-secret fears (I'm writing about it on a blog, I can't really call it a "secret" anymore, now can I?) for as long as I can remember feeling fear: being the cause of some poor soul's boredom.

I took him up on his challenge, and this new play I'm writing has something for everyone. I described the stage (blank), the lights (a single beam illuminating the actor), the blocking (open on one person, sitting downstage right--or was it left? Does it really matter? Does my life have meaning? Why am I here?! Who are you?!!?!), the props (a shabby notebook), the costumes (tattered and grubby), and... oh wait, I forgot sound. Meh, who cares about sound anyway. They have all the pre-show music to worry about & will probably be glad for the break.

Then I did something truly terrible, something I would never in my life dream of doing unless I had no intentions of being involved in the production of this show except in the capacity of actor (let's be honest, actors ... well, go read backstage badger, you'll get the gist of my point).

I made it rain.

That's right. I wrote in my stage directions that it's raining. How? How would that possibly be feasible in a live theatre with a minimal budget?! How do I think that's going to happen should anyone choose to produce this show?? I dunno, and I don't really care right now. Because do you know what I discovered in the process of writing all these minute stage directions before I even touched the dialogue? I discovered who the stage directions are really for. They're for the playwright. That's why no one else pays attention to them. The reality of the situation is that stage directions help get those ever-elusive and mocking rays of creativity to dance just within reach. They help "set the scene" (literally) so the dialogue can actually begin to flow. I kid you not, I started out with a vague picture in my head. The moment I had that picture set on the page, I knew so much about the plot, the characters, and what the dialogue was going to be like. It was crazy!! Granted, most of that will probably change by the second or third draft, but just the fact that so much of it came so quickly--it was ... it was beautiful! :)

So yeah, that's my little schpeel on stage directions. Later!

Protect the cubs! Eat an apple!