Workshopped now – tired and happy

Ahhh… the six workshop productions – which took the form of staged readings – are now done.

The actors and director worked incredibly hard to do a low-tech realization of the draft. The energy they brought to the piece was palpable, and their talent and

Audience response was educational and sometimes heartening.

About 30% saw it and had a response similar to drinking a triple espresso… they responded with energy, excitement, enthusiasm, even. The draft as it stands today – “scene complete” but nowhere near finished or polished, inspired a lot of comments on its ideas and constant drive forward through its complex worlds. Those responses were heartening. I can expect that even if I get really wild, this 30% can stay with it.

As for the 70%… there were comments like “a play is *that*… a play is not *this*” – meaning a play is not what they saw. Most commonly this came over in a somewhat distressed tone. The draft is sprawling with characters, scenes, modes, ideas, words, images. It is not in its current form easy to follow. In a sense it has too much in it. But there was confusion between faulting it for its ambitions and faulting it for its complexity. It is too complex, it does need to be lined up and neatened. It does tend to burst out of the space and that’s not always a good thing. In that sense, they’re right… but they didn’t need to be so distressed about it. The draft was a scratchpad for the play in a sense… a testing of various ideas and modalities for telling this particular story; exploration of possible character arcs and character forms from the ironic to mythic to the realistic.

What they saw was a series of experiments, testing the limits of what the play – when it’s finished and actually becomes a play – can get away with. A few people somewhat condescendingly trying to define what a play was… nice of them… the definitions tended to fit into TV and well-made forma. One place, a few people talking, conflicts on a personal level. Someone actually said, a novel is about a conflict inside someone, a play is about a conflict between people, and a film is about a conflict of a person against the world. They are missing the point, but that’s OK. Another person faulted the science aspects of the play, saying it’s known the scenaria are implausible. Well, it’s a work of fiction. But even so, scientifically it all really could happen.

A subset of those who responded enthusiastically were non-American folks. I think for them the expectations that any work for the stage would have a necessarily linear plot with clear precedent at every point for the main characters, that focus would necessarily be primarily on the protagonst, are different. Whereas Americans are more used to TV entertainment that reaches all the way into their living rooms to get them; they have fingers that twitch at an imaginary remote control whenever they see something that doesn’t draw them in instantly or that floats above their line of sight.

Now I’ll be taking a break from The New Life for about a month – a necessary cooling off period before I go out to absorb everything I learned, re-read the draft as if someone else wrote it, and apply a gimlet eye. Always need to do that… otherwise I’ll start the rewrite with a strong sense of ownership and the changes and cuts will be too hard to do. You can’t have that sense and still make the brutal cuts and rewrites that will be needed to turn this mass of twitching machinery into a real play.