The first order of business was to draw out of a hat the theme we were all to write about—one of four possibilities. What we got was “Destiny.” (The other possibilities, we learned after it was all over, were Addiction, Revenge and ? I’ve forgotten the fourth.)
Then each of the playwrights drew a card out of the hat that randomly distributed the characters by gender. I drew a cast of two males, one female.
That’s what I had to go on: a play about Destiny, for two males and one female. I didn’t know who would play the parts, not even their ages. I didn’t know who would direct. My head was already spinning (and not from the champagne, which I prudently only sampled) and I now had less than 12 hours to write the play. And that's only if I didn't sleep.
Before I left I did one more thing that turned out to give me something else: I went down to the theatre and took a good look at the stage. It was very wide, and looked deep (it turns out I was wrong about that.) Then I turned and faced the auditorium itself: it is immense. While I was there, an actor got up on the stage and tested the resonant acoustics. This was a place for full voice—which would make certain plays more fun (like Shakespeare), and others more difficult.
For the next few hours my head swirled with possibilities that resolved basically to two. The first was a kind of comedy sketch, an elaboration on a particular situation (I’m not going to say what, I may still use it!) I knew that it had a good chance of working on stage, given the constraints and circumstances. I also knew I could write it, because I’ve written pieces like it before.
But there was another idea forming, more elaborate, more risky, more of a challenge to me and to the director and actors. The first thing I thought of when I heard the theme was that I’d once written a song lyric with that title: “Destiny” for my first (and longest-lasting) musical group, which began at the end of high school and continued for a few years after that. Though I wrote lyrics and music both, the three of us collaborated in various combinations. One of these friends (they are still my closest if now physically distant friends), who turned out to be my most fruitful writing partner, composed the music to this lyric. It was one of our last collaborations and oddly, I never learned to play it.
But I remembered what it was about, and I used something in that lyric to get me started. Of course the two men, one woman cast suggested a triangle.
Musing on the topic of destiny, I thought first that it was something that occurs over time, and so that should be part of the story. But could you do a two-act play in ten minutes? Plus I had recently been thinking about fate and destiny—pretty natural for my age, as the third act of life begins. I’d been re-reading James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, and listening to the audio version, in his voice. I was becoming a fan of his “acorn” theory, which posits that the essence of who we become is in us from the beginning: the tree grows from the acorn. There’s more to it than that, but that simplification became the guiding notion of destiny I used in my play, which I titled “Acorns.”
All of this was still fairly abstract, but I had another idea to anchor it in a place, based on that first impression of the auditorium of the Eureka Theater itself. What if the actors facing that huge echoing space were playing characters facing another huge echoing space—like a gorge? I immediately thought of an actual one, near the campus in central Pennsylvania where Margaret taught before coming here. (A couple of people later noted that there were gorges near other campuses—Cornell, for example.) And what if this was a special place to these characters, and one thing they did there was to shout out phrases—lines from plays or commercials, and so on—that sounded good echoing there?
The idea of characters sending out their feelings echoing into the gorge was the starting point for the actual writing, which began well after 11 pm. After I had a few lines, I found myself doing what I’d forgotten I’d done the last few times I’d written for the stage—I walked through the play I was going to write (this time, in the half-dark kitchen), hearing approximately what the characters would say according to where they stood, especially in relation to each other.
I knew already that the structure of the play would be one scene when the three characters revisited the gorge years after their youth, followed by a scene of their last visit to the gorge when young. As the play evolved, it became their college graduation day, preceded by a reunion visit, thirty (though probably it should have been forty) years later. In other words, in revere chronological order, so you see the trees before the acorns.
I started with the two sets of shouted quotations, one for each time period. But soon the characters were talking, and I experienced that amazing phenomenon of listening to these characters speak, and taking down what they were saying. And they were characters—not based on real people (how could they be? They had to be completely defined in ten minutes!)
There were however a few snippets of dialogue in the first section that came very close to words from a real conversation I'd had, and it was then that I realized that I was using the experience and perspective of my age. Another opportunity! Because there aren’t many counterparts to the contests for “Playwrights Under Thirty.”
Fortunately, by the time I got to the end, I had something like a play. If I hadn't--and of course I realized this risk from the start--there wasn't time to start all over again with another one.
I had my script at around five in the morning. I was due back at the theatre at 9, although I was supposed to arrive with copies for the director, actors, adjudicators and the administrators, which meant an extra drive (Sanctuary had a deal with Staples so we didn’t have to pay to get them copied there.) So even if I had been able to sleep, which I couldn’t, it wouldn’t have been for long. I may have managed to doze for part of an hour before I was on the road again, sleepless in Eureka.
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