Saturday, May 22, 2010

Stage/Bridge

It has been awhile since I last posted here! My apologies for my posts have been few & far between. I have been busy though. First off, we have a lot going on with our Wood Sugars site between podcasts & columns. So a lot of my writing energies have towards the podcast & my weekly column The EGP: The Economic Gho$t Po$t which is a blend of fiction (ghost stories) with economic analysis. Both the paranormal & economics have fixated me for sometime & I thought it would be fun to combine them into a strange concoction. I am by no means no economic expert, even though I have been reading up on economics quite frequently, the post is more so a means to a conversation regarding it, I might say something stupid but am open to be called out on it., so please read it & comment...maybe we can all learn from it.

I've also been drawn towards playwrighting as of late. For along while I either wrote fiction or screenplays. In February I pounded out a script called Bosto. It's a strange one, takes place on the 3rd floor of a building. Three fisherman live there (two are out of work, one gets work) & below them one floor is a shelter for battered women. And on the bottom floor is a fine seafood restaurant. When screams sound from the floor below them, the fishermen are drawn into a night of intrigue. The play will be work-shopped with XIII Pocket this coming august at the DCA (Department of Cultural affairs) space in downtown Chicago along with two other plays by members of the artistic ensemble. I am psyched to get it on its with the other ensemble members, to see it, hear it, and continue to tweak it.


I have also tweaked the screenplay I've adapted from my book Whiskey Pike to also be a stage play. I must say I've had the most fun with the stage play form. Even though I feel the screenplay is in strong shape, I may focus on mounting the stage play first. Why? Both will be fairly expensive to produce. As it stands they read as period pieces, which are naturally expensive to produce. I do have some strong ideas to gear the film away from being period & make use of modern, guerilla shooting. This would make it more feasible to shoot on a low-low budget. But I feel compelled to stage it...to build an atmosphere to be experienced in the flesh. I feel with the vision I have brewing, I can get away with minimal setting, costuming & still douse it with the feel of an old forgotten world. There's still a lot of props & transitions, so I am continuing to work on fine-tuning it, simplifying it, trimming. But I am excited. It currently stands as a strong two act play, with a lot of potential for eerie environment & highly kinetic movement.
I think what is currently drawing a lot of my interest in writing plays is that it serves to bridge to of my passions: performance & literature. Plays serve as a strong blue-print towards performance, but also great reads. Look at the many who read Beckett, Shakespeare, O'neill, Shaw, among many others, and enjoy the read for it's literary value. I get a kick out writing with the challenge of developing human behavior within space. It's a blast to drive your own production but also interesting to let the script continue to exist & be interpreted by other productions throughout the years. As much as I love film, it tends to stamp one vision to a story & limit its play on one's imagination.

I've had some new ideas for the developing of a novel I wrote called Televictim. The novel is still in rough form. I wrote it very quickly during the month of November. It's a bit sloppy overall. There's some stuff I am pretty proud of. There's also a lot that needs to be cut & there's a lot that needs to be further explored. I have spent a lot of time combing through it & working up a new outline. And the further I have gone into outlining it, the more I churn up some interesting staging concepts. I have currently put this project on hold until later in the summer as to focus more on writing for the Wood Sugars podcast Inside the Barrel & fine tuning both Bosto & Whiskey Pike but perhaps after letting it stew, I may dig back into the novel instead as a stage play.

3 comments:

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater said...

Sounds like lots of new and interesting stuff. I imagine ghosts could tell some cautionary tales of economics, like if a guy died from starvation during the Great Depression and annoyingly haunted people, reminding them to put some extra cash under their mattresses.

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater said...

Sorry if that was a weird call. I got some bad information, so it wasn't even a call that needed to be made, as it turns out.

After talking with you, I'm really thinking about just finishing the play I started. I know it will go fast and will be fun to write once I get going, and who cares if it has gross material? There's so much more I NEED to do, but having half-done projects floating around just doesn't sit well with me.

Anyway, great catching up with you, and hope we can get together some time.

The Igloo Oven said...

No worries man, too bad it takes a rumor for us to catch up, but yes, we should grab a beer soon! Yeah I know the feeling, I have a novel I need to dust off and move from a rough draft into something readable. It's hard though, some times the creative flow gets blocked or re-directed from a certain project, but yeah, I know that gnawing feeling of "might as well finish stuff." I love gross material. Can't wait to see it!