Love's Labors Lost

June 8, 2008

Act 2, Scene 2

(Glade deep in the wilderness. We are trees surrounding it.)

Trees awaken and "transform" into dryads. Satyrs emerge from the depths of the forest. There is a freedom and energy to their frolicking - a sort of physical prayer - which has a primal rhythm to it that is by turns violent and erotic. Rabbit seamlessly flows into the merry-making. Red Riding Hood looks on. She clings to the edge of the glade, hovering between approach and retreat. Unable to hold out any longer, she joins in.

The celebration gradually becomes a frenzied blur of fighting and dancing and fucking. In the midst of this, Rabbit is seized and torn to pieces. Everyone smears Rabbit's blood on themselves - a kind of anointment - and devour Rabbit's flesh. They turn on Red Riding Hood as if trying to fuck her and eat her simultaneously. They scratch her up, tear her clothes, rip her cloak. She barely escapes. Once she is clear of them, the dryads and satyrs "disappear."

June 4, 2008

Act 2, Scene 1

Mirrors transform into Thorns that surround Snow White, who is Sleeping Beauty again. There is a jerkiness to their shifting that is creepy and zombie-like. We form the outer layer of the thorns.

PRINCE wearing a blood red cloak tries to make his way to Sleeping Beauty. Thorns writhe as they close in on him. Prince tries to leave, but Thorns have entwined around him. He tries to escape, but Thorns entangle him and stab him to death.

As Prince dies, Thorns take the cloak. They pass it to and fro, marveling at its color and texture. They handle the cloak with such care and grace that it resembles a slow dance. Some of us closest to the stage could be a part of this "dance" as well.

The cloak "floats" from Thorns to rest on Sleeping Beauty. She stirs, pulling the cloak around her.

As she awakens, Thorns become Trees. In something like a courtly dance, Trees align themselves along a narrow path. We are trees just beyond the path.

Sleeping Beauty wakes up as Red Riding Hood.

More on process

Another word about process. It's not normal for me to work in a linear fashion. My initial drafts look like bits of action, image, dialogue, plot, theory, and stray thoughts floating on a sheet of printer paper. From this raw material I forge something that resembles a scene. One of my weaknesses as a writer is my tendency to stall if I don't have everything in figured out ahead of time. I also have a habit of wanting to perfect one scene before moving on to the next. It induces a kind of paralysis in my writing, where I'm doing the same scene over and over again because I "need" it to be perfect before moving on to what happens next. As a result, I often get frustrated and down on myself then abandon whatever it is I'm working on. I think I can get trapped inside my head. I guess I need someone or something to help pull me out of that. I really want to stop sabotaging my work like this, but I'm unsure of the best way to proceed.

I suppose I should give myself permission to write about what interests me at the moment until the draft is done. So, from here on out, everything might not be in order, but it is part of the same piece.

Breakthrough

I had a breakthrough tonight about something that was holding back my progress with this play. As it turns out (as always), I was simply making things harder for myself. I'll talk about this later after I post Red Riding Hood and/or a revision of Snow White. In a nutshell, I was falling into habitual thought patterns about what I "should" write instead of sticking to the enchantment that motivated me in the first place. I'll post more on this later, after I get the next scene(s) done.

Remind me to ask about the dream I had about Bee Bee.

June 1, 2008

Issues

Looking over the first part of the story, I'm thinking of altering some of the more erotic elements. I like them, don't get me wrong, but I think they're a bit too transparent. I think I was embellishing on my original idea instead of sticking to it and suggesting rather than being blatant.

Also, I've lately questioned the wisdom of having trees, mirrors, etc. be portrayed by actors. It might be asking too much to have so many bodies on the stage. Perhaps just having the audience (the ever-present "we" I often describe) be these things is enough.

I hope to get a draft of Red Riding Hood soon. But that's where I am now.

Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932