“FEEHAN: Or maybe…maybe she does offer him a cigarette. And when he turns, she’s not sure. Maybe it’s him, maybe it isn’t, it’s been a long time, and whoever this guy is, he’s been beat up by the world, and this dame, she’s been beating things up, so they think, but they don’t know. He takes the cigarette, they smoke in silence.”
On June 2nd, I finished Encryption and then fell deep into preparation for the TCG National Conference. However, I managed to eke out some odd hours to work on a new play called Tidal Devices that I’m writing for Sol Crespo and Rachael Hip-Flores (they’re not lovers this time). Yesterday, I wrote 9 more pages to get past the half-way hump, and so it looks like I’ll have at least four new plays to work at the Flux retreat.
Encryption is an interesting play for me, closely mirroring Perse in structure mixed elements of Denny and Lila, but without quite reaching the darkness of those two plays (though it does get plenty dark). It is a more comic variant of the haunted, first-person narrative, meta-theatrical confessional story that I seem driven to write every few plays.
Tidal Devices is a deliberate break from that. As I wrote some months back, I want to push myself out of that comfort zone by writing through other people’s plays that I admire. The first attempt at that was The Fields of Blue and Glow, which grew out of my admiration for Johnna Adams’ Gideon’s Knot. Tidal Devices is inspired by Annie Baker’s The Aliens, and remakes some of that play’s structural and thematic elements. It’s been a joy to explore that kind of slower-paced naturalism and work against some of my default settings as a playwright, and I think it’s coming out well.
As per my last post, I’m also trying to record various activist things worth noting, both to encourage the practice in myself and perhaps make it contagious:
- Heather and I have joined a CSA with Katchkie Farms. After many small steps, this is the first big step towards responsible environmental behavior. The book The Story of Stuff had a big impact on me, and I’ve just begun in earnest the hard work of knowing where things come from and where they go. Also, yum.
- I signed this Performing Arts Alliance letter, and I hope you will, too: Protect FY13 Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
- A Brooklyn teen blinded in one eye by a homophobic assault at school, and this petition pressures the school to apply anti-bullying programs immediately.
- I signed a petition to keep student load interest rates from doubling, and thankfully, Congress addressed that issue just two days before it the doubling would have gone down.
- A gay coach was fired for some old Facebook photos that revealed his sexuality – sign here for justice.
- Atrazine even sounds like a chemical a super-villain would come up with.
- Speaking of unsafe chemicals and our government enabling them.
- And while we’re on the subject of our government enabling terrible things, Amensty International is pushing for tighter international gun laws.
Corinna Schulenburg 