Chapter One: Exercises

Item #1:

there were three stories in last night's newspaper that i thought might offer some possibilities for development as plays -- one for a farce, one for a tragedy, and one that might work for both in the same play.

the first item was concerning the now defunct tiger sanctuary in ste. genevieve. originally created by depaul university, the curators [after a change in university president] changed their mind. the acreage and five tigers were left high and dry in rural missouri. a local winery has now purchased the whole project, and will construct a bed and breakfast on the property. apparently one wall of each guest room will be made of bars, so the tigers may approach the guests up close. this might offer two comedic interactions. first, just the local hillbilly types reacting to the big city university crowd bringing tigers to their sleepy little town: chicago intellectual vs. local yokel. the second possiblity would be a farcial situation involving an overnight guest with an unanticipated feline roommate. could be possibilites.

the second item concerned an appeal of the sentence of the pharmacist in kansas city who was convicted last year of adulterating cancer patients' drugs in order to increase his profit margin. i think several story lines could be developed out of the tragic consequences of his actions. a possible hook would be to have someone dear to himself die as an unintended result of having gotten some of the weakened batch of drugs. following this line could have a very dramatic twist, although you would have to be careful not to step on 'all my sons' toes.

the third item was a story about a drunken driver who hit a power pole and without being aware of it, decapitated his passenger. he went home, passed out in bed without being aware of what had happened. some passing children noticed the headless body sitting in his truck parked at the curb, and some other people found the bodyless head on the ground by the power pole, a ways down the road. i think this might be worked into a very dark comedy; some things are so ridiculously horrible they can seem funny when given a good spin.

Item #3:

i have always been curious about my own ambivalent attitude toward capital punishment. as an intensely liberal person [i'd give about anything to be rid of bush and ashcroft] i seem at odds with my own beliefs and friends on this issue: i feel perfectly comfortable with the idea of executing certain criminals. i feel that in the commission of some heinous crimes, the perpetrators forfeit their status as human beings, and therefore are no longer eligible to the entitlement of life. executing such a person has no more significance to me than the recall and destruction of a defective appliance. as defective human beings their raw materials may as well be returned to the earth. of course, i'm speaking of truly horrible crimes, and convictions not based upon circumstantial evidence. a play dealing with this topic might be constructed as a death row conversation between inmates, or with an inmate and a vistitor, or both. it would be a quiet play; intense, intellectual, and without action in the usual sense.

Item #5:

i have always been fascinated by my grandfather's alcoholism, but his death when i was only 16 left me without a very mature understanding of it. he was what is called a 'high functioning' alcoholic. successful in business, a well-known local politician, he was respected and admired, yet there was the fact that he was addicted to liquour and frequently drank himself into insensibility. it would be interesting to probe into his background [he had been an unhappy child with an abhored stepmother], his marriage [he was rough and tough; his wife a diminuitive, intellectual school teacher], and his political and business affairs. since i would probably never know what this was all about, it would become a somewhat fictional piece constructed upon an armature of fact. there could be funny scenes of happy family life [there were many] or sad scenes: one time when i was a child we got a phone call that we should come get him: in his eighties, with a good business, ownership of several thousand acres, a member of the state general assembly; he was on the main street of our small city, sitting on the curb, feet in the gutter, holding his head in his hands, dead drunk. a theme to develop might be the way in which alcohol brings both the meek and the mighty to the same low estate.

Item #7:

the effect of wal-mart voracity on small towns is interesting. people will shop there, even knowing that every new wal-mart kills a half dozen small locally owned stores. apparently, to most poeple, the destruction of our historical downtowns seems a small price compared with saving a few bucks at a mass merchandiser. i was thinking about the circumstances of a third-generation small town hardware store, faced with a news report of a new wal-mart. the whole play could take place in the old hardware store, a really old-fashioned one, with bins along the wall and a rolling lader to access them. dialogue could be among members of the owners family, perhaps with customers coming in and out. the general atmosphere would be ominous...and a twist perhaps involving a grandson or cousin making a great deal of money selling the land for the new wal-mart, or being hired as its manager. the play would be generally a forum for discussion of traditional views of community and perhaps holding wilde's aphorism up to the light: "the problem with people nowadays is that they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

more to come...keep tuned...

"MASTER HAROLD" ...and the boys

although i had heard of this play, i had never read it before. my immediate impression was that it started out slow, a rather pedestrian recitation of humanistic virtues. however, the dramatic twist at the end redeemed it for me and i decided that i enjoyed reading it.

as i was reading, i could not help but think about 'huck finn,' it being [as far as i'm concerned] the gold standard of literary conversations that similarly cross racial and generational lines simultaneously. granted that the novel/play comparison is an apple/orange one, i still find the parallel to be interesting -- a reverse parallel at that. in huck, we see the epiphany of an unconsciously racist boy growing toward a socially conscious manhood right before our eyes. fugard gives us almost the opposite -- a boy that seems preternaturally mature at the beginning of the play regresses, from his hurt, to a less mature, racist lashing out at his friend. only in the last few lines of the play are we left with a slight opening for an optimistic future development: 'all you have to do is stand up and walk away from it.' just as in 'huck finn,' it is the 'social inferior' who is the conduit for wisdom.

the only negative criticism i have of 'master harold' is that the dialogue fugard gives hally seems not as true to character as it should be, particularly in the earlier lines. based upon his school level, he should be about a high school sophomore, maybe 16 years old? but he doesn't speak as you might think one that age would. you might expect to hear him say something like 'well, uh, you know...social consciousness and all that stuff.' instead he says things like: 'i know. i admit it. that's why i suggest we reserve our judgment until...' and 'don't confuse historical significance with greatness. but maybe i'm being a bit prejudiced...'

he is so articulate that i have a verisimilitude problem -- he often sounds like a 50-year-old fugard speaking while wearing a facemask. again, back to twain, huck never sounds like anything other than what he is, an uneducated midwest boy. you never hear twain speaking; you may hear sam clemens, but never mark twain. i read somewhere that an actor was good when you couldn't see him acting. perhaps a parallel might be that a playwrite is good when you can't see him writing.

anyway, i enjoyed the play, but i thought the hally dialogue could have been better.

Happy Holidays 

Introduction

Hello, I'm b.h. I'm taking this class because I like the theater and would like to develop some proficiency in writing for it. In earlier writing classes I discovered I liked writing dialogue, so trying to produce material for oral and visual presentation would be an exciting skill to develop. On the other hand, having technical skill won't go too far if I have nothing to say. Time will tell.