Jungle Book Tease + Fairy Tales and Food

The Jungle Book

News about The Jungle Book will be coming soon.

I started writing this play a year ago. It was produced. And things are happening.

End of Tease.

Fairy Tales and Food

Yesterday, I wrote “End of Play” on the first draft and meant it.

23,700 words in three weeks.

Why does that number matter? It’s almost twice the size of the average play these days, but a longer play doesn’t equal a better one.

The container for this play — tentatively titled The Brothers Grimm and the Huntsmen — requires a helluva lot of words. The story, right now, is that the Brothers Grimm are stumbling through the forest looking to scrape stories from crones in cottages when they come upon the Twelve Huntsmen (who are actually women) in the middle of their own fairy tale. Over a feast, the Huntsmen share various stories they’ve accumulated. The stories for a given night’s performance are selected (mostly) at random. Every night will have a different permutation of which tales told and in what order.

I like that theatre invites the unexpected. Art in the moment — of the present — means that anything, really, can happen, something that theatre world needs to remember next time it loses its shit about an audience member getting onstage before the show.

So, yes, this means that the play should be massive.

And it’s a confidence builder to write a lot in a little time. I’ve sat next to many a skilled writer coughing up thousands of beautiful words while I slowly chipped away at my own work. Words become so precious when you’re a slow writer, which increases anxiety and makes for worse words. (I partly credit this article from the Playwright’s Center for this summer’s increased productivity.) So I needed to write a lot in a short amount of time.

More soon…