Well, I missed a month didn’t I?
I’m writing this aboard an American Airlines flight home. The airplane is half empty and bigger than most, and a woman sitting next to me is watching The Martian. We’re flying over Vegas. It seems appropriate.
People who lean back in their seats should have to travel on the wing.
Playwrights Week at the Lark provided me the space and time to revise the play with a new cast, same director. With ten hours of rehearsal, I focused on trimming Act I so the play wouldn’t be so lopsided time-wise. Now I’m chomping at the bit to see this produced. I want to make the play.
I’m still without a production-in-waiting. I worry. If this plane falls from the sky, does my work disappear? Will someone put it out there?
Detached from humanity, Skip says,
“Can you hear me, Earth? I can’t hear you.
I pretend you can. I pretend,
It’s a message in a bottle baby.
What I do out here matters.
It matters to someone out there.
It matters!
I matter!
I matter.”
***
T’was a hard semester in Skybridge theatrelandia. The high school play was far more ambitious than anything else I’ve made, eclipsing even the JH [a different] Romeo & Juliet. Having only six kids spurred it to another level, and I borrowed from Angels in America and Eurydice to inform the structure. It wants to be something for more mature audiences. I’ve started re-writes.
My students were ready, mostly, for work that approached adult. We knitted together a story that felt about the now. Much of it takes place in Taco Bell. There’s a boat made of popsicle sticks that takes a sibling to the underworld.
I detest the person sitting in the seat in front of me. The inability to account for the space you take up is one of the more obnoxious things that people do.
I have a couple projects waiting in the wings. A ten-minute play I wrote for a bake-off feels present – the next major project is to make it live and long- but I will also have to start writing a play for my junior high students in January for performance in May. I’ve been itching to work on The Henchman, which will be about the relationship between a trans activist and a gay aide to a transphobic governor of a major state that rhymes with Lexus.
Briandaniel Oglesby 