Last year, I focused on writing, and I drafted four plays – Icarus, [More] Deleted Scenes, Piper, and And Then, She Picks Up the Sword. This doubles the output from the previous year.
Piper is the new title for Knitted.
I am about to kick off the third chapter in the adventures of Carl – previously seen in And Then, She Picks Up the Sword and The Untitled Pirate Play .
In Pirate, Carl stows away aboard a ship – and has very little impact on the plot. In Sword, he plays a secondary character, who loses his memory and misses the climax of the play by being dead for a little while. I love this. I can see the anger of a dozen playwriting workshops as they turn on me – a hero is supposed to impact the plot, of course, and I love nothing more than doing the opposite of what I’m supposed to do when I write. This semester, I’ll be using tropes from Joseph Campbell’s work as base material, and Carl will either be in space or in Atlantis.
The Process
I’m spending the first couple week focusing on skill building – specifically improv and story-building. My tech classes did some dramaturgical research on possible ‘worlds’ – space and Atlantis – and we’ll be using the images, sounds, and videos to devise and improvise next week.
Briandaniel Oglesby 