so... i'm in b'bay and it's raining endlessly...
i dreamed of an ex-girlfriend, can't remember which... i have a stomach upset...
i've got travel itch... and i've got a pile of deadlines coming up.
and with that relevant preamble i want to talk about "monster plays"
i have two of them on hand at the moment - Ultimate Kurukshetra and Into Stone
what is a monster play?
a monster play is like an unhealthy relationship.
you pour your heart, blood, guts, brain, sweat, self and soul into the play for years and years and years. and years. - and all you have to show for it is fatigue...
i just did a reading of Ultimate Kurukshetra and for the first time i have hope for these two plays. i started writing Ultimate... in 2003 and the reading was early this month. i can't even begin to imagine how much time i've spent on it.
hearing it read out loud produced a huge sense of relief! and trawling through past entries on my blog, where i've cheerfully announced completion of draft after draft of Into Stone, all i can feel is sinking despair.
a monster play refuses to be complete. just when u think u've pinned it, it either expands or contracts and then u're back to the start - with too much material, or too little. with a fat draft, or too lean a draft. a real mess.
at one point last year i was going so crazy that i was writing both plays simultaneously. and as anyone who has written a play knows, that's asking for trouble. anyway, the point of this diatribe is to reassure myself that - monsters can be slain!
and ultimate... is in my sights. for the first time. in six years.
what's a bit funny about ultimate... is that i can feel myself in it in a rather odd way. i can hear my voice as it was six years ago. it's like hearing myself when i was right out of college and saying - fuck this, let's do something really ground breaking! - which is always the kind of statement that lands you in trouble!
and there's trace elements of other plays in it. stuff that i was thinking about, things i was going through. many elements of crab that i had idiotically tried to write onto it. hearing the reading was like hearing an echo from the past. and strangely enough those echoes are exactly what are screwing me senseless on into stone. 'other selves' that creep up on you now and then.
sometimes i wonder how i mange to connect everything to everything else. and how that same instinct has given me splitting headaches and the highest buzzes while writing. that amazing sense of interconnectedness. that sound you hear when all sound stops. that soul freezing hum that is the machinery of the universe, chugging along.
anyway, its' nose to the wheel for me. and it's back to the most basic test for a playwright. you may have the skill, but do you have the stamina? if ghosts can be slain, so can monsters.
