Every work of art is a message in a bottle, a hope that whatever it is you were trying to share when you created it makes its way to someone who can use it, ideally to make their lives, if only for a moment, a little bit better, clearer, nobler, happier, or more hopeful or truthful, or at the very least, more fun.
Tag: Gossamer Grudges
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Prior to Starting Work on My Still Unproduced Farce
8/7/07 – 5:0? PM
If I do this grudge play it has to be in the spirit of Wilder. It has to seem silly and overly earnest and then cut to the bone and then throw up its hands and say, “Oh, no, no you misunderstand. Forget that last part. I really AM just silly and overly earnest.” It has to ring a bell true and then say, “Who me? What? Ring a bell? Well, yes, I guess I have. But I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest.”
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The Poem that Started All This*
Simple Sympathy
Bill calls because you’re still
angry, not at him, but everything.
Bill wouldn’t call if you were just angry at him.So, instead of walking to the water’s edge to sit
zazen on the spot on the bench someone carved PAUL
into years before you appeared with your dumb ritual— bowing once before it, turning, bowing again to the sound,
then sitting, bowing again and then just sitting
maybe fifteen, eighteen minutes in all weather–you rant over the wind’s blow into the cell phone and Bill,
like a patient boxing coach with sparring mitts gives
you just enough flat punchback to keep you swinging, bleedingoff just enough of your blockheaded hate
for feckless actors and administrators in a rag doll
death dying theatre and mostly your own damned selffor writing another damned play to put on a shelf
over and over putting yourself here,
in front of these waves strangely
luminous, ominous, heaving the sound
in sympathy, or so it seems,
to your simple mind.
*The create date on the Word file containing this poem is Monday, October 26, 2009, exactly a year ago today. Obviously, I was stuck in a very frustrated place. I had just learned that the theatre in Southern California that seemed so eager to premiere my farce Gossamer Grudges had suddenly, unaccountably and irrevocably lost interest. We at NewsWrights United were also starting to realize that a certain “nice” leader within Seattle’s regional theatre echelons was not, in fact, going to come through on his glad-handing promises of resources and good will for the first edition of our Living Newspaper, It’s Not in the P-I. I was feeling fucked, frankly, and very deeply sorry for myself.
Anger has always been a part of my life. Twenty years of Zen practice has not changed that and I doubt the remainder of a lifetime will. Anger is part of who I am. On the other hand, anger is not always inappropriate. Certainly when it comes to Seattle’s current theatre situation, the old hippy adage applies: “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention.” And, of course, anger unshared is absolutely no fun at all.
I didn’t know it then, but within a few weeks of howling out this poem, I would begin planning the essays that I started posting here last December. I suspect Bill Salyers is glad that I now have this place to vent. For my part, I am grateful too to have Just Wrought, but much so much more grateful that I have my Zen practice, friends like Bill, and the wide open daunting weather of the Puget Sound in autumn, vast enough to humble any marginally sane human being.
Full disclosure: I reworked the poem a bit since I first posted it on Face Book a year ago.
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When Plays Pay in Odd Ways
My play The Sequence has made me more money than any other play I have written. This is true, even though The Sequence has only been fully produced once, at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena in 2008, and I did not receive any more than the usual compensation for that production. How can this be? For starters, The Sequence was a commission, meaning that, through a generous grant from EST/Sloan Project, I was paid up front simply to write it. And while that commission was larger than any I had previously received, it was not huge by any measure, and certainly did not exceed the total that, say, Louis Slotin Sonata had brought in by that time through productions. However, once I had a full draft of the script—albeit by no means final—I started getting inquiries from bio-tech organizations interested in hosting readings of the The Sequence at various symposiums and meetings around the country. After a few of these readings, I became bored and started charging more than I thought anyone would pay. They paid anyway. And thus I came to learn what should have been obvious in the first place: bio tech organizations have more money than regional theatres, and less myopia around where good plays can come from and what they are worth.
Now another yet-to-be produced play threatens to vaguely embarrass me by making money through means even less tangentially related to theatre. My most recent full-length on-spec script is called Gossamer Grudges, and presents the story of a family-owned business devoted to “holding your grudges so you don’t have to.” I have been nursing this premise for several years on the belief that it was deliciously absurd enough to fuel a proper full-on farce. All that time I never guessed it might be absurd enough to inspire an actual business.
Here’s a link to the first in what surely will be a long line of promotional videos for a new service called Grudgr, uniquely poised to—you guessed it— hold your grudges so you don’t have to.
Negotiations around my compensation for inspiring this business are on-going. It could well be I won’t see a penny. I am notoriously stupid when it comes to predicting the success of Hollywood enterprises. I remember a phone conversation I had with Jeff Probst over a decade ago in which he told me about his upcoming television show wherein ordinary people would compete to be the last person on an desert island. I remember thinking as I got off the phone, “Poor guy. What a stupid idea. They’re going to cancel that crap in two weeks tops.”
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Put Grudges on your Calendar
Just wanted to give Seattleites advanced warning that there will be a reading of my very latest play, Gossamer Grudges at the Seattle Repertory Theatre* on Tuesday, June 8 at 7 pm in the PONCHO Forum.
For over a hundred years Gossamer Holdings has delivered faithfully on its simple pledge: “We hold grudges, so you don’t have to.” Times, however, have changed, and Horatio Gossamer knows that in this “go big or go home” world, the family firm must grow or die.
Gossamer Grudges is a fast, funny, furious six-actor comedy with its feet firmly planted in classic farce and its head swimming in the intoxicating clouds of instantaneous celebrity, money, and sex.
We will have an amazing cast amazingly directed, and maybe, just maybe the play will be worth hearing. I have been working on the idea for over three years. Farce is easily the most difficult form I have ever attempted. So please come because I’m going to have lots of questions on how to make this bird sing.
This reading series is co-sponsored by the Rep’s New Play Program and Northwest Playwrights Alliance. Special thanks to Jerry Manning, Braden Abraham and Bryan Willis for making this program possible, and letting a pain-in-the-ass like me participate.
*Yes, they’re letting me in the building.