If you were sitting in a fire,
Which direction would you face?
East is the obvious answer,
Back against the sunset
Waiting for night.
Author: Franklyn Monk
“A Throne!”
“You, you,” he points at you,
“You can’t be in my audience,”
And collapses.
There are no stagehands here
To shuffle away his bones,
“It’s a one man show!”
He now understands his mistake,
But he’s proud of shrinking
The universe down to a man.
Who does that?
“The Artist!” he’ll inevitably cry
And laugh because it’s ludicrous.
“I took tickets too.”
And he cleaned the aisles
And he built you a throne
With cheesecloth and cardboard,
“And my soul!” Yes, yes, of course.
And there now you are
In the throne he constructed
And he’s not ready to be seen or heard
“Or exist!” No, no, of course.
Fragment
The day begins in despair.
The day begins with loss and sorrow.
No, I have that wrong. The day never ends.
It’s constant despair playing out
of a damaged reel-to-reel.
The Play Must Go On
Goddamn it. Theatre is a collaborative art and the most egalitarian. It’s those aspects that I’m having to come to grips with.
To be specific I’m talking of the writer-director-actor triad. Together we become, like god, responsible for making and learning from creation.
I want to get lazy, throw up my hands and accuse Kaufman of dropping the ball, of failing to develop the characters. But that’s a novelist’s job, not a playwright’s. In the theatre that role is handled by a triad. A tribunal.
That committee had better be empathetic, passionate, and dedicated to learning and creating.
I think we are.
But it’s nerve-wracking, and I feel powerless. My last collaborator bailed. Left me holding, and I couldn’t complete the play without her.
So, yeah, I have some trust issues…and the collaborative aspect of theatre freaks me out.
It’s like this.
The writer splits early, and all we are left with are words, and it takes talking to figure out what they mean. It takes the interplay of sharp accepting passionate minds to come together.
Don’t bail on me.
You heard it here first.
In the future the guardians will give away music, but mastered at such a low level you can’t hear it on a windy day. And all of the days will be windy.