Long-Form Storytelling

One of the reasons I'm hesitant about a production blog is the fact that I wonder if it's really a good idea for people to know the stuff that directors are thinking about before the show opens. I mean, it's never anything *good*. The show could be brilliant. Alternately, it could be terrible. But there's a sense in which I'm the least qualified person to make that judgment.

One frustrating thing, I think, is that we never get the luxury of standing back and looking at our work with fresh eyes. That's the real reason why so many of us have difficulty marketing ourselves -- it's not being self-deprecating, so much as it's the fact that you're necessarily fixated on the things that need to be worked on. When I look at one of my shows, all that I see is a collection of flaws.

The other problem with writing about your own work is that it's almost impossible to document the work you're doing and to actually *do* it at the same time. The blind panic of production week is beginning to set in, and with it that odd, serene despair.

The greatest struggle that I've been having with this piece is the transition of a collection of sketches into something resembling, y'know, a play. (Funny, how it didn't occur to me that this would be difficult until, like, yesterday.)

But then, the transition from short-form into long-form is something that I've done a lot, in the past -- Lokasenna was originally a collection of sketches developed by students that I turned into a play. (And has, bizarrely enough, been recently re-adapted into sketch form again.) Both Son of the Dragon and Broceliande began as sequences of loosely-related poetry around which a frame was constructed. And Libertarian Rage was a bunch of sketches that, well, never really developed a satisfactory through-line.

The reason for this process is probably that every large project needs to be broken down into smaller parts before it can be undertaken. But I've always considered myself a long-form writer. My favorite composer is Wagner, and my favorite poet is Tennyson, for largely the same reasons -- their ability to take recurring phrases and themes, and intertwine them in complex and interesting ways that illuminate the central ideas of their stories in a way that wouldn't be possible on a smaller scale.

Achieving these things, I think, requires significantly more time and focus then I've had for this project. Hell, at this point I'll be happy if people understand what the fuck is going on.