Thoughts on Collaboration

So here's a cell-phone snapshot of Monica, one of the dancers of Mad King Thomas. She's literally chopped up one of my scripts into pieces with a pair of scissors and surrounded herself with language fragments, trying to re-arrange them in some sort of dramatically dynamic way. I find this to be a pretty accurate metaphor for the whole project.

While trying to schedule and organize a cast this large (and by large I mean larger than, like, five people) has been a bit of a headache, the rewards of collaboration have been a pleasant surprise. It's confirmed what I've been suspecting for a while -- that the core group has simply become too insulated -- and working with artists who are challenging us to plow outside of our comfort zones has been a lot of fun. If I derive no other benefit from this project, it's that it's already causing me to reconsider many aspects of my existing scripts -- I'm confident that many of the gags and structural tricks introduced by our collaborators are going to work their way into further rewrites.

One interesting aspect of this project has been the conflict arising between artists of different disciplines: on one side we have a group of actors, who are very protective of the text, and on the other side a group of dancers/mimes/musicians, who regard it primarily as a means to an end. Striking that balance between textual depth and audience enjoyment is something that we've been struggling with since day one, and one thing I've been devoting a lot of thought cycles to lately.

In It's a Meaningless Life (closing this weekend, by the way!), Joe Scrimshaw opens with a story called "Christmas Carol: Year Two." It's very clever, well-constructed, with some truly inventive turns of phrase. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, he's been playing with the material, gradually introducing more scatalogical jokes here and there. Which I enjoy, but I find myself wondering: how much of the work we put into what we do is just for, well, us? All of the careful effort we put into interesting narrative and layered comedy -- are audiences just sitting through that politely until we get to the laugh lines? It's a discouraging thought.