"'You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.'
'Perhaps
it hasn't one,' Alice ventured to remark.
'Tut,
tut, child!' said the Duchess. 'Everything's got a moral, if only you can find
it."
It probably
doesn't come as a surprise that someone who founded a theatre company entitled
"Maximum Verbosity" is a die-hard fan of both Lewis Carroll and his
elaborate wordplay.
In any case, I
read. A lot. I always have, or at least for as long as I can remember.
Embarrassingly, my drug of choice for much of my adolescence was pulpy Dragonlance novels. Margaret Weis has had more influence over my prose style than
I should probably admit, and I remember picking up a copy of an anthology that
she edited -- Fantastic Alice --
Jesus, it must have been well over fifteen years ago.
Most of the
stories were forgettable. The thing about Carroll's brand of nonsense poetry is
that it lends itself to interpretation. It lends itself rather too easily. It's not pure abstraction, but it has just
enough clown-logic stitching its outrageous images and phrases together that
it's pretty easy to conclude that these whimsical faery-tales are all about
sex. Or death. Or pedophilia. Or necrophilia. I certainly have my own ideas and
conclusions about what was churning in Carroll's subconscious, but modernism's
tendency to break down literature in the most facile manner has led to some pretty goddamn absurd results.
There was one
story in the collection, however, that wormed its way into my subconscious: A Common Night, by Bruce Holland Rogers.
The tale of an English professor tormented by images of Wonderland the night of
his wife's death, it was a take on the subject that managed to be morbid
without being self-indulgent; that seemed to both comprehend and respect
Carroll's whimsy for its own sake.
As I've grown
older, and found myself confronting death time and again, it's a story that I
keep coming back to. Fifteen years is a long time remember a bit of prose, and
as I've been struggling with the subject again, it occurred to me that, hey,
I'm a playwright/producer. Hey, I bet I could find Mr. Rogers' contact info
online. I could at least ask. All
these years in show business, and I still haven't gotten used to the notion of
people saying "Yes."
Announcing my withdrawal from ensemble
production is one of the
hardest things I've ever had to do. I've spent a lot of time asking myself what
returning to it means. Season
announcements and grant proposals? Am I a Producer
again, instead of just a Storyteller?
What does it mean?
And it's taken me
this long to realize that I'm being too much like Carroll's Duchess, and
looking for a moral in everything. It doesn't have to mean anything. This is a
story that I need to work on right now, and this is how I need to do it.
It's been a mix
of the new and the old. It's my first time purchasing a license from a living
author -- that's new (and terrifying). On the other hand, I'm booking a venue,
hiring staff, and holding auditions. That's very familiar.
Which is all a
long way of announcing auditions for my first ensemble show in four years. Want
on board? Know anybody who does? Check out this link.
Let's figure out the next step together.
