I’m so beyond tired right now. I didn’t have class on Tuesday—it’s Spring Break this week—but I did have class on Thursday because we wanted to make up for a week in April where BU is having a Monday schedule on a Thursday due to getting Patriots’ Day off that Monday. All but two of us were able to make it to class this week. One of my classmates had planned a trip to New Orleans and the other a trip to Chicago before the make-up class had been announced.
Thursday was my scheduled day to workshop my full-length play again, so I brought in twenty pages of revised material, which was about two and a half scenes. I spent so much time on the revisions, but I had begun to feel like I was just going around in circles instead of pushing forward. Hearing it read by the actors helped though. I got to hear for myself how much stronger some of the dialogue sounded. The section that took up most of my workshop time was when we had the actors up and moving around trying to block out the big fight scene I’d reworked a little. My professor said that workshopping scenes like this is always difficult because the characters are moving around all over the place, plus I have six actors on the stage in this scene. Seeing the actors up on their feet going through the motions was so helpful. Some things that had seemed to make sense on paper were not working out as well on stage because of the time it takes for the actors to perform each moment. Some parts were happening too late or too early, so I want to go back and revise that section with a better sense of the timing of everything. I also want to make sure there’s more reactions and interrupting dialogue since parts of it felt too clean and polished for an argument that leads into a fight with six people in the room. That scene has a lot to juggle, so seeing actors walk through it helped me see the big picture of it a lot more clearly.
Our public readings are in late April, which is way too soon. It came up on us out of nowhere. I need to send my professor a title for my play and a little promotional blurb for the postcards they want to mail out to their subscribers about our reading series. A student from last year’s class who sometimes serves as an actor for our class suggested I call it The Prayer Bargain, after a line towards the middle of the play. The main character talks about how when her family had problems when she was a child, the only way she could deal with things is by hiding in a corner somewhere and praying for things to be OK. And she’d make a little “prayer bargain” as she called it, where she convinced herself that if she prayed about it three separate times and promised to do a really good deed in return, things would get better. And now that she’s an adult and her family is once again in turmoil, she wishes she still had that childhood belief that everything would be OK again if she prayed about it three times. I might use that title—I do tend to favor titles that are lifted from a small line in the script, and it does come from an important scene—but I’m not sure yet. I don’t want it to seem like the focus of the play is on faith or loss of faith because it’s really about the members of the family and their relationships with one another. In the meantime, I’ve been jokingly referring to it as Long Day’s Journey into Somerville, after Long Day’s Journey into Night, one of my favorite plays ever, which is also about a troubled Irish American family. I have to decide on a real title later today and get it and the promotional blurb sent in as soon as possible.
I might go see a play in Cambridge tonight by a student in last year’s class (a different person than the one who suggested the title to me). It’s supposed to be really good and is based on the life of Sophie Treadwell, the woman who wrote the play Machinal that I read at HC in Steve Vineberg’s American Drama class and really liked. I’m just so exhausted though from all the revising and the busy week at work. One of my cats is curled up next to me making little kitty-snore noises. Sometimes I get so jealous of my cats and how they can just sleep all day. I, on the other hand, have copyediting and title-brainstorming to do, plus I need to work up the energy to see the play tonight.