WHAT THE HELL WITH THE HAT? - ED BALLOU'S PLAYWRIGHTING DIARY 2017

Friday, November 17, 2017: I’ve been working on the ninth draft of ‘Pittsburgh Steal, my play about a woman with schizophrenia and its effect upon her marriage. I’ve personified the voices she hears into one voice, originally called Tanya, but now called Elan, on the advice of my director friend in New York, who read a draft. I’ve started to expand the play outward, instead of sticking to a more narrow linear approach, having a couple of characters stand outside their scene and narrate to the audience. Since then, I’ve decided to have all the characters do a narrative speech - even the waiter who has no lines in the play, except for his short narration to the audience. First I wrote all the speeches in a separate file - then, after I cleaned them up, I copied and pasted each into the place best suited for them in the play, and cleaned them up some more, depending on their context. I also had Elan assume an ethereal on-stage presence in white  in the last scene only, and instead having her just disappear offstage as in the previous drafts, I had her walk through the fence between the freeway and the frontage road the little duplex sits on - we hearth sounds of her getting hit by a car on the freeway, and when the car stops, offstage dialogue indicates no one is found - I don’t know, I just tried it. The other idea I am trying out is that Dee, the woman with schizophrenia, has her mental illness triggered by a fire set by her husband, Vaughn, on a hillside above their house, so that he can collect the insurance money - the fire is traumatic for Dee because her young son almost loses his life in it, and she barely saves him. Also on the advice of my director friend, I added a last scene as an epilogue, where Dee is 20 years older in a wheelchair at an assisted living home, unable to speak coherently - her son, her only child, comes to visit her a last time, her husband having passed away - at the very end, Dee has passed (spoiler alert!), and her son, Teddy, addresses the audience in one last narration, summing up (I hope) both the tragedy of his mother’s life, as well as the beauty inherent in it. I’ve decided to step away from this play for a few days or more, to gain some perspective on it - so, I have been re-visiting my other three current projects: I just re-read ‘Push The Lever’, my O’Neill ‘Ice Man Cometh’ play, and right now, having nothing new to add - the third play in my Gothic Trilogy, ‘Lake Olympus’, has five new scenes stuck in an old laptop that died, and I am considering when to take it in for, hopefully, a re-start of the computer - as for my incipient play about the friendship between Robert Frost, the poet, and J.J. Lankes ,the lithographer, I went to order a book on Amazon, ‘Riders on Pegasus’, about their correspondence through the years with letters, but the website said I had already ordered the book almost a year ago - and did I want to order it again? - I did have some memory of ordering it, but when the book never arrived, I forgot about it - so, now I contacted the publisher - turned out they had debited my account for it and then shipped it - when I took the tracking number to the Post Office, they looked it up, said they couldn’t locate it, and to call two numbers, one an 800 number, which I will do today - that’s where things are at, although I again made a list of the things I have to do in order to stage a reading of ‘The Glimmer’ - you will not be noticed until your plays go from the “page to the stage”, says Ken Davenport, the New York producer… Update, next day: I did call the two numbers the Post Office gave me - one was a Consumer Affairs number that kept me on hold ten minutes, only to tell me with a recording that no one was available - my first complaint: Why can’t is there no one to talk to me? - but, I leave a message instead, with some details about my quest for my book - the 800 number I then called, assuming it is the Post Office national headquarters in Washington, where the main computer will be able to track my book - turns out to be a recorded solicitation for a Medic Alert bracelet, and when I decline, it shifts to a recording only telling me I’ve won a free three-day vacation for a trip to Fort Myers, Orlando, and the Bahamas - I only have to pay the taxes, plus $47 - and I presume, the airfare - ah, the Post Office - I shall battle on with them - I’ve learned the only way to defeat bureaucracy is to outlast it - talk to you… Ed

Wednesday, July 26, 2017: Okay, I got a short draft out of one of my “hanging” plays this year: ‘Pittsburgh Steal’ - took me the past week - I was supervising tutors up at the College for my school, and as a result, I had a lot of time to work on my plays - and read other plays - as the tutors were either awaiting students, or tutoring them - so, I finished that small book on Chekov plays - I read ‘Ivanov’, which was much in the style of ‘Three Sisters’, but with a relatively rapid climax, with unlikely plot twists involving at the end, of course, a shooting - and then read the     one-acts in the volume - one with the title, ‘On the High Road, a Dramatic Study in One Act’, about travelers at an inn and their interactions - Chekov says so much in sketching his characters through their dialogue - what an insight into Russian peasant life around 1900! - and, again, I saw in all these plays his great sense of humor - and is he loquacious! - as isTennessee Williams, in a book of his plays I’ve been reading since then - Williams, also, with his own sense of humor, great scene descriptions and his nailing down of authentic dialogue between often quite ordinary ( as well as fantastic) characters of the deep South from the 30’s and 40’s - and how does he think up those names? - I deliberately picked the volume containing ‘Glass Menagerie’, as I realized my play, ‘Pittsburgh Steal’, had some similarities with it in the person of the narrator Tom, the small number of characters, and the over-riding sense of tragedy - but how did he use such a simple story line to get noticed on the American stage? - and all his characters talk and talk, like Chekov’s - gee, I wish my characters would do that! - instead, they seem tongue-tied - sometimes, I wish I had never studied (on my own) Beckett, and also the East European playwrights, early in my writing career, as they always seemed to try to say the most with the least number of lines or words - anyway, getting back to this past week’s writing,    I first wrote another scene or two for my ‘Ice Man Cometh’ bar play - but didn’t get very far, and ran out of direction or plot, so I thought, “I’ve been putting off writing ‘Pittsburgh Steal’, as it is so close to me, but I have the time now, so go for it!” - and I wrote 9 short scenes over the next week, edited them a couple of times, and as usual, tried to discern a plot - again, not how to write a play - but there it is, so far - the middle play in the trilogy - the first and third plays having been already written - about my sea-faring grandfather’s life - he only makes a one- scene appearance in this play, to provide through-line continuity for the theme - I have just posted “Pittsburgh Steal’ on my website - it has a picture of a Pittsburgh steel mill, not belching smoke, but standing solitary against a cold blue sky - I spent some time this morning perusing images for the play that were in the public domain, and I chose this one, so far - you notice I have an image for almost all my plays - actually, this particular image appears twice in a row before the text, so I’ll have to fix that - again, I stand at the feet of giants whenever I write (forget about standing on their shoulders!), so it can be quite depressing for me to look at my work, after reading their work - but, oh well, I continue onward (“En avant!”, as Williams said).. by the way, as per the current flap over the potential danger of Artificial Intelligence - you might read ‘R.U.R. - or ‘Robert’s Universal Robots’, by Karl Capek, I believe, maybe a Hungarian writer - written almost a hundred years ago about robots who take over the factory where they are made… Ed

Wednesday, July 12, 2017: Hey, I’m back, after a hiatus of too many months, typing on my new MacBook Air - finally, a computer that responds! - I need to get back to writing, and posting, on a regular basis - haven’t done much in the interim, since last I posted - and the year is half over! - somebody just gave me an old book, ‘The Plays of Chekov’, published in 1924 in England - has a sticker on for $5.98, probably from a thrift store - started reading ‘Three Sisters’, with which I was unfamiliar - I have read and seen some Chekov, and read a biography of his life - right away, his dialogue - mostly exposition in Act 1 - jumped out at me - he makes deep life observations through the characters, while at the the same time opening the scene to the greater world around them - I see the next play is ‘Ivanov’, which I believe is his first full-length play, written at maybe age 26 - I read it about 20 years ago, but can’t remember it - the remainder of the little book consists of some of his one-acts, none of these which I have read -   it is both an honor, and an education, to read Anton Chekov.. Ed

  Well, I just finished ‘Three Sisters’ - some random observations: It took the play some time to get going, and then I could see the plot take shape, and knew the baron was going to be shot at the end in the duel - suspected that was how it was going to turn out, after reading and studying ‘The Sea Gull’ (“The fact is, Konstantin has just shot himself..” Curtain.) I really got into the play as it moved along - my own characters sling lines of words at each other, while Chekov’s characters envelop each other in clouds of magnetic dialogue that bind them together - I kept having to go back to the character description page to remember who each character was and what they were about; I think it’s the long Russian names - I started recognizing the depth and types of humor Chekov sprinkles through his plays, actually underpinning his portrayal of 19th Russian upper-crust life (although, why do they have jobs?)- his humor can be so subtle, as when Tchebutykin speaks to the homely/pompous schoolmaster who has just shaved off his mustache: “I might tell you what your countenance looks like now, but I really can’t.”, or be so outrageous, as when Solyony speaks to a mother doting on her child: “If that child were mine, I’d fry him in a frying-pan and eat him..” - speaking of the crude Army captain Solynoy, I see now, looking back at the play, the lines of dialogue throughout the Acts that establish the conflict between him and Baron Tusenbach, whom he kills at the end of the play in a duel - my takeaway? - reading Chekov, or seeing his plays, makes me question why I have ever been writing at all, it is like looking up through the clouds at the feet of a god on Mount Olympus, knowing I can never join him - and yet, I continue on.. Ed  

  What to work on next? - I can’t really work on the third play in my Gothic trilogy, ‘Lake Olympus’ until I take the old dead I-Book, with my five new scenes stuck in it after 2 weeks of work, to a computer place to get it to boot up - then I’ll get the scenes out and into the original document which now lives in my Time Machine, by figuring out how to convert the old format to the new Pages format - for my ‘Iceman Cometh’ bar play, I only fleshed out the character description list - on ‘Pittsburgh Steal’, the middle play of the trilogy about the life of my           sea-captain grandfather (the first and third plays having already been written), I have written no more that sketchy first scene - the most work I have done these past months has been on the currently titled ‘Print of a Poem’, my play about the friendship between the poet Robert Frost and the lithographer J.J. Lankes - I extended the first (and only) scene several times, and did more reading of Frost’s poems and other writings - and in the process, wrote another 10 poems of my own - then, again read Lanke’s ‘Woodcut Manual’ and an observation of him by the playwright Sherwood Andersen, while I carved out and made another lithograph myself (not very well) - I now have to make more lithographs and write more poems - which reminds me, I’m going to cobble together a little book - a’la Frost’s 1924 ‘New Hampshire’ - with my own poems and lithographs - maybe not very good, but I can do it, just to know what the process is like.. Ed

  A final thing: I am a Ken Davenport ‘Producer’s Pro’ member, and today in a blog he suggested that studies have shown you are almost 40% more likely to accomplish a goal if you write it down - so, here’s my first goal for the second half of my slow-starting creative year - “I will finish a draft of ‘Print of a Poem’ by September 1, 2017 - and by September 15, 2017, I will put together the poems and lithographs I made during the writing of ‘Print’ into a little book to be called ‘El Sobrante’ ”.. talk to you next time - Ed

Monday, March 20, 2017: I’m trying to write a modern myth, based on the ancient Greek myths, in my new play, ‘Lake Olympus’, the third play of my ostensibly Gothic trilogy - I have Greek gods, as well as two of my ongoing characters in the trilogy, Percy and Mary Shelley, Romantic Writers from the early 19th century - I also want this to be a play about the romance between the two of them, a love story - I rewrote the opening scenes four or five times, and cut out a couple of characters - Act 1 is set in Mount Olympus, home of the gods, with Zeus, God of the Heavens, and Hermes, his messenger and friend of man - and then I couldn’t open these scenes over the next few days - my software says either I’m missing an index file, or I have to buy and download the latest version of Pages through the Apple App Store, which I will do on the First - that meant I had to work on Act 2, set down in the Underworld with Hades, God of the Underworld, and Charon, the ferryman on the river Acheron which must be crossed to get your spirit - called a shade - into the Underworld, to do time - I hadn’t really thought through Act 2 - but I wrote 4 scenes for it and sketched out - I’m also struggling with my usual problem in finding a plot - I tend to a more organic approach to writing, like growing a plant - write something, edit, write, rewrite, and after a while, try and discern a plot - like growing a plant, watering it, then snipping off some, watering again, snipping - it’s like I’m trying to shape the plant into a play - I would not recommended this approach to structuring a play to anyone - I wish I could replace this 2010 Apple laptop with a new one that actually word processes at normal speed - and actually finds and opens my files - for research on this play, I’ve been reading my copy of Larousse’s ‘The History of Mythology’, specifically the section on Greek mythology - what great pictures of the temples, sacred groves, and statues of those gods, and the paintings referencing the myths, as well as a wealth of knowledge! - too bad I can’t discuss this stuff with anyone - I am still struck at how some of the ancient myths match up with, or sound like, modern myths about aliens from other planets - like the myth about Cronos and the Titans, who first ruled the heavens and all that was below it - since he had overthrown his own father, he was fearful of the same thing happening to him - especially when a prophecy predicted his overthrow by one of his children - so to solve the problem, every time his wife gave birth, he simply swallowed the child whole, and each of the five children grew to adult size inside of him - but the last child his wife saved by hiding him in a cave, and giving Cronos a rock wrapped in a blanket to swallow, which he promptly did - the child in the cave was Zeus, and he gave his father a drug that made him regurgitate all his children, who then joined with Zeus to fight their father Cronos and his Titan allies, finally overthrowing them and vanquishing them to a remote spot called Tartarus, where they were imprisoned for eternity - couldn't this be the story of two races of aliens battling for control of Earth? - we’ll see.. I was invited to cold readings with some Berkeley playwrights, by an actress who had auditioned for my now-defunct reading - 10 pages each playwright - a little difficult at first because I knew no one and didn't have much to say - but it got better and they let me read last - I chose the first 10 pages of the new Act 2 of my play, ‘The Glimmer’, which I had re-written at my director’s bequest, and hadn't yet heard read - they made various comments like I should write in a more staccato style, and they liked a one page scene where a character goes into an Accelerator tunnel where somebody accidentally (?) turns on the beam - wanted me to write the whole play around it - next time, I'll pick 10 pages at the start of the play, so they don’t hear things out of context - I also bought and read August Wilson’s play,

‘Jitney’, about cab drivers just scraping by, set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I grew up as a kid - turns out August Wilson was only a year older than me and lived in Pittsburgh at the same time, although I think he lived in the Hill District, and we were in Penn Hills - funny to hear references to the neighborhoods and roads I hadn't thought of in 50 years - looks like he wrote this play when he was 34 - it's the last of his 10 play cycle to make it to Broadway - since he had won the Pulitzer Prize and at least one Tony award, I figured maybe I’d learn something - what a way with dialogue, what believable characters! - although maybe his plot was a little contrived, I don't know - but, at least he had a plot! - and I liked the ending, suggesting so much with only two words - I really should see the film of his play, 'Fences' - sadly he died 10 years ago, at the age of only 60 - what a talent! - Ed