We read an incredible play today called Hit the Wall, by Ike Holter. It was a heavily dialogue-driven, witty, sad, razor-sharp, rhythmic play that I think will stick with me for a very long time. Hit the Wall is about the Stonewall Riot, an event in 1969 that many historians seem to agree was the catalyst for …
Category Archives: Courses
11 Pages
It’s not good. It’s not terrible either. It’s just alright, but it’s also the longest play I’ve ever written, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. I have not written a lot of fiction in my life. This play, while definitely angsty and almost definitely shitty, is still dialogue-driven, still meets the …
7-Page Regret
I’m 7 pages into my 10-pager, and I’ve fallen into every trap I promised myself I would avoid: I’m angsty, I’m not making jokes, I’m writing about things I haven’t researched fully, and I don’t know how I’m going to end it in the next 3 to 8 pages. Dialogue is really not my forte. …
Medical Plot
That was trying to be a pun on “medical pot,” but that’s not important right now. We’re in class right now discussing a student play about a writer who loses his wife to his incompetence in husbandhood in 1939, and we’ve spent an hour discussing reasons why it’s so great and saying “I don’t want …
I Said A Hip-Hop Hippie to the Hippie
Today was hip-hop aesthetics day in Idris’s class, and it was kee-razy. We spent a lot of time discussing the categories we use to judge hip-hop music, the history behind it, the future of hip-hop, and, of course, hip-hop as a form of theatre. That’s right, hip-hop theatre. We read an essay by a performer …
Framework Narrative
We read a play today called The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones. It was near-perfect: a tasteful mix of awkward Mormon comedy and painful identity-crisis drama. One of the most interesting aspects of the play, though, wasn’t the fact that the title character is a robot, or that the protagonist has OCD. …
It’s done!
And all it took was putting my nose to the grindstone. You know what came out of it? Definitely not anything I expected. But I think it’s something worth being proud of. And that is exactly what I wanted. The Attic Play. It’s about a raccoon breaking up a marriage. And it’s totally worth it. …
Albee Fine
When I started writing what I’m now affectionately referring to as “The Attic Play,” I was worried I was just reproducing Edward Albee’s bizarre, hilarious masterpiece “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” The danger in this was that Idris is way more well-read than I am, so if I was thinking it, he definitely would …
Audience as Orchestra
I’m in a play right now that my good friend James wrote. It’s called Masturbating While Lonely, and no, it’s not a performance piece where you watch me masturbate for an hour. That tends to be the most common question we get. My friend Holly and I are the only two actors in it, it …
Real Life
It’s difficult to write a play. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I think the thing I’m scared to do is write about things I don’t know. It’s infinitely easier for me to write if there’s some element of autobiography in what I’m writing, because I live very much in my head and …
