Cold Showers

It's been a relatively quiet few months on the playwriting front - just a couple of silly little plays that I don't really like, and that will probably never see the light of day, and one not-so-silly little play that I kind of like, and that probably won't see the light of day unless I decide to produce it myself. Much of the work that I've created in 2022 was in the first half of the year, in response to the "28 Plays Later" challenge in Februrary, which did yield some interesting material, and fired up my creative juices enough to pull together a series of shorts set in a single living room that I submitted (unsuccessfully, I presume) to a contest looking for multiple works in that particular location. But since then I've struggled with where I'd like to go next. 

I'd definitely like to tackle something full-length. I know that I write way too many short plays (10 minutes or less) and more than enough plays in the 20-40 minute range. This is my comfort zone, but as Stanislavsky purportedly said "Contentment is the enemy of the artist." I need to rise to the challenge of holding an audiences' attention for more than hour, and I need to do it more often. I know that I can do it, because I do have some plays that are that length that I count amongst my favourites, but I don't have nearly enough of them that are any good (I have more than a few full-length stinkers). 

I'm also interesting in honing my wordsmithing skills, and really concentrating on the best way to say things. This blog post, for instance, is me writing at my worst: rambling, incoherent, formless. I'll probably have edited some of that out by the time this gets to your eyes, but I won't be able to get rid of it all. There are better, clearer ways to say things, more intelligent word choices, better sentence structure, etc, that would dramatically improve both my blogging and my playwriting. Even if I'm writing a not-so-smart character, or a dialect (two things I rarely do anyways) there are still better, clearer ways to get my point across. So I should make sure that whatever I pick is something that forces me to do that. 

And finally, I think it's time for me to put a hold on writing comedy. It used to be that comedy was the challenge, something that I could only write when I was in the right mood. It still is that, but I find myself trying to go for the laughs, and the happy endings, over and over again. I need to get back to my roots. 

My plays were once described as "the kind of stuff you need to go home and take a cold shower after." They were shocking, visceral, sometimes gruesome, and many raised uncomfortable questions about things like civility, regrets, misplaced affections, etc. There were no great earth-shattering truths in those early plays, no great moral lesson or other payoff for the few audience members who were willing to indulge me enough to go on those journeys to those dark places with me, but they did have something that I feel has been lost in much of my more recent work. 

So for the next little while it's good-bye, Beulah Belle (the stock heroine of "Gay 90's melodrama" as hilariously brought to life by Katy this past summer in Shakedown in the Loose Moose Caboose) and hello, once again, to characters like Celeste and Brooke, two of my more gut-wrenching creations from Muzzle Blast, a play first written in the early 2000's that we resurrected in 2018, and then again in 2019 (with Julie D. and Kehlar pictured here in the respective roles), to find out that it had aged gracefully, to horrifying effect.  

I'm interesting in seeing where this all goes. In the meantime though, this blog is going to go silent for the next few weeks (I understand there's some sort of seasonal celebrations going on), and then on January 1st, 2023 I will be announcing the Grinder Productions 2023 season! Please check back then for all the exciting details, including how you can get invovled, onstage or off, in next year's plays.