Last page of catchup: a letter

This is based on something a flm director mentioned when talking about writing to Voirrey about an interview. She wrote a polite refusal. I like the idea of this being a way to shoehorn a monologue into the thing.

18 August 2011

VOIRREY voice over as CREATIVE TYPE reads a letter.

VOIRREY: Dear Hamilton.

I write this letter with some trepidation, as I write most of these letters and all too frequently. One

of the curses of being a voter with a name like mine is that I can be located with a little trouble

and a lot of leg work. I presume that the rolls are searchable online now?

As for your very polite request for an interview, I must decline. No, thank you. I cannot help you much with your production. I am old and the memory of those events nearly sixty (or is it seventy?) years ago grows ossified with the passing years. Questions beyond the barest facts I fear will be useless. I fail to remember much of the events. My father was the diaryist and I find travelling to the past painful and frustrating. Was I ever that young? Ever that innocent? I shudder at the very thought.

[[new thought 10/30/2011: "I fail to remember much of the times to begin with let alone those particular events]]

I am not and have never been insane despite the constant implication and outright accusations of many over the years. The events of those years have left a persistant taint throughout my life and have closed many options to me.

Also, I refute claims thagt my father abused me. He was strict but I have no doubts that he love me, my Ma and my older brother and sister. Regarding the insinuation of both Mr Price and Mr Nandor, how can I refute a negation except to say they read too much into a stressful time of our life.

I will not stop you in what you propose to do. Suffice to say I am not interested in knowing how your endeavour goes and have no wise to find out.

Before I sign off I will simply say this: most all of the events are true and to the record I can add nothing. Please understand I will not reply further.

Yours sincerely, Voirry Irving.

P.S. Please do not give my address to others

Voirrey dies. Notebook catchup

Another scene, written at my job during breaks. Rereading it, I think I need to make Voirrey a little more strident, the dialogue even more oblique. Some of it is too expository when more information can be revealed later in the play. I really need to work on the Priest and giving him a definite platform. As I'm re-learning, there are many flavours of Christianity. In the early scenes the characters outside the main mongoose story are our entry into it.

9 August 2011

Voirrey Dies

In darkness.

GEF (Repeats): Pop goes the Weasel.

An old (80+ years) Voirrey in bed.

Anglican Priest sits beside bed.

VOIRREY: A monkey chased a weasel.

Voirrey chuckles.

PRIEST: Voirrey, are you afraid?

VOIRREY: Afraid?

Beat

I'm terrified. I look back over my life and it is a load of regrets with one shining moment of

importance.

* * *

OLD VOIRREY: The entire world was watching us and I, we, were witnesses to something huge.

Pause

PRIEST: What did you witness?

VOIRREY: A diabolic miracle. A malignant blessing. A weasel in hen's clothing.

Pause

VOIRREY: A stream appeared which both quenched and drowned. I have no other way to describe what happened to us. To our family.

PRIEST: You told me once you grew up on Isle of Man. I have heard tales of the fair folk and their giftss that are as much curse as boon.

VOIRREY: Aye, the walls are thin there on the island.

Beat

I think you know more about my past than you let on.

PRIEST: I thought it impolite to say.

Pause

PRIEST: Have you made your peace with it?

VOIRREY: Hell no.

Silence

PRIEST: Well, that's that, then. Do you wish you had?

VOIRREY: Only every day. I wish I could put it behind me. I've had many opportunities.

VOIRREY: I should have put it all behind me. I could have at any time.

PRIEST: It can be hard to move on, but you did.

VOIRREY: No, I didn't. I ran. I ran from it all. The teasing, the media, the family and him.

PRIEST: Who? Your dad?

Voirrey laughs.

VOIRREY: Oh no, not him. Not him at all.

Beat

Well, maybe him a little. I meant Gef. Gef, it was, I ran from.

PRIEST: Why him?

VOIRREY (mimics): Why him? Why him?

PRIEST: You're avoiding the question.

VOIRREY: I am? Yes, I am. Why him? He cracked the world wide open. Everything hurt after that.

Pause.

VOIRREY: Everything.

PRIEST: Voirrey? Do you love him still?

Voirrey nods.

PRIEST: Shall we pray together? Shall we pray for him too?

Voirrey nods.

VOIRREY: Yes.

The Priest gently takes her hand.

As the Priest talks, Voirry gets stiller and stiller until she is no longer moves.

PRIEST: Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Snip goes the prayer.

PRIEST: Amen.

He holds Voirrey's hand a little longer

then he gently fold her hands across her chest

and closes her eyes.

There s a large thump overhead and a high pitched keening wail.

PRIEST: What on earth is that?

Silence.

PRIEST: Bloody dogs.

Black.

***

VOIRREY: Do we ever really die, father?

PRIEST: I don't know what happens when we die. I put my hands of Jesus on that score.

VOIRREY: Will I be saved? I don't think I will.

PRIEST: Have you lived a good Christian life?

VOIRREY: And what would that be?

PRIEST:

Catchup, from notebooks

So this is a dump from my notebook. I wrote most of these while at work.

This post is a long list of title ideas. I think I settled on "So said the Mongoose" as the most likely option. Some of them betray their influences to me. Some are close to Lovecraft stories ('The Mongoose in the Wall') while others have escaped from roleplaying game modules ("Death Memory Mongoose").

8th May 2011

The Mongoose Play

Playing Mongoose

The 5th Dimension

A Girl and Her Ghost

Mongoose Fidelis

Isle of Mongeese

Ghost Island

Voirrey's Ghost

Echoes of Angels

The Scratch

Scratches

Keeping Score

Echoes in the Wall

Behind the Walls

Beyond the Wall

Behind Locked Walls

Ghost Rat

Echo Rat

Voirrey's Echo

Echo Miracle

Miraculous

Ghost of Time

Echoes of Time

The Shadow of the Mongoose

The Shadow of the Rat

The Ghost's Shadow

Planet Mongoose

The Shadow on the Wall

The Shadow in the Wall

Voirrey has two Shadows

The Shade at Cashen

8th Wonder

Voirrey at Cashen's Gap

The Life of a Haunted Girl

Walled In

Echoes in the Walls

Mongoose Sub-Protector

Ghost Farm

Spook Farm

Voirrey's Spooked

Voices Beyond the Wall

Spoken Wall

Bound House

The Black Urn

Crop

Shadows on the Wall

Death Comes to Cashen

Death and the Mongoose

Death and the Rodent

Death Memory Mongoose

Voirrey, said the Mongoose

Love Death said the Mongoose

I protect, said the Mongoose

We All Died, said the Mongoose

I Live in Memory said the Mongoose

I am Memory, said the Mongoose

I am the 5th Dimension, said the Mongoose

Said the Mongoose

So Says the Mongoose

So Said the Mongoose

In the Walls, the Mongoose

The Mongoose Speaks

After the April frenzy...

...posting has gone distinctly light. New thinking for me is in order. I have been writing a little as I travel to the job, so I'll get that up. I do need to make changes.

So a little readjustment is called for.

***

Part of my writing is going to be bitching about not writing.

Next : decisions that people made.

Gef as noir

Spewed from the maw of Leviathan on 5/12/2011

These pages are a mangled mess of ideas and metaphors/similies with a little recursion. Retyped here with minor corrections.

***

His name is Gef.

He is a mongoose. He appeared on a small farm called Doarlish Cashen. How he got there, I do not know. Somehow he found his way from India to the Isle of Man by way of Europe, Britain and then there.

Gef is a little furry timebomb that detonated in the life of the daughter, Voirrey, a slow motion explosion that spread out from the time of his arrival until she evenetually died in 2005. The shrapnel of his existence permeated her life, residing within her and making her existence intolerable. It did not matter that she ran and hid, she was still caught in the blast.



Things may have been alright had the father, James Irving, not decided to notify the world of the existence of Gef. For whatever reason, Jim Irving felt compelled to draw attention to the remote farm and the isolated family. He wrote to Harry Price, a pre-eminent ghost/medium buster about Gef, as if to dare him to come with fabulous tales of the miraculous. Captain X was given just enough of a taste of Gef to be able to entice Price to the Isle and to the farm.

Where do I come in? I am a point of view applied by force to the story as I have read it, I am an ever shifting view, I am not yet fixed on the one path through the many ideas that cluster around the farm, the family, the girl and her mongoose. The idea that Gef is Voirrey's mongoose is possibly a fiction. The link between them has become established over the 80 years since reports of the miraculous mongoose first came out of the IoM (an abbreviation that reminds me of a magical order like the golden dawn (the actual abrev. has fled my head )).

As a writer I need to focus on the decisions that have been made by the characters in this story. Like James' decision mentioned above. Voirrey's decision to stay out of the house. Should Gef make decisions?

I read a list of 10 writer's "rules" for writing Noir. (from http://www.deadendfollies.com/2011/05/christa-fausts-ten-rules-to-write-noir.html) where Christa Faust writes for number 10 (in part):

10) No happy endings. Everyone goes down and winds up either dead or wishing they were dead. If your cool, witty, handsome, fedora-clad, jazz-enthusiast Detective Mary Sue walks away unchanged and unscathed at the end of the book, then it ain’t Noir.  

 This made me think of Gef, Voirrey and the rest. Voirrey wishes she had never met Gef, Gef is dead, James loses contact with his children. perhaps the story is nir, or more likely my perversion of noir. Perhaps. Perhaps?

I don't believe in characters remaining unchanged at the end of a story. That's a little a strong. I don't find the idea compelling and I try to move characters on from where they began. it's possibly why I really like the structure of Pinter's play BETRAYAL. It plays with how characters change over time, and the peeling away of time is the reveleation of the character's actions.

GEF needs me to apply the same processes. That each step backwards in time reveals character's actions. That this revelation shows them making and executing a decision. Casts a light backward onto scenes that the audience has just witnessed and forwards onto future ones.

It can never be as simple, i would not want it as simple as "This character did this because of this other event." I want mystery to be part of these things. How characters act throughout will provide the motivation for their decisions, will hint at these motivations.

The concept of making GEF a noir-ish story is attractive. I love the idea of noir: a person finds themselves, due to their actions, in dire, danmgerous and destructive situations.

I am unsure if this could or shoul dbe taken literally with GEF. Though, it could be constructed around Voirrey's inability or reluctance to confirm or deny the reality of Gef. Perhaps that is the set of decisions that have to be explored? Voirrey is given many opportunities to say hat it was fake and then go about her life, to place Gef firmly behind her.

Why does she no do this? Why does she not cash in on her relationship with Gef? Noir is tragedy, and perhaps this is where my love of King Lear comes in. The tragedy is that the decision that could save themselves is not taken until too late. Voirrey could have said at any time "he was made up," but she refuses to. In the face of many opportunities to deny, perhaps that is Voirrey's tragic decision: to deny Gef is to betray whatever prompted her connection to him, real or not. By denying Gef, she denies herself.

Perhaps the idea is similar to Peter denying Christ. Peter's fateful decison could have ended in him dead with no contact with his redeemer. Perhaps this is true for Voirrey. In some way gef saved her, and to deny him is to undermine that redemption.

***

Okay, all kinds of confused in there.

Next post: a list of decisions/actions taken by the characters.

A prologue, of sorts

The example lawyer from the Beckett directing on paper post
http://alienplaywright.blogspot.com/2011/04/becketts-directing-on-paper.html
has stuck with me.

After I had written the throwaway examples I suddenly realised that the lawyer could address a concern that had been bugging me: being truthful to the real life living persons. What I realised I needed was a disclaimer.

***

ACTOR LAWYER: Welcome to our show. This show is a tragic tale of a girl and her mongoose. Or maybe the story of a girl and a boy who happens to be a mongoose. Or a poltergeist. Or something. It is based on a reported series of events, with most of the characters based on real people. The intent of the playwright is not to smear anybody or paint unflattering pictures. But fiction being what it is, sometimes liberties must be taken. So without further ado, please bear the following in mind:

                    Actor produces a slip of paper and reads:

'All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.'

ACTOR LAWYER: Which is a statement the playwright grabbed from the "All persons fictitious disclaimer" wikipedia page. It would be, to paraphrase an unseen Three Stooges film, a bloody miracle if in fact the playwright managed to have any of the characters resemble real persons, alive or dead.
                    Pause.

Admittedly, all of the above must be taken with a fine grain of salt. I am not a lawyer, though I play one on the stage.

                    Black.

                    Lights up on Actor, now the Lawyer. Standing behind a desk.

***

And as before. The stage transition from Actor to Lawyer is one of those areas where I may give the direction "the Actor becomes the Lawyer" for directors to interpret as they see fit. Were I to direct it myself, I'd probably have the actor appearing informally at the front of the space with the houselights up, and then use the lighting  (houselights come down, spot comes up, say) to transition the actor back into the set to take their place as the Lawyer. Perhaps with an onstage costume addition (doing up a tie, slicking back hair).

Directions are the one place where I can pass some of the fun of creation to the director and actors.

Edit: link!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclaimer

Leviathan

I had been thinking about buying a typewriter since coming to the US, but without much income to play with didn't really want to pay the exhorbitant prices on e-bay. I had left my beloved, flawed Olevetti behind in NZ. Don't let me fool you, I am not a typist.

There is something gloriously physical and solid about a typewriter that you lose with laptops and PCs. With a typewriter you can trace a direct physical connectionfrom your finger through the key, the lever, the arm, to the hammered letter directly imprinting itself onto the paper. The computer is far more opaque in operation: a naive alien from another star could open a typewriter and quickly discover how it operates. That same alien would probably vapourise the planet when confronted by a PC case.

I found Leviathan in the Good Will and instantly fell under it's dreadful spell when I opened it's ugly tan-orange case. It is a beast of a typewriter, weighing close to 15 pounds in it's case. I almost wrenched my shoulder out when I picked it up for the first time. I could of sworn it were made from the bodies of dead stars and the tears of kittens.

I want a Leviathan for quite a few reasons. The biggie: it is solely a writing machine. No internet to parasitically suck time out of me, no distractions, no email, no fascinating Neverwinter Nights or Baldurs Gate or Diablo to play. Simply me, the blank page and my intermediary, Leviathan.

The second is a little symbolic. The typewriter is a twentieth century writers tool, one that birthed any number of beautiful worlds out of words. I am pretty much a 20th century boy, and while there are many advantages to the 21st century's digital age, the pervasive speed and conectivity leaves me a little cold.

A more practical third: it's black-out proof. Like a pen or pencil too, a typewriter can keep going even when the power generators falter. I guess it's possible I could run out of coffee.

And a selfish 4th: I like the sound.