Last night I went to a  meditation class ~ I’m trying to find ways to hit the pause button on my monkey mind; and our meditation teacher taught (or tried to teach) a lesson on “the insight of stopping”.

I can’t begin to tell you how infuriating it was.  “Stop the impulse.”  “Stop the wanting”  “Stop, stop, stop.”  And I’m trying, but I seem to have an overactive, ADD, coffee candy control addicted, sugar spun-out mind that only wants stories, interaction, distraction and the next thing.  What ever that is.  I can see that it’s pretty hard to find insight and inspiration amongst all that freeway noise. But I’m used to my carnival of chaos; at least that’s what I know.

This morning I went back in my archives to find this. 

Jill Bolte Taylors Powerful Stroke of Insight

It did make me pause and think.  And if I didn’t stop, at least I slowed down (a little).

This is what happens when you write about ghosts; they follow you from the darkness. They follow you offstage. They slip into the bathroom. They cross over from realism to surealism to magical realism. 

Magical creatures onstage don’t have to obey the “laws” of those real lives – they can fly/float/appear in other times/as other people/other voices/other animals/other languages.

And then they don’t always obey the playwright.  As in shut up when I’m done writing.

The ghost I’m writing about now – follows me around sometimes like a helium balloon during the day – and hovers over my head when I’m trying to go to sleep.  Mostly she’s in my thoughts, trying to escape the ordinary.  Whatever that is.

I thought the attached link was an interesting “find” in the natural world.  Of course the images at the VERY END of the(16 minute) piece are what I was most interested in.  They resembled characters waiting for the playwright to bring them to life.  Or, at least, to bring them a strong cup of coffee.  Substance and Absence: An artist shows/demonstrates

One of the writers in my writer’s group goes to the Sundance Film Festival every year, and comes back to share stories of what she’s seen. It sounds like a Harry Potter experience, to be able to see these wildly original films, ready for marketing (or not), and to be part of a small group of industry insiders who get to see those efforts.

What I loved hearing from her this year is that all of the films that she saw (and she only saw a sampling of what was offered there), the films that she saw –  were written from a very personal point of view.  The films were “intimate” and “story-focused” and “emotional”.  Now granted, these are films, not plays. But I think that there is an influence from theatre to cinema, just as there is an influence of cinema to theatre.

I was thinking about that influence of cinema on theatre when I saw this clip on Anna Deavere’s Smith’s new play.  Look at the visual effects for this one woman show – it looks like a scene out of a big budget motion picture. And yet, there’s an intimacy in her writing, and obviously, in the people she’s portraying. 

The Clip from the News Hour on One Person Shows

I remember when I did a one woman show on Emily Dickinson, all I had was a desk and a fainting couch for a set, and some pretty low budget lighting.   (“And lights up.”  “And lights down.”) Would the show have been better served with a scrim projecting images of Amherst, and Emily’s handwriting, and beautiful photographs of the natural world, the beauty, the despair, that she wrote about?  Perhaps, and especially in the media/photo saturated world we lived in now – but I like to think that theatre is also about asking the audience to imagine a cowboy holding a beer at a bar, or an enraged patient at a doctor’s office.

I still think about using scrims with projected images for background images onstage.  But I just haven’t made the leap. Yet.

I hope you get a chance to read this essay by Wallace Shawn; he explores the world of acting and writes about the freedom inherent in moving between roles and society.

Wallace Shawn post

I remembered this post a lot this weekend as I finished up a writing project that I’ve been working on for the past year.  I resembled an insane person as I talked out the various voices: gesturing to the air, scaring the cats with imaginary arguments, figuring out how an arthritic recluse would clutch a tea cup, yelling at dust bunnies on the floor.  But somehow I was in that zone of letting it come out of me, all the noises, all the steps ahead, to let the story uncoil and have its own path. It was a 15 hour writing marathon, and on the other side of it I’m amazed. I’m amazed I drank so much coffee and survived.  And the cats…well, they’re glad that this weekend is over.

Last year I went to a play reading by someone in my writers’ group that chronicled how Kenneth Grahame came to create his famous children’s novel The Wind in the Willows. The play touched upon the difficulties of Mr. Grahame’s marriage and his relationship with his son, who ended up committing suicide at age 20, and simultaneously featured the animal characters of the book as well. The subject matter was intriguing but I had some trouble following the story.

Flash forward to December and I went to see something else by this writer: The King’s Speech.  I loved it and I hope David Seidler wins an Oscar for it.

Maybe it was me, maybe it was the script, maybe it was a combo of both on why the Kenneth Grahame piece didn’t take flight for me during that reading. But I was heartened to see that David had something else that not only is flying but  flying high.

Baseball players don’t bat a thousand — .300 is a good batting average. They keep coming up to the plate, we keep putting pen to paper. We re-write. We start something new. Either way, we get another shot.

How David came to write The King’s Speech is a fascinating story unto itself – he asked the Queen Mum permission to write about that period in her husband’s life — and she said not in her lifetime. She ended up living to be 101.

Fortunately, David didn’t forget about the idea and in the intervening 28 years from the time he contacted her, he accumulated life experiences that made the script even richer.

The King’s Speech in the L.A. Times

Right now I’m nursing some pulled muscles in my right side. I’ve been taking an exercise class at work on my lunch hour, and we were doing as many sit-ups, squats and pushups as we possibly could during a timed workout last week. I felt a weird pressure sensation on my back about halfway through the workout every time I did a sit-up. Did I stop? No. Should I have? Yes. Why didn’t I? I didn’t want to fail. Me. The instructors. My parents. Fill-in-the-blank.

Failure can lead to insight, which is what my aching side is leading me towards even as I type this. Must I drive myself so hard? No. Of course there is a fine line between that and throwing in the towel prematurely.

Back on January 11th, Ravenchild shared on this blog a link to J.K. Rowling’s commencement address (“The Fringe Benefits of Failure”) where she discussed how the very lowest of low points in her life led her to create Harry Potter. If you missed it, I highly recommend it.

Someone else whose life derailment led to astounding insights in the form of a bestselling book is Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame. I resisted the book for a long time thinking it had to be overhyped, but I found it rich in observations and laugh-out-loud funny to boot.

If these two women can take humongous life setbacks and turn them in to inspiring art… who are the rest of us to throw in the towel when the going gets tough?

So I’m listening to my body – always a wise move – and taking a break from the exercise class. I’m also using a heating pad, ice, Advil and help from my acupuncturist. In terms of writing, I’m gonna keep at it. No strained muscles in sight at the moment.

And if you’d like to hear Elizabeth speak, check out her talk on creative inspiration….
Elizabeth Gilbert on Genius

I’m in the bubble right now. A week from tonight I will hear my new full-length play COMMUNITY read all the way through for the first time at my writers’ and actors’ group Fierce Backbone. I’ve heard chunks of it before, in installments, weeks apart. But next Monday is the first true road-test to see if it can go the distance without all of the wheels falling off and the transmission landing smack in the middle of the second act.

I like the bubble. It’s one of my favorite places to be. It’s a happy place. A place full of optimism and potential. It’s where I’m insulated from any script problems that are still lurking out there. It’s where the script’s amazing possibilities are still alive in my mind.

Before cold reality sets in.

The individual sections read well, we got some laughs, the characters were engaging. Yes, I did get feedback on how to make things better and yes, I’ve implemented some of those changes.

Right now I don’t know whether those changes work. And that’s fine. Because soon enough I’ll be wrestling with characters that need more development and an ending that needs more punch and… you get the idea.

Right now I can catch my breath and dream of glorious productions of this baby on down the road – before I have to get out my tool box and start tinkering and rebuilding again.

Here’s to the bubble. Because without the bubble, especially in the future when I’m up to my elbows in sludgy motor oil of scenes that have no pace and cylinders that aren’t firing because there’s no conflict, I need to remember the bubble of possibilities and keep driving towards it.