Vagina Dentata
Christopher Hayes came up to me and told me that he had the Eureka Theatre for four weeks in late June and early July, and asked if I'd like to do a show here. He was going to be renting it out to several different shows so that we could all share the rent on the (normally quite expensive) space.
I hesitated only for a moment. I was still recovering from "Manumission" and was already planning on doing a show for the Fringe Festival in September. I hadn't heard yet if "Get it? Got it. Good!" had been accepted, though, and how often do you get a performance venue dropped in your lap?
I went home and looked through my address book and wrote down all the actors I knew that I wanted to work with that I hadn't done anything with in a while and who I wasn't planning on casting in the Fringe show. I couldn't help but notice that they were mostly women.
I decided to write a play with an all female cast, and plucked a few names out of my list and began to think of the characters I'd like to see them play. Most of these actors ended up being available and are playing the roles written for them.
I wrote the entire thing in three weeks. After a private reading and feedback from some trusted sources I rewrote one of the scenes and made some significant tweaks and excisions. It will be performed at the Eureka for three weeks, beginning at the end of June. If all goes remotely well, I'll re-mount it in 2007 someplace where I'm not sharing space/set/lighting with another show.
The play can be found
here. As always, if you want to produce this script, please contact me first so we can work out the rights.
411
It started in a Marie Callendar's in Fremont back in 1999. I was chatting with Matt Bogen after a show and we were throwing ideas back and forth. Somehow the subject of Stephen Wright came up, and I started riffing on his joke about calling information to find out where his socks were. By the end of the conversation I had the bare idea of someone calling 411 and getting an oracle, and the image of an eternal group therapy session with Oedipus, Macbeth and Banquo, Saul of Israel, David Koresh and the 8-Ball woman.
It would be five years and three rewrites before 411 made it to the stage. Acts I and II have changed very little from the first draft, but it took me years to find out exactly what happened in Debbie's afterlife. The role of Debbie was originally written for Renee Racan, who left the Bay Area to pursue her MFA before the show found itself.
411 was the premiere production of Cassandra's Call Productions, at the Next Stage in San Francisco in October of 2004. The company itself takes its name obliquely from the play, as I never found a way to work Cassandra into the group therapy session at the end of the play and I wanted to give her her due.
I hope to bring it back some time in the next couple of years, as it was warmly received by audiences but as a new play by a new company, we were unable to attract the press to the show.
No need to wait, though. You can read it
here
Get It? Got it. Good!
I was performing in the 2005 SF Fringe Festival and started thinking about the requirements of a Fringe production. No set to speak of, limited lighting, and ideally it should be something that bends the rules a bit. I decided not to think about it too much, but to just take those parameters and start writing. My work with RadioStar had recently involved focusing on starting scenes in the middle of a conversation, so I decided to write it like a series of improv scenes. By the time I got a third of the way through the first part of the piece, I had started casting the show.
I wrote the whole thing in about a week.
Get It? Got it. Good! will appear as part of the 2006 SF Fringe Festival.
You can read it
here.
Pinch
In 2002, Matt Quinn asked me to write a play for the upcoming "Fear Project". I had already adapted several short stories for the stage for him (Neil Gaiman's "Troll Bridge" and "We Can Get Them For You Wholesale"; Martha Soukup's "Arbitrary Placement of Walls" and "A Defense of the Social Contracts"; Ursula K. LeGuin's "Darkness Box"), but this was to be an original piece. We just couldn't find a short story that appealed to both of us.
My instructions were clear. Write a play that was about fear, not based on Neil's works, not science fiction or fantasy, and that would push the boundaries of what we had been doing with multi-media theatre. Also, we were casting the show in two weeks. My first thought was that he was nuts in his requirements. Five minutes later, I had the answer. Nightmares.
Despite my instructions, I took a page from Neil's book, "Sandman". The idea of the waking nightmare, the nightmare that you think you've woken up from but you haven't, was the hook for the piece. The Dreamer would wake from one nightmare to another, each one worse than the one before. Originally, I planned on one dream for each of the nine primary nightmare types, but that quickly became burdensome. I condensed it down, packing them together: Speaking in public combined with trying to find something you've lost combined with losing your teeth; naked in public with being back in school; etc.
initial reactions to the script were disbelieving. "You've written a film, not a play." But the goal was to push is, and this definitely did that. We had access to simultaneous front and rear screen projection, and also an excellent animator and videographer (Ethan Hoerneman), which made these effects possible. Ethan created the animated bugs, the shifting backgrounds, the bluescreen effects for the Hive, and the speed-up/slow-down off the cliff sequences. His most startling contribution would have to be the gunshot effects. He used the rear screen projection to blast the brains of the family onto the "walls" of the house when the King takes his vengeance. It was far more real than I thought we'd ever be able to achieve. Steve Kahn brought in music and maggot noises for the "meat baby."
Sadly, we had to substitute a paste baby for the meat one, for health reasons. If I ever do a film version of Pinch, we'll use hamburger, though.
The show never went off without a hitch. We never got all the cues to play just right, and the difficulty in synching up the light flood and blackout with the whooshing sound cue proved to be too much for our operators. When it hit, it was incredible. But I had pushed us just beyond what we could do. Still, people who didn't know the way it was supposed to work left the theatre surprised, amazed and deeply disturbed. I had several people come to be afterwards saying how perfectly I had captured the experience of being caught in a dream.
I doubt anyone has figured out what each of the dream symbols mean, but I'm hoping that someone eventually cracks my code. Everything does mean something. I invite you to take a crack at it.
Download "Pinch" here and check out the photo gallery on Dan Wilson Show for pictures of the original production
In a Distant Country
This was my first full length play. It was 1994 and I was in the middle of Seminary, writing short plays for use in church worship services when a friend approached me with a request. "Write me a Christian comedy," he said. "One that isn't insipid and stupid."
I was, and still am, a big fan of Sonheim's "Into the Woods", and the idea to do the same kind of tight interweaving of stories that you think you know really appealed to me. So I took a bunch of parables of Jesus and linked them together in a modern day setting. The end result, I hope, is a fun and light show that anyone can enjoy and that has deeper levels for those who are familiar with the original source material.
It's a fun show and audiences responded well to it. As a first time playwright and director I was gratified to hear one person say that they thought it ran for under an hour, when it ran a little over an hour and a half.
The only problem I have with it is the final scene with Tass, which is the only time that the play becomes explicitly Christian. It's not reflective of my current thinking, but it resonates with the original source material and changing it would be a disservice to the play, I think. Besides, unlike George Lucas, I feel like there is a time when you declare a particular piece of art "done" and quite futzing with it.
An evaluation copy can be downloaded
here.
