Cause and Effect

So a little over a year ago I wrote a little 20-minute play called Cause and Effect, which was about two kids sitting in a psychologist's waiting room and was really an experiment in dramatic arcs and which I never expected to go anywhere. And it didn't, but my friend Caleb who is so often my co-conspirator on everything fell in love with one of the characters and begged that he get to play him, one way or another.

Fast forward to last Friday night.

"ALIZA, I NEED A MONOLOGUE FOR FORENSICS COMPETITION."

"OKAY, WHEN?"

"Well, competition's tomorrow... so tonight. I was wondering if I could cut together something from that play about the pyromaniac kid?"

"Okay!"

I was out at the time and he had a copy of the play saved on his computer, so I let him go ahead and get started (note: this is terrible form and as a playwright who expects to be treated professionally, I should never have let him do this, but Caleb is one of my best friends and I knew I'd be getting final say on how the piece worked when I got home, so there was no harm in letting him do the basic assembly.) Later, when I got home, he showed me what he had so far and I realized I was going to need to do a bit of footwork - Cooper's arc in the original one act is the less intense of the two characters, but his intermediate monologues are better. So I did some adjusting, wrote him a new ending, and sent him on his way.

So how did Caleb do with his competition monologue that we tossed together in, oh, half an hour, tops?

"I'm reading instead of memorized, which I think I'll get knocked down two places for... So I'm aiming for third."

So what does this brilliant, overmodest child do? HE TAKES FIRST. What the hell, Caleb. So of course my reaction is to demand he send me a video of his award winning performance, or barring that, a re-creation. What's he do?

"Okay so I was going kind of fast because acting for my parents makes me nervous and I'm in my pajamas but HERE."

Oh Caleb....

Anyways, that's how this dastardly duo stole first at forensics competition.

Awkward turtle?

The guy who lives next door to me can never remember my name right, which is awkward because he really does try and usually winds up calling me some variant of "Allie." This is only made worse by the fact that I actually do always remember his name.

The biggest thing I miss about freshmen dorms is actually knowing the names of 80% of the people who lived on my hall, and actually hanging out with them.

Last night's dreams

The extremely weird and vivid dreams continue!

I had three faces. I also might have had two heads, but the dream was inconsistent. One of the faces didn't really do anything, but the other had a jaw that grew from somewhere behind my ear (I know because in my dream I kept reaching back to feel the bone). It was extremely painful to open that mouth, but that face kept trying to open its mouth and I couldn't stop it.

Also the other two faces may have been conspiring to take over my head.

Also no one mentioned these extra faces I'd sprouted, so either everyone else had three faces and I couldn't see them, or else only I could see my three faces.

Anyway there was an earthquake at one point and the building I was in did a barrel roll or four and then I went back in time and prevented it by going into a different room, which I don't really understand but whatever.

I think I'm going to keep writing these down on account of them being so strange and vivid lately.

Dreams from Last Night

I have a tendency to have very vivid dreams about my teeth falling out. These are really unsettling because they're generally accompanied by realistic sensations of my mouth sans tooth (or teeth). Usually it's molars or incisors - for whatever reason, I don't usually lose my canines in my dreams. According to the internet, dreams about teeth are usually concerned with your appearance. But last night I dreamt about knocking out a canine tooth which, just based on anthropology last semester I sort of think that canine falling out dreams might be more about a sense of powerlessness. But enough about that.

So in my dream I knocked out a canine tooth and obsessed about that for a while, until my obsessing about my tooth was interrupted by the fact that I apparently worked on a bar at a space station, and I was expected to serve 4loko to weary space travelers. Or, actually, Jack Harkness and the Ninth Doctor.

Um, what?

Yeah, these guys.

Apparently I was out of 4Loko, so I mixed blue power-aide and vodka. According to my subconscious, this is the exact same thing. (In my subconscious's defense, I've never actually drank 4Loko.)

And then the Doctor waved his sonic screwdriver at me and told me I had a piece of the void between universes stuck in my head, and asked "How long has this been going on for, huh?"

So now my subconscious writes self-insert fanfic. This proclamation was about as far as the adventure (which would have probably been awesome) got before I woke up to the sound of rain and the realization that it was ten AM. I was kind of bummed, I was really looking forward to galavanting around the universe with two handsome rogues! Never mind that, though. Oh well.

Maybe I should watch weird british sci-fi before bed every night, because it seems to do good things to my dreams

Contemplation of a toilet seat.

I'm kind of obsessive about wiping off public toilets before I use them. It's because when I forget, the seat is usually wet. Don't you hate that feeling? I mean, I'm pretty sure this is why most people squat, but you can't get HIV from a toilet seat. (And if you do manage to get HIV from a toilet seat, contact me: I'd be very interested to know what you were doing with that toilet seat.)

So you do your business and dry yourself off, and then you experience a profound sense of relief when you realize that the toilet is a very wet flusher, or else that the nearby sink splashes a lot.

That was probably too much information.

Sanitized Anarchy, and what I've been doing this week.

So I went to go see American Idiot, which to be honest was sort of disappointing. For all the avant-garde anger of the concept album, the musical was alarmingly mainstream. While from a technical and performance aspect it was pretty phenomenal, I couldn't help but feel let down. First of all, any play that you have to read the wikipedia summary just to understand... is not actually a good play. Second of all, everyone got off scott-free at the end. It would be really, really nice if, for once when writing a musical about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, not everyone got a happy ending. Like, why did I just watch Jesus of Suburbia run away to the big city to do hard drugs if at the end he goes back to Bumfuck, New Jersy to hang out at the 7-11 with absolutely no consequences? Everyone got a happy ending, more or less, except for the ambiguously-skinhead ambiguously-gay ambiguously-real drug dealing St. Jimmy.

Seriously I would have watched a whole play about the drug-dealing leader of an Anarchist Cult of Personality, but I digress. The point is, American Idiot is no Spring Awakening, despite its shared leading man (Oh John Gallagher Jr, I sure do love you). In fact, it's not even Rent or even Hair, if we want to go really far back. It's Anarchy Lite, so you can pretend you're being edgy but it's still fun for the whole family. Your ten year old already knows the word "fuck" and has probably puzzled out how sex works, so what's the harm, right? Sure there's some drugs, some beer, some masturbation, but really... there's nothing in here that won't offend your grandmother.

(Well, maybe... Is your grandmother as liberal as mine, who loved Avenue Q? Because Avenue Q might just be edgier than this.)

Anyway, so what's Leez been up to this week? (I promise, this discussion's going to loop back around to my complaints about American Idiot in a moment.) Leez has been hanging out at the Young Playwrights Inc. conference where she's making new friends, doing a lot of revising, and attending master classes. Well, she was, because it's over now and the whirlwind has stopped and she's taking some time to sit down and write a proper blog post about it. (Actually, gonna cut the whole third person thing.)

Anyways, so one of the great master classes was with a playwright named Thomas Bradshaw, whose work tends to be a bit... controversial. One of the things we talked about was how Americans tend to be very puritanical towards sex, drugs, etc in our theater, as opposed to Europeans who are a bit more loosey-goosey free love. The flip side of this is, of course, that Americans are morbidly fascinated by the stuff that repulses them. So we want to see violence, but not too much violence. We want to see sex, but we want people to get under the covers or turn off the lights first.

Which is exactly what American Idiot does. The sex is covered up, the drug use is stylized, guns shoot flags that say bang. For a play that is ostensibly about the Bush years, it doesn't really say anything about the Bush years at all. There's grandiose language, but it doesn't deliver. St. Jimmy preaches anarchy, but there's no anarchy to be seen. Everyone goes back to Bumfuck and gets off scott free. They all grow up.

Everybody lives.

Everybody lives, and I didn't give a fuck, because not one of these characters was worth giving a fuck about. I was intrigued by St. Jimmy, but I have to compare him to Graverobber from Repo: The Genetic Opera, because I think they're part of an emerging class of character... the Squandered Badass. He's that dude who despite not doing a whole lot of anything is just sort of the most memorable part of the show. A character who, due to being more interesting or better played than anyone else, just seems wasted because of their small role. I don't really care about Jesus of Suburbia. He's a whiny angsty white boy. But St. Jimmy - who is he? What's his story? I know one interpretation is that he's just a figment of JoS's imagination, or else an alter ego he invents, but I kind of like the Anarchist Cult story better. (Although if he is JoS then it explains why he's so ineffectual.)

Basically, I watched this musical and just started thinking of ways that, given the album, I could have done it better. Maybe I'm just getting too jaded and cerebral for Broadway musicals. Or maybe I missed the point. I didn't hate the show - from a tech and performance standpoint it was excellent - I was just underwhelmed by the story. It didn't live up to its themes and my expectations.

Maybe when you write a musical about the Bush years, it's helpful to actually mention any significant events from the Bush years, yeah?

I'll write more about YPI at a later date, hope you enjoyed my rant.

Let's kick off the New Year with a belated post about Doctor Who!

I somehow forgot to mention in one of my previous posts that some friends and I had a pow-wow on Christmas to watch the Doctor Who 2010 Christmas Special, which was pretty great. I enjoyed the flying sharks and references to marrying Marilyn Monroe, as it's fun to see the Doctor portrayed as anything other than an asexual autistic savant. I just got into Doctor Who in the last year or so, but you could say it's a series I really like. SO HEY, let's watch the trailer for next season and do a quick reaction post!

So what we have here is the trailer for season six, at least the first story arc, possibly more. So right off the bat we've got what are either aristocrats from the French Regency or Pirates, and also Nazis, and they're both looking for our favorite time traveling alien. (Those wacky Nazis.) It looks like the Doctor is chilling with Amy and River. I don't see Rory in any of these early scenes which makes me wonder where everyone's favorite Roman Centurion/Male Nurse has gotten off to. Amy in a fancy dress with a petticoat... cut to scary black man with a gun and the Doctor... in the oval office, requesting a SWAT team and some cookies.

If these are all scenes from the same episode, I am very curious what Steven Moffat and his team are up to. But, moving on...

Flyover of Monument Valley, Doctor in a stetson, OH HI RORY I SEE YOU MADE IT TO OUR LITTLE SHINDIG AFTER ALL. 8) Flashback to last season with the fez, oh hi River you are looking as Mary Sue as ever. Is the writing team sure this little expedition wasn't just an excuse to make the whole gang wear flannel? At any rate, it seems they've been recruited to work on something at Area 51 (this is the only reason the Doctor would ever be caught dead on American soil - to deal with an alien threat.

So it is implied that the Doctor, in bedraggled unshaven scientist mode, has summoned himself because he can't deal with this shit on his own. Okay then! And then shit gets real! Aliens! Amy running! Rory running! River naked!

Wait. Why is River naked?

If this is a hint that we are actually going to find out anything useful about River this season, that would be awesome, k thx Mr. Moffat.

So Amy's screaming, the Doctor is monologuing ominously, everyone looks pretty freaked out, and we see... a member of the Mos Eisley Cantina band?

ALRIGHT THEN. Bring on season six.