Page From My Play 1971
A page of a play I wrote during the summer of 1971, just after I'd graduated from Davidson College. The characters were obsessed with contractions and elliptical language.
I like the idea behind "closet dramas", which are dramas designed to be read, rather than performed. The problem is, I ran into know-it-alls in college who performed them anyway. My goal was to write a closet drama no one could perform--so the way words were written or spelled became crucial to understanding the play.
The drama opens with two couples discussing contractions, ellipses, and alternate ways of spelling simple words--"we'll" for "we will", for instance, and "colour" for "color". One of my characters got carried away early, though, and started to laugh by first saying "haw-haw", then "ha-ha", "a-a", " - ", and, finally, " ", much to the amusement of the others. But he went too far, eventually contracting himself out of existence altogether.
The play gets better. It had to. Yeah, it was pretty dopey, but lots of fun. I wrote it in about 10 minutes. Thirty years later I found it at my mom's house in a drawer.
When I went to visit Maggie in November 2005 she asked me if I still had a copy of the play. I couldn't believe that after three decades she'd still remembered it vividly. When I visited her again in early December 2005, I gave her as a gift my only remaining copy, along with "Zoo Story", a poem I'd written that same summer for Lost In The Alone.
Page From My Play 1971
A page of a play I wrote during the summer of 1971, just after I'd graduated from Davidson College. The characters were obsessed with contractions and elliptical language.
I like the idea behind "closet dramas", which are dramas designed to be read, rather than performed. The problem is, I ran into know-it-alls in college who performed them anyway. My goal was to write a closet drama no one could perform--so the way words were written or spelled became crucial to understanding the play.
The drama opens with two couples discussing contractions, ellipses, and alternate ways of spelling simple words--"we'll" for "we will", for instance, and "colour" for "color". One of my characters got carried away early, though, and started to laugh by first saying "haw-haw", then "ha-ha", "a-a", " - ", and, finally, " ", much to the amusement of the others. But he went too far, eventually contracting himself out of existence altogether.
The play gets better. It had to. Yeah, it was pretty dopey, but lots of fun. I wrote it in about 10 minutes. Thirty years later I found it at my mom's house in a drawer.
When I went to visit Maggie in November 2005 she asked me if I still had a copy of the play. I couldn't believe that after three decades she'd still remembered it vividly. When I visited her again in early December 2005, I gave her as a gift my only remaining copy, along with "Zoo Story", a poem I'd written that same summer for Lost In The Alone.