A little late in mentioning this, but a few weeks back I had the opportunity to see a couple of pieces done as part of an undergraduate directing class at a college here in town. As a part of their final, the students were required to choose a short play, hold auditions and select a cast, and stage the production as part of a night of one acts.

Two of the students chose pieces of mine. One picked up The Restoration and another took on the last act of Idle Hands. It was a very nice evening and I thought each of the directors (and their casts) did some nice work with the pieces.

The Idle Hands piece in particular had some problems to overcome (the text didn’t do them any favors). They played it ‘straight’ as it were — no hints or nods to the punchline. The biggest problem I had, hearing this script for the first time (and a good thirteen years after I wrote it) is that it’s far too obvious. It lacks a subtlety and an ambiguity — making it much more difficult for the actors to sustain the momentum that the audience needs.

Also, it’s nearly fifteen years old . . . so I think the writer could work a little harder on making it a tighter piece. After the performance, I put it on the revise list . . . though not for this year). Coming in 2003, I blow the lid off the question Is Satan The Bad Guy?

As I said. Subtle.

Each of the directors had to include some biographical information about the playwright they chose. The director of Idle Hands — the incredibly tall and fabulous Mandi Hutchins — decided to forgo reading my autobiography for pertinent details and sent me a survey to fill out instead. I have included it here, without her permission. Consider it revenge for her making some unauthorized and very effective cuts to the script. I hate it when other people make my work better when I should have thought of it first.

(As a sidenote: I’m talking about Idle Hands here . . . which is not to neglect Codname: Rizzo’s direction of The Restoration in any way. I love listening to an audience laugh at something I’ve written. Especially when I meant it to be funny on purpose. It was nice to see that the script holds up, long after the Sistine controversy has died down.)

Here’s Ms. Hutchin’s questionnaire and my responses.

How old are you?

I’ll be thirty-three next month, as old as Jesus.

How long have you been writing?

I’ve been writing since junior high, mostly bad love poems for girls who never saw them. I wrote my first play my junior year of college. So, in reality about thirteen-fourteen years writing seriously.

Why do you write? (Is it the money, the women, the weekend trips to Venice?)

None of the above. I write because I enjoy it more than any other activity that comes to mind. Putting words together, telling stories, it’s what I am more than just something I do.

When I don’t write, when I’m not physically getting things out of my head and onto paper, my brain starts to get a little backed up. There’s all sorts of seepage as the ideas slowly rot and decay — into my daily life, my dreams.

And then depression sets in, if it hasn’t already.

The only way out, the only way on, is to write. Leave a “stain on the silence” as it were.

Who are your influences? Do you have any? (Marijuana, perhaps?) What is your favorite work by an author other than yourself?

The list is far too long, writers and friends and musicians and pretty girls who’ve inspired me or fed me or invaded my mind (but no history of drugs beyond alcohol and nicotine, sorry).

Here’s the top ten or so, and certainly not in any particular order: Samuel Beckett, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Dorothy Parker, T.S. Eliot . . . there’s lots more there, but that’s the first layer.

I know you write in all mediums (ie. poetry, plays, short stories, etc.), but do you have a favorite? And why is it your favorite? What is your favorite personal work?

Despite the odd poem or story, the majority of what is given to me is Theatre. It’s just the filter that most of my ideas come through. I prefer writing Theatre to most other forms. When you’re done with a poem or a story it has a pretty limited life beyond the artifact.

With a play, it can be reborn with each new production. And (as someone far more intelligent than I pointed out) I’m only doing the blueprint. Once a director and a cast get a hold of it, it becomes three dimensional and I can walk around in it and say “Wow, I never thought of that before…” Much more satisfying.

I don’t know about a favorite work. Many are very personal and so they hold some small place of affection. But most of my favorite things are either incomplete, unfinished, or unwritten. The reality is that I typically hate things when they’re finished, on paper, waiting for someone to come along again and give them a real life onstage. Until that happens, they’re failures and miscarriages, and all I can do is sit and wonder why no one wants to do them, second-guessing my choices and decisions as a writer as the rejections start coming in.

So my favorite works are the things I’m waiting to do, dying to write next.

One is a long story (or short novel) I wrote nine years ago about an undertaker called [title deleted] and it’ll be rewritten later this year. Much of the story comes from a dream I had about [premise deleted] set in the country where most of my dreams are set: A gray, twilight place where anachronism and slapstick and myth and horror wander about, bumping into each other from time to time. That’s where I go when I dream and, sometimes, I bring things back with me.

Another favorite is a play that I’ve written maybe seven or eight pages of dialogue and about fifty pages of notes. It’s called [title deleted again] and probably won’t be written until next year. So, here’s the basics: It’s about an elderly horror writer named [name deleted] — who may or may not have written a very controversial novel about an undertaker under a pseudonym when he was younger.

Connect the dots however you may.

When did you write “Idle Hands”? Why did you write “Idle Hands”?

Idle Hands was written during Spring Break my junior year of College. I wrote it because three fragments of concepts got joggled together in my head and suddenly resembled something slightly more interesting than what they were individually:

– A conversation with my professor A.R. “Pete” Diamond about the character of The Adversary in the Old Testament and how his motivations seemed so oddly contrived as to make me suspect there was a piece missing from the story.

– Reading about Gnostic sects who believed that the whole scriptures had been inverted, that the good guys were actually the bad guys and vice versa. Cain was the wronged party, the serpent was only doing its job, Job was ill and unfairly used, etc.

– Reading Deidre Bair’s biography of Samuel Beckett and the description of his later years spent in a spare room, moving from bed to chair to table to bed. Also, his remembrance (perhaps contrived) or trying to fly as a child by throwing himself out of a tree struck a chord.

I wrote it on campus, when everyone else was away on break. I sat in the college newspaper offices and just banged it out all day and all night, playing Beethoven full blast with all the lights off and eating canned peaches when I got hungry.

Just a few basic questions. I hope you have time to answer them. If you have anything else you want to add, that would be great, so please add. I would appreciate it.

The only thing I have to add is my thanks for your enthusiasm for the piece. I’m so pleased that you chose to do it and I was very happy with how it turned out. I enjoyed it immensely and I thought you did an excellent job with the staging and direction of the actors.

The things I didn’t like about it were all due to deficits in the script and not your work. At some point it’s going to be rewritten, I expect. I’d like to try and solve some of the mistakes that younger writer made thirteen years ago. Perhaps next year. When I do work through it again, it’ll be due in no small part to your interest and willingness to allow me to hear the words I wrote for the first time.

————-

For the record, I’ve deleted titles and names and premises from the survey out of the sheer paranoia. Apart from a few people here and there who act as my sounding board, I don’t usually discuss the specifics of unfinished (or unwritten) work. I don’t want to wake up one day and find out that someone nicked a bit of something and incorporated it as their own.

A case study: Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolf wrote an excellent, nasty little guidebook called A Walking Tour of the Shambles. Gaiman read portions of it to an audience at a convention last year well ahead of publication. He was a bit annoyed to find out much later that someone had kiped a website/URL mentioned in the book and registered for themselves.

Not a big deal. But exceptionally uncool, I think.

But we draw things out of the air, writers. There’s a lot of things floating out there that are free for all. We’re all influenced by what’s happening and you can’t protect yourself from someone else making the same connections on a story or a premise or a really keen “What is…” idea.

But when you know what something is, you know what you want to do, you should hang on to it . . . keep it close to your chest until the time comes to fix it in form on paper. And hope someone doesn’t beat you to the punch.

(I’m writing this outside on the porch. There’s lightning in the distant skies and a soft breeze is blowing. The mosquitoes are starting to put in an appearance. A truck just drove by and there was the sound of shattering glass in the street. But they didn’t stop. Maybe someone threw a bottle.)

In any case, it’s time for bed…