Stone Riley's Blog: Stone Riley's Shoebox - Posts Tagged "grief"
Beginning A New Drama Piece
I did a lot of stand up storytelling in the 1990's, the best of it actually one-person one-act dramatic plays. The storytelling form was very popular here in New England in those years and our threadbare bold adventuring Pagan movement here – with our high literacy and our lust for primary true experience – reached high levels of connoisseurship. In performance, Pagan audiences were quite conscious of the psychic field so even the deepest classic ancient mythic material could be explored properly.
Now just this week I have begun composing another of those one-person one-act dramatic plays for performance with a Pagan audience, the first in all this time, and it's developing well. It seems to have a threshold / verse / chorus / coda structure, the threshold is firmly in mind and it feels compelling. My purpose in the piece seems good, clear and necessary. Several current strands and intimations are coalescing into it. I even put a bid in for performance space at a popular Pagan event twelve months from now.
But this time I am feeling it is different. I could name a string of things, of course, that are different after twenty-something years, but it seems like what I need to do is pinpoint some difference between the 1990's and today that I haven't thought of yet. I'll even bet good money that it's something big I must discern before proceeding from the threshold into the play's first verse. Maybe I can find that thing here on this page.
Alright, something leaps to mind. (Only ask clearly and something leaps to mind:) The youth. Our youth. My guess of their position in the play seems wrong. It is wrong. I had in mind to teach them. That is ridiculous; I must recruit them into teaching me like was done with audiences before. But our youth are tired of us imploring them, imploring them, imploring them, where twenty-something years ago we ourselves were feeling primed and ready for the action. So how to recruit them now? By misdirection and surprise?
A synopsis of the play: It is one hundred eighty years from now. An Old Man Witch, staring through a sheet of broken glass, desperately tries to conjure the spirit of his grandmother in the magick healing arts for an urgent consultation. (We are told she is a young women present in the audience.) He lives in the Good New Age, but it is still an initial foundation phase. People there are struggling with tremendous grief for everything that is being murdered now in our time. We come to understand that he is bringing one of his own great sorrows to this consultation.
The play is titled: “You Are The Future's Past”.
In other words, we must persuade our children of today – sitting in the audience of our struggles – to accept the role of ancient guiding spirit whom our great grandchildren – there in the future – are already conjuring for essential help. And we must let our children of today say how their work is to be done. And this one-act playwright is to actually do at least some quantity of that inside of thirty minutes.
By misdirection and surprise? Perhaps, for there is this: Day before yesterday I sat with an eight year old child in counseling for a sorrow. He was quite surprised, indeed, as our roles became reversed but then he was very helpful to me and very good and I love him deeply.
Now just this week I have begun composing another of those one-person one-act dramatic plays for performance with a Pagan audience, the first in all this time, and it's developing well. It seems to have a threshold / verse / chorus / coda structure, the threshold is firmly in mind and it feels compelling. My purpose in the piece seems good, clear and necessary. Several current strands and intimations are coalescing into it. I even put a bid in for performance space at a popular Pagan event twelve months from now.
But this time I am feeling it is different. I could name a string of things, of course, that are different after twenty-something years, but it seems like what I need to do is pinpoint some difference between the 1990's and today that I haven't thought of yet. I'll even bet good money that it's something big I must discern before proceeding from the threshold into the play's first verse. Maybe I can find that thing here on this page.
Alright, something leaps to mind. (Only ask clearly and something leaps to mind:) The youth. Our youth. My guess of their position in the play seems wrong. It is wrong. I had in mind to teach them. That is ridiculous; I must recruit them into teaching me like was done with audiences before. But our youth are tired of us imploring them, imploring them, imploring them, where twenty-something years ago we ourselves were feeling primed and ready for the action. So how to recruit them now? By misdirection and surprise?
A synopsis of the play: It is one hundred eighty years from now. An Old Man Witch, staring through a sheet of broken glass, desperately tries to conjure the spirit of his grandmother in the magick healing arts for an urgent consultation. (We are told she is a young women present in the audience.) He lives in the Good New Age, but it is still an initial foundation phase. People there are struggling with tremendous grief for everything that is being murdered now in our time. We come to understand that he is bringing one of his own great sorrows to this consultation.
The play is titled: “You Are The Future's Past”.
In other words, we must persuade our children of today – sitting in the audience of our struggles – to accept the role of ancient guiding spirit whom our great grandchildren – there in the future – are already conjuring for essential help. And we must let our children of today say how their work is to be done. And this one-act playwright is to actually do at least some quantity of that inside of thirty minutes.
By misdirection and surprise? Perhaps, for there is this: Day before yesterday I sat with an eight year old child in counseling for a sorrow. He was quite surprised, indeed, as our roles became reversed but then he was very helpful to me and very good and I love him deeply.
Stone Riley's Shoebox
A poet writing essays. Why the title? You know you keep a large size shoe box with all those creative ideas and suchlike stuff scribbled on the back of electric bill envelopes?
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