A Play as Collage

Lately i've been thinking of writing a play in the form of a collage, using excerpts from other plays i've written along with some new material, but without a plot made up of a fixed set of characters. My influence here is contemporary dance, which often consists of assorted solos, duets, trios, etc without any obvious narrative thread, but which holds the audience's attention through its emotional changes and underlying themes. I want to do something similar but with dialogue as the basic material rather than movement, although i can imagine some choreography involved too, just as dance sometimes uses text. And as in dance, i will repeat certain scenes, or "scenelets" (for they might be only a few lines long — or even just one line), with variations, and i might just insert a poem for a "solo." The cast might consist of anywhere from three to seven actors playing the various "roles," which the audience would not necessarily recognize as specific, naturalistic characters.

A Pond in The Ramble, Central Park, NYC, 2010

One thing i like about this idea is that it doesn't compete with movies or TV, which do a much better job of creating the illusion of reality, just as painting can no longer compete with photography. And if a representation of "reality" — Naturalism — is not the intention, then something else can be focused on, such as pure emotional interaction. Or so i imagine.

I also like the idea that i can "redeem" bits of things i've written before that never saw the light of a stage, while at the same time including new "stuff," without having to make a whole script out of each thing. (I say "stuff," "bit" and "thing" in reference to snippets of dialogue.) To find this prima materia, to use an alchemical term, i look through old manuscripts and just take whatever seems striking to me, as a first step to making "gold" (see yesterday's post).

What i don't like about this idea is that theatrical productions are very difficult and expensive to stage and usually never recover the costs of doing them. That's why i usually prefer simply doing solo improvs on a bare stage. Still, the writer in me keeps demanding that i create something a little more permanent, like a script, that will remain after i'm dead, not that it will matter to me then. (I note that the Moon entered Scorpio, which is associated with death, just before i started writing this entry.)