Archives for March 21, 2011

I had planned to take the weekend off and putter, but on Thursday I started writing a new play called Brother Al, and by Friday night the words were pouring out of me so fast that I decided to put aside everything else and see what happened. Well, what ended up happening was that I finished writing the first draft of the three-character play on Sunday afternoon, all two acts and fourteen thousand words of it. I spent the rest of the day feeling astonished, as though I’d been struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale, and by the time I went to bed, a theater-savvy friend had read the script and told me that she thought it worked.
Plays, unlike novels, do get written that fast–sometimes. Noël Coward wrote the first draft of Private Lives in four days, though he spent a week and a half sketching out the plot before sitting down to write the dialogue. I’m not Noël Coward, needless to say, but it took me about that long to write the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf last winter, and I was so surprised by the quickness with which it took shape that quite some time went by before I could be persuaded that it might possibly be anything other than lousy. “Don’t worry,” a very experienced playwright told me a few weeks later. “With a play, that kind of speed can be a good sign, proof of inspiration.”
It’s way too soon for me to do anything but spend the next few days sitting on the new play, after which I’ll read the first draft again and see what I think of it. I need to cool down before drawing any conclusions, and I’ve got more than enough to do this week and next to keep me well and truly distracted. But the mere fact that I was able to do such a thing at the age of fifty-five is in and of itself profoundly gratifying.
Not until I started work on The Letter did I imagine myself capable of producing anything more creative than a well-written biography. Today I have two opera libretti under my belt, plus a one-man play about Louis Armstrong that has survived the grueling test of two readings, one private and one public, and is looking stageworthy, not just to me but also to several case-hardened professionals. Now I’ve written a second play. Go figure, and let me know what you decide.
As for me, I’m not quite sure who I am this morning, but whoever this guy is, I think I like him.

I love my new neighborhood:

“I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion; I loathe the country.”
William Congreve, The Way of the World