November 8, 2002
a disappointed playwright
Listening
to: Queens Of The Stone Age - No One Knows
Reading: Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor
Hugo
The last day of school lacks a lot of fanciful ceremony. The egg-and-flour fights were as
active as always, an unbreakable tradition I hope I won't ever be a part of. It's just
that, people have just stopped going to school after the exams altogether, no longer
coming with board games, card decks, and great conversation like the previous years. I
miss that. The official last day of school didn't mean anything at all this year, because
as far as everyone was concerned, school was out a long time ago.
I didn't get to finish a lot of things I wanted done, most importantly the shooting of the play for english class (that everyone else including the teacher had most conveniently forgotten), because there wasn't a time when everyone was free. It was a shame. My second unsuccessful script out of the three I wrote this year.
I wrote another one earlier this year for the english literature seminar. The assignment was a play on the open theme of 'family'. The play I wrote for my group was a series of soliloquies for five women in a family, coping with the news that one of them, a teenager, is pregnant. I particularly liked that script.
On the day of the play though, the lead character (a 50 year-old playing the teenager) decided that she didn't like her monologue, because she was against teenage parenthood. Then she decided that her lines had to be rewritten. Even more unfortunately, she put in the alterations herself, during the play, and stunned the other four characters (myself included).
So that was a catastrophe. Four monologues reacting to the news of the teenager having and raising her baby, and that one monologue from the lead character herself saying 'you know what, I don't want the baby'. It made the entire play pointless. I've always thought that your opinions should have nothing to do with the character you're playing. If you don't like her way of thinking, just deal with it! Don't alter it just to have it your way! Personally, I don't like the idea of teenagers getting knocked up either. And I was heartbroken to just stand there onstage with her, playing my role while hearing my script go down the drain without even the slightest warning.
The successful script was after that, also for the english literature class, a synopsis of Long Day's Journey Into Night, Act 4. It involved four other teammates and myself as the narrator, all of us holding up white A4 papers for dialogue, drawings of props, character analysis points and so on. It was a haphazard last-minute attempt (a silent play so we wouldn't have to memorise any dialogue), and it turned out great.
And now, since I was co-directing the medley play with my script, my affection for it was on an entirely different level. It was so much fun. And all I wanted was to have it finished, on a VCD ready to play later in the future for all of us to laugh our asses off. I don't think that's going to happen either.