in which the poet writes a play

Today, riding the inspiration of the past week's spooky theater going shenanigans, I wrote the first scene in a spooky play. I did not write another poem for my american cyclorama manuscript, which sits currently at about 30 pieces give or take. I did not work further on the horror essay project I am thinking may eventually be a book on writing horror poems, or maybe just the horror, itself, of writing poems. Instead, something new was emerging that may or may not be a thing just yet. A small kernel before turning to paid freelance or press work for the day. Last night, in bed, an idea for dramatic subject matter occurred to me, so over coffee, instead of starting the day's poem, which I am back to penning first thing while my head is still fresh. While writing a play as a whole feels huge and foreboding, I told myself as I followed the scent of coffee out to the dining room that doubles as my studio/office, I could start small. Like a seed. Like a poem. One scene. The opening scene. I could perhaps write it, not in torrent (which is how I usually approach the fiction I am never satisfied with.) Like a small fire that I could fan the flames. 

In some ways, this makes sense. Perhaps even more sense than writing in other genres.  In high school, I had always been more literary than theatrical. Outside of a junior high drama class, that I only remember involved fun field trips to productions and a Debbie Gibson lip-syncing incident caught tragically on video tape by the teacher, I managed to get through grades 9-11 without so much as setting foot in a theater. In high school, I was all about writing--I wrote rambling editorials on environmental issues. Penned essays for contests on legal issues and activism. I loved, but struggled through, Shakespeare monologues in English class. Through classroom readings of Miller's The Crucible and myriad other plays read by all midwest highschoolers as the 90s dawned. 

The summer before my senior year, I received a call from the JHS vice-principal, who was apparently tending to clerical tasks during thin summertime staffing. He informed me that my chosen schedule, which included a couple of science courses I wanted (I intended a career in marine biology and had already begin applying to programs for early admission the previous spring) was not working oyt. Certain classes, like Honors Senior English and 4th year French, conflicted with those courses and did I want to choose some other possible electives that first into the first two periods of the day--the only ones I had open.  He read off a list of options, which included a first period Computer Applications course, which deserves a whole blog entry of its own about the dawn of my experience with tech. Second period, the other options were pretty much a wash, but they were offering 1st year drama. He suggested that while it was a freshman class, it would be be my first drama semester, so he was sure it would be fine. 

When I arrived in class, held in desks lined on the stage in the school auditorium facing the back wall, I realized my mistake. While the teacher was happy to have a senior in a first year class, I was surrounded by a bunch of 14 year olds, the result was I spent a lot of time helping the teacher--grading papers and essentially serving as a TA.  This not only helped an overworked drama teacher, but some of the time, allowed me to skip out on more mundane classes during other periods. Within the first couple of weeks, she suggested I might want to audition for the fall play, a production of an older play The Curious Savage.  Somehow, I landed one of the lead roles. I was bitten. Within a couple months, I was considering ditching my science career plans and contemplating a career as a Broadway star.  I was, of course, probably a terrible singer, and my only training was loud renditions of Les Miz in my bedroom with the door closed, but I was hooked. I wondered how my life may have been different if I had started earlier as a freshman. How that would have molded my high school experiences altogether differently.  Even in that one year, we did many things that I would have loved to be doing all along--field trips to shows in Chicago, theater conferences downstate.  Hilariously, even some playwriting things--workshops on drama and an entry in a one-act contest for high schoolers. I wrote a play about fairy tale characters and courtroom litigation that I think was meant to be funny and satirical. A year later, they sent me an honorable mention certificate I still have tucked in my writing scrapbook I kept religiously pre-internet.  

Mind you, I had already been writing poems for a couple years at this point. I think my first was a class exercise sophomore year. The same year I received the blue locked diary I would continue to fill, along with loose sheaths of poems on pen-pal stationery and lined notebook paper. Poetry, even then, was more amorphous. Or at least the idea of "being a poet." Plays, however, were something tangible and living. Something you could sink your teeth  and fingers into. that entire year, I was mired in theater, from early morning classes and scenes to after school rehearsals for the spring musical, which fond me in the chorus of Once Upon a Mattress. Theater opened up into more friend groups, but also closed off others. Nights spent in rehearsals meant I had less leisure time outside it. Theater was already becoming something which rewarded but also consumed. By the time I graduated that spring, I had set my eyes back more firmly to science and college in North Carolina in the fall. While writing was something I already knew I would probably never stop doing (for one thing, I was good at it and had formed some of my identity around being a word person, I set theater aside, though in off moments, I remember feeling a certain pull. There were productions I attended alone at UNCW because no one in my small circle of roomates and classmates wanted to or could go. 

When I gave up my science career dreams and retuned to the midwest the second semester, I enrolled in some lit and other courses at the community college, which just happened to have a rather healthy theater department, including yearly Shakespeare productions and an outdoor summer musical series that I believe is still packing them in today. One of my classes was a seminar in Dramatic Lit, in which we read all the classic curriculum circa 1993. The Greeks, down through some Shakespeare and later more contemporary authors like O'Neil and Williams. By the time I enrolled back in a 4 year program in lit at RC, I was ready for a whole class devoted to Shakespeare. 

I was feeling an itch to get back into theater, and RC actually had a similarly vigorous program with many offerings each year, both faculty and student developed. I took a directing class, which turned into a two-semester ordeal of having to recast my scenes due to flaky actors, Later, there were acting classes and more drama history, both in the English Dept. and the Theater Dept, which I would straddle the next two years, though not as a performer, but a backstage tech. Again, the the theater crowd formed my primary friend group in those years. I enrolled in a class usually for majors, that helped build costumes and sets. I served as everything from a costume mistress to stage manager for a large musical. Lightboard, sound, spotlight operator. Based on those experiences was even invited to work on a community production, a rather harrowing experience where the actors were still blowing their lines on opening night (which made running light and sound cues horrifying.)  

I was paid for helping backstage for touting dance productions and actually made one of my first paychecks this way, though most of the time it was for free (the other was for helping proofread an English Dept. faculty's anthology on southern women writers.  For the next three years, I spent my nights at rehearsals, which sometimes stacked up to the entire night when you added student productions to the mix. When I look back at my handwritten journals from them, I was stressed and sick a lot of the time, but I was also having fun. I have since realized that while being a stage manager responsible for every detail of a production was something I was weirdly good at, I'm not sure it was good for me.  But one of the coolest things was a non-credit dept, offering that involved, 2-3 times per semester, transport into the city to see performances of plays and musicals.   

I was of course, still writing poems then. And stories. My classes were mostly lit and theater by the last couple years, a time that felt hard, but I realize in hindsight was quite idyllic in a way you never get back to once capitalism and the work world gets its hooks in you. Even in summer, I would be on campus in the large and echoey black box theater working on student productions. When i talked to other theater people, ow when asked by people who expressed interest, I told them I might be a playwright, which would combine the stage and writing perfectly.  Or maybe a dramaturg, to indulge my love of research, which was already apparent. So it was perhaps a little strange that I would not set foot on or backstage again. Nor would I even see many staged performances after those first couple of years for two decades. 

I graduated in the spring of 1997 and moved rather quickly to the city for grad school starting that fall. Several of the classes I took at DePaul were drama-centered, and I went to a few stage performances, usually with comped tickets handed off by the university or my teachers to places like Steppenwolf and Victory Gardens, which was right around the corner and a couple blocks from where I lived then. I took several classes during those two years with the department drama expert, who would actually later write me a recommendation when I decided to get my MFA in Poetry. There were courses in Women Playwrights and Contemporary Stage Plays and it was exciting to be in a city that was so flush with theatrical offerings even if I couldn't afford tickets to them yet. I was still unsure what I wanted to be when I grew up, but theater seemed like a hard road (funny since I ultimately chose one of the hardest roads when I decided to pursue a career as a poet. I explored many options, however, stage tech programs, dramaturgical studies, performance studies Ph.Ds. 

The world you launch into, however, as we all know, forms your path. By the time I finished my degree and moved back to Rockford to find a job, things were already apparent that theater was something you had to go all in on. The last thing one wanted was to spend the day toiling in a grade school library, exhaustive but rewarding work and then sit another 3-4 unpaid hours in rehearsal each night.  I still saw a few shows, returned for a few productions at RC and got tickets for the annual Shakespeare offerings at RVC. A year or so later, when I moved back to the city and started working at Columbia, I had neither money nor free time for seeing shows on stage. Outside of a few events, like burlesque shows or cabaret acts, I would not set foot inside an actual theater for a long while, even as just a member of the audience. On weekends, I was either working at the library or too exhausted for much going out, nor did I have extra income to enjoy Chicago's ample stage offerings. Or even someone else to go with given friends that were primarily writers in other genres and librarians. My relationships, though many through the years, felt like stolen time. Lunches. Trysts. Occasional sleepovers. But mostly I was alone. While going to films solo was something I relished, stage shows seemed strange to witness alone, how could one digest the show without someone to talk about it with afterwards.  

Enter J, of course, who changed everything. While his schedule  in the first 8 years years we dated, was as messy as my own, he was a performer, both as an office manager for a local acting school (and a woefully mistreated and overworked one at that) and a part-time DJ. By the time we had both launched ourselves into self-employment circa 2022-23, and had free nights during the week (when tickets are always more affordable and easier to get for high-demand shows)  we decided to start going to see things regularly.  Suddenly, I was factoring pricey Broadway tour seats into our monthly budget and creating indexed lists of offerings at professional, community, and collage productions in the city and envrions.  You could say I was ensnared again. The past couple of years, we've seen so many shows locally--largely musicals, but also plays, including a slew of horror and gothic-toned ones this fall that have put these seeds in my head for the possibilities of horror writing for the stage. This somehow fittingly combines several and all of my loves in one place. We will see what comes of it...

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