A. Fish!

“And if there is one truly infernal and damned thing left today, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like those tortured at the stake, signalling through the flames.”  Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

Tuesday: Three - one to fill the bathtub with clocks and one to set the giraffe on fire.
How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
2. Purple

It's an old joke.

And not a bad representation of how my mind works... or doesn't... depending on your point of view.

I hate the times when my mind is stirring about with an idea, but I have nothing solid.  I get depressed.  I start reading (horrors!).  I try to get exercise.  I sleep poorly.  I'm irritable.  I waste endless hours playing computer games.

Yes, I'm back to not having a particular project to write.  I blame Peter Brook and his book The Empty Space.

I was looking for something to read.  I've wanted to read Antonin Artaud's The Theatre and its Double, and as I was doing some looking for a cheap copy, Peter Brook's book popped up as another "suggestion."  I could get it at my local library branch.

I was reading Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, but it was too depressing to continue.  I know I am an artists and the chances of me ever making more than paltry sums of money with my art is remote at best... but I don't have to have my nose rubbed in it with massive amounts of actual data.

I've been snacking at a book I picked up at Half Priced Books, The Theatre of Revolt.  It's a study of "modern" playwriting and by "modern," I mean starting with Ibsen.  I've gotten bogged down in the chapter on Chekov.

I'm tired of writing and seeing "the well-made play."  I love Shaw and Ibsen, but this whole start at point A and drive the characters forward to point B, the end of Act 1 and then picking them up at the beginning of Act 2, where they left off at the end of Act 1, and driving them to the dramatic climax at the end of the play.  It's not that I think this is bad, it just seems to me that even the best plays of this type keep the audience at arms length.  Too often, it's like watching TV.

Not that most of the alternatives have been much better.

And I know that I am not the first person to think this.

I want the audience on stage.