New Work in Progress, 15 Feb 2019

Trinity

   

As I work on this piece, I am going to share the progress in "real" time.  Real is in quotes because, I started a couple of weeks ago and already have a couple of pages of notes.
    Let me go back to the genesis of this new play:
    I keep lists of notes on ideas for plays.  I've been doing this for years.  The list is several "pages" long.  (Pages is in quotes, because the files are digital.  There are no pages.)  Most of the entries are interesting things I discovered during research for other projects, news articles, random reading, etc. 
     When I am barren; when ideas are few, I open my ideas notes and read through it.  Several of the ideas in the notebook have already become plays or been incorporated into plays.
     Now, bits of recent history that seems to be informing everything I write. 
     I joined the board of TILT Performance Group about a year ago.  TILT creates professional theatre with persons with disabilities.  I am a person with a disability... a very, very minor disability.  Persons with disabilities were often characters in my plays before I became a board member.
     I started participating in a performance group called Warrior Chorus last summer.  Warrior Chorus is a group of Military Veterans who gathered, read classic Greek literature about war (Iliad and other works,) and then created our own works of art to be shared with the public.  I wrote a one man piece talking about my experiences as an F-4E (Phantom Fighter Jet) crew chief.  This was a surprisingly powerful experience for me. I had not realized how much my military experience had affected me and informed all my art.  I had always included veterans in my works, but...
     Finally, as a small boy in grade school, I was strongly affected by my experiences during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Duck and Cover.  By the time I was a junior in High School, I had concluded I would not live to be 30.  I assumed that sooner or later, the bomb would be used, and life as I had known it would be over... even if I survived, which I hoped I wouldn't.  My plan in case of a nuclear exchange was to climb up on the roof and watch the end of the world.  In college, as I learned to write, I researched Civil Defense.  As an F-4E crew chief, every war game ended with loading every plane that would still fly with a nuclear bomb and sending it out to end the world.  In North Carolina, where I was stationed, we loaded dummy bombs.  During war games in Germany, we loaded a live nuclear bomb on a plane with my name sprayed painted on the canopy opposite the pilots.  I strapped in the pilots, started the engine, and waved my arms to direct the plane to the runway.  With the fall of the Berlin Wall, I thought the miracle I had prayed for had occurred. 
     I was wrong.
     Trump started blustering about nuking Korea and the warning about incoming missiles was broadcast in Hawaii.

     Anyway, that's where I started this new project.

     MORE WILL BE REVEALED!