White Feathers Dragging in the Uneven Ruts*

Here but not here.  Now but not now.  Real but not real.

I am about half way through writing a new full-length play.  I may have even found a title. (I keep a list of possible titles that currently runs to eighteen.)

And my new book arrived, Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance by Ralf E. Remshardt.  I read the introduction online and knew I needed to read this book.  I hoped... and feared that it would change the way I looked at my work.

Half way through a piece is not the time to change the way I think about my work.

I didn't want to read it until I was done with the first draft of my new work.  But what is beach vacation for if you don't read a book?

I took other books.

I didn't read other books.

And I only read about 50 pages of this one.  I had to go slow.  Nearly every page held something I needed to consider.  I marked passages.  I dog-eared pages.

But it is not time to digest yet.  There is more to learn.

And the new play has me in its thrall.  I know when I'm doing good work.  I keep looking at it; tweaking what I wrote last week, adding a line, changing a word, even if I'm not adding pages.

And I'm adding pages.  Two or three everyday and I can feel the momentum building in me, in the story, in the characters.  I can sense how the characters, themes, and plots are and will weave themselves together.

And the new book hasn't changed the way I think about my work... yet.  Just reinforced the direction I have been heading in.


*The Swan, Charles Baudelaire