But it may come three, two, one, two*

It's been several months since I updated this blog.  My last blog entry was written after the attacks in Paris.  I hit publish, but didn't post on social media that I had written anything.  I wasn't sure then and I'm not sure now that what I wrote didn't trivialize something of tremendous pain to so many.

My life and my writing has been in transition for the last year.

Last summer I wrote 90 short plays in 90 days.

Before this I had been working on a play about my experiences as a foster parent.  The play seemed artificial and forced.  I wrote thirty pages that I didn't like.

During the 90 in 90, I found myself writing a large number of short plays about my experiences as a foster parent.  When I returned to the play I was working on earlier, I realized that I had already written a play about fostering.  I gathered the best of the 90 in 90 and compiled them along with a one-act I'd written two years ago for FronteraFest into the play I had dreamed of writing about foster parenting.

I was struggling.  Trying, again, to force the words out.  To make it be a play with "internal logic."  A classical, traditional play with a beginning, a middle, and an end, in that order.  A "well-made" play.  A play with a coherent plot and character development presented in a normal chronological order.

Maybe that's just not me.

What I have is once again... not surreal.  It's not a dream.  Most of what is on the page is autobiographical... very autobiographical.  But as you can imagine for a play made of 30 or 40 smaller pieces scrambled together... it's surreal... with touches of Brecht... just for fun.

I also wrote a high school play.

And then the desert.  I have written nothing for four months.  Some of it was life (household repairs, health, etc.) getting in the way.  Some is just lack of... motivation... or rather focusing on a different area of my life.  Focusing on the practical, the everyday.  Things I often neglect.

I have dreamed of projects.  I've made notes.  I've done research...
...but I have not written more than a few words.

Nothing has inspired... yet.

But I can hear the Siren's call.


*The Monkees - "Ditty Diego - War Chant"

What is my theory that it is*

I was wrong.

I dream of being a surrealist.

I was bemoaning in my last blog post, and to my mentor, that so much of the modern theatre (this is the spelling I am sticking with) is concerned with the "internal logic" of the play.  Nothing wrong with this, but it is very limiting.  And I speculated that Alfred Jarry or August Strindberg never worried about "internal logic."

I don't want to worry about internal logic.

I was doing the dishes and listening to the radio as I do every morning.  On NPR (where so many of the great ideas I have come from), a mention was made of a book called Aluminum Dreams - The Making of Light Modernity.  What a wonderful title, I thought.  The modern world helped along by a manufacturing process.  I wrote a poem years ago called Plutonium Dreams.  I remember the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick, the book the movie Blade Runner is based on.  Anais Nin wrote The Novel of the Future, a wonderful book I read in high school about surrealism in art, with the refrain "proceed from the dream outward," which I have used as a touchstone in my own work and, which I have just learned, is a Carl Jung quote.

Dreams are important to me.  And, no, I am not one of those people who writes down every dream and I spend very little time analyzing my dreams.  I don't think most, or practically any, of my dreams are important.  Most dreams are a response to the previous day and are basically a process of sorting out what the day before held.

But as an excessively rational person, and an artist, I work hard to tap into my irrational mind.  It is a critical element in my creative process.  (Remember what this blog is about... my creative process.)  Dreams, the waking kind, the fantasies that spring into my thoughts unbidden are regularly keys to my art.

And suddenly I understood why surrealism has such a hard time in the modern theatre.

Real life is surreal.  Modern living is surreal.

I can go to a building in my town.  Enter a tiny room crowded with people.  Sleep through the night, and wake up with the Eiffel Tower at my feet.

I've done that.  We call that building an airport and that tiny, overcrowded room an airplane.

This very morning, I was doing the dishes, listening to voice coming out of the ether, telling me about the making of modernity.  Moses would have thought it was the Word of God.

And then there's politics, or international relations, or mega-corporations, or global warming or... on and on.  None of it is rational, logical.  It's surreal.  The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade makes more sense.

No wonder "internal logic" has become so important!  Real life has no internal logic.  Perhaps modern drama must.


*John Cleese & Monty Python, "Ann Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses"