The Physics of Joy: Table Read, The Second Draught

Time for take two of a table reading!

It will be the same format will as last time: a full read through with stage directions, quick discussion/bio-break/reload on food, then a second full read through but without stage directions.

We're back at The Lake House, with the following cast and crew:

JOY O'DONNELL - Hana Lass
JUDD - Mark Cooper
LIAM O'DONNELL - John Patrick Lowrie
RACHEL O'DONNELL - Lisa Nix
EVAN O'DONNELL - Dane Stokinger
APRIL - Sydney Andrews de Salinas
DAVID - Jared Michael Brown
STEVE - Gino Scarpino
MARGARET O'DONNELL - Maggie Stenson
MICHAEL HUDSON - Emily Chisholm
JACOB HUDSON - Kevin Hyatt
MARY - Amber Wolfe Wollam
Narrator for the first read - March Rogers

Stage Manager - Suzie Haufle
Scenic Designer - Scott Fyfe
Producer - Gino Scarpino
Executive Producer - Maggie Stenson

I am not a physicist, part two. (or, "Thank you, Facebook.")

As I've noted before, I am not a physicist

Thankfully, I have an amazing network of friends and family that were more than happy to put me in touch with all of the actual physicist in their lives. 

The list included one of my favorite actress' aunt, Lauren Likkel, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, and Director of the L. E. Phillips Planetarium; my cousin's friend Gabe Alba, of the Rutgers University Physics Department; and my step-father, Zeke Hoskin, who apart from being a generally witty and funny man, happens to have a Masters in physics.

Their collective help has been inspiring; thanks to each of your for your time.

I am not an 8-year-old girl.

One question that came up during the table-reading of Draft 1.0 of The Physics of Joy was if the character of Joy - who time travels between present day and twenty-three years in the future - should be an 8-year-old girl in the present, or should she be younger.

The feedback from the read, in which Joy was written as 8 in the present, was that her dialogue and actions were more consistent with those of a 5-year-old than with those of a girl of 8. 

I agreed, and in the current drafts since that first table read, I've reduced her age down for a few reasons:

  • From a pure dialogue point of view, 8-year-olds are not radically different than an adult character; the conversations between them doesn't have strong cues to the audience that this adult actor before them is now playing as a small child.  Also, for the actors and reader, I found there to be less to distinguish Joy on the written page. The types of conversations you engage in with an 8-year-old tend to be not too different than a polite or playful conversation with an adult, especially with girls who tend to mature faster than boys.
  • The 8/9-year-old girl in my family has been working so hard at being cool, and tends to be more reserved than effusive.  She doesn't jump up and twirl any more.  She does play with dolls, but I don't think she'd be crushed the way a 5-year-old would be if one of them broke.
  • The stakes feel lower when Joy is 8-years-old.  For example, there is a scene where she walks home alone as dusk.  While it may still be outside the norm, it is not uncommon for 8-year-olds to have liberal boundaries within their neighborhood and/or community.  To have a 5-year-old do the same, even if it's only a couple of blocks, is alarming.
  • And last, frankly, as I noted that while I do have an 8/9-year-old girl in my family, I have a 5-year-old daughter around me day and night.  As such, I kept finding I was writing a 5-year-old, whether I wanted to or not.  This one is actually a lame excuse - I also don't know any Irish barkeeps or millionaire power couples - but it's an honest, self-reflection on a bit of why the character got to the state that she is in.

Playing Joy younger brings with it some challenges as well, though:

  • There is an important event that is happening in Joy's life during and surrounding the show.  A 5-year-old probably won't hold on to these strong memories - even ones as big as this event merits - with the intensity that an 8/9-year-old would, and that colors who Joy is in the future.
  • Of greater concern to me, I lost having Joy's father, Evan, being a child dad.  If Joy is 8-years-old, it's easy to make Evan be at the beginning of his twenties when Joy is born.  This sets up a situation of children raising children.  With Joy being 5-years-old, Evan necessarily becomes written as being in his mid-twenties when she's born - still young, but his brain is fully developed at this point. It means that - though human and capable of all the stupid mistakes any parent makes - it's less likely, and less forgivable by the audience, if he's an emotionally formed adult when raising her.  The Prefrontal Cortex is the last part of the brain to develop, and in kids this happens in their mid-twenties. And this is the part that manages impulse control and judgment.  Until it's developed, the Amygdala handles the judgment calls that will later be handled here; and the Amygdala is purely emotion - it's why asking a teen a trivial thing, like please make your bed, can turn into an emotional eruption.  So while having Joy younger heightens the stakes for some of her own things, it risks lessening the stakes for some of the things that happen with Evan.
  • Last, as my friend Hannah pointed out, it's a challenging casting issue. It's likely easier to find actors who can convincingly pull of being both 8/9 and 28.  Once 5-years-old is introduced, it starts to bring up ideas of double casting and actors passing the baton of the role during the time-traveling moments.

As I've been rereading and revisiting the decision to make Joy younger, I'm growing more confident that having Joy in the present being 5-years-old is the right thing to do. That said, I'm looking forward to the next table read to understand better if it's working as I think it is.

The Physics of Joy: Table Read

I'm excited to announce the first table-reading of The Physics of Joy.

The format of this table-reading will be a quick meet and greet, introduction to the material, a full read through with stage directions read, and then notes and discussions. Depending on how much time we have left, we'll either go for a second full read through with stage directions, or will pick some specific scenes to read again.

The reading well be at The Lake House on beautiful Lake Sammamish, in Redmond, Washington. 

The cast and crew for this read is as follows:

JOY O’DONNELL - Libby Barnard
JUDD - Mark Cooper
LIAM O’DONNELL - Gino Scarpino Sr.
RACHEL O’DONNELL - Lisa Nix
EVAN O’DONNELL - Mike Spee
APRIL - Sydney Andrews de Salinas
DAVID - Jon Lutyens
STEVE - Gino Scarpino
MARGARET O’DONNELL - Maggie Stenson
MICHAEL HUDSON - Jill Snyder Marr
JACOB HUDSON - Jason Marr (1st read) & Kevin Hyatt (2nd read)
MARY - Amber Wolfe Wollam

Narrator for the first read - Holly Griffith
Stage Manager - Kansas Harvey

 

A Taxonomy of Drafts

It seems useful to briefly explain how I label my drafts. 

It is of note that I don't share draft numbers with outside folks; when I submit a work for consideration, I simply submit it without any reference to which draft number I'm on.  This is because early draft numbers come across as unready, and large numbers come across as unproven.  That said, I am sharing my process here, and so explaining my taxonomy seems relevant. 

Draft numbering, for me, is not a one-to-one with the actual number of iterations I've written, but rather a statement of readiness to be consumed.

I tend to start with my first full draft being around 0.5 or 0.6; this is simply the first time I have a complete story done, with the ones preceding those being partial states.  From there I work through in 0.n increments until I have something that I feel is ready for its first table read.  This one is what I call my first draft; Draft 1.0.

The loose taxonomy of drafts for me is:

  • Draft n.0 - Ready to be read.
  • Draft n.1 - Mostly unaltered version of Draft 1.0 with only typos fixed and with all notes from the read/performance embedded in the script.
  • Draft n.2 thru n.9 - All the real work between drafts.

Actually, to be completely honest, Draft n.0 means both that it's ready for consumption, and that I've gone blind; that I can no longer objectively evaluate the quality of the work, and I have to hear trained professionals read it out loud.

Given this, the general life of one of my scripts will be: draft 0.5 when I have a story done and I solicit feedback (collaborators, respected peers, my dramaturg, and - of course - my wife), draft 1.0 when it receives its first table read, draft 2.0 its second, and it is not until draft 3.0 when it will finally have reached the starting point for a staged reading or a production.

But, this is just me.  For my fellow writers who may read this, I'd love to hear your approach.

Movieline: David Mamet’s Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit

In the interest of full disclosure, David Mamet is, in no small part, why I got into theatre in the first place. Mr. Mamet, the movie Harvey, and a handful of talented and influential teachers.

For me, I discovered Mr. Mamet through film; I remember seeing The Untouchables somewhere around my Freshman year in high school and being so floored by it that I brought friends back to see it the next night, and the next night again after that. That was followed by A) discovering House of Games, and B) devouring his book of essays, Some Freaks. His scripts continue to stand amongst my favorites - both the classics and the newer works - with the lesser-known Heist being an annual viewing event for me.   Who but Mr. Mamet can give us lines like, "Everybody needs money; it's why they call it money."

That being fully disclosed, and even if you are not a fan of Mr. Mamet's work, I think that any writer would benefit from reading this memo that he sent to the writing staff of CBS's drama The Unit, for which he was the executive producer. While I was late to discover it (thanks, Gino!), I've found it immensely inspiring. Enjoy.

TO THE WRITERS OF THE UNIT / GREETINGS. / AS WE LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS SHOW, A RECURRING PROBLEM BECOMES CLEAR. / THE PROBLEM IS THIS: TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN DRAMA AND NON-DRAMA. LET ME BREAK-IT-DOWN-NOW.

I am not a physicist.

Actually, even that is too generous of a statement of my working knowledge of physics. However, the title character of my new play The Physics of Joy is a PhD candidate in physics, and I have to write her.

It all started with a simple enough idea: could I take a word with multiple meanings, in my case gravity, and use each possible definition as mini-themes within the uber-them of the shows narrative arc? Of course, not knowing anything about gravity or all of its various definitions, I started with Merriam-Webster. Some of the definitions were obvious, and loaded with possibilities for drama, "a serious situation or problem," for example. 

Others were less obvious:

 
3 a (1) : the gravitational attraction of the mass of the earth, the moon, or a planet for bodies at or near its surface (2) : a fundamental physical force that is responsible for interactions which occur because of mass between particles, between aggregations of matter (as stars and planets), and between particles (as photons) and aggregations of matter, that is 10-39 times the strength of the strong force, and that extends over infinite distances but is dominant over macroscopic distances especially between aggregations of matter —called also gravitation, gravitational force — compare electromagnetism 2a, strong force, weak force
 

I spent a lot of time crawling the net, exploring topics of physics and generally trying to learn a thing or two, but my first real inspiration came when my normal RadioLab podcast served me up this discussion between Robert Krulwich and Brian Greene, physics and mathematics professor and director of the Institute of Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University.

 

I had my inspiration.  A search of Professor Greene lead me to his amazing NOVA special, The Fabric of the Cosmos, based on his bestselling book by same title.

While I am confident that there is much that I will have gotten wrong, Professor Greene's work, and all of the great physicist that he has led me to, has been inspirational.  I've reached out to friends and family in search of physicists interested and willing to collaborate directly. Until such time I hear back from them, this work has been as grand a place to start as I could hope.

Thank you, Brian Greene.

The Physics of Joy: Act One Feedback

"Love Love Love the start - only 5 pages in... crazy week... will have time to read this weekend and let's chat by phone then too?"

Nothing like waiting on feedback, and when you receive it, having it lead off with three "loves."  That was Tuesday.  By Friday I had tweaked the first 40 pages of The Physics of Joy quite a bit and had another 5 to 10 pages added.  By this morning I had a great set of feedback from Chris (with apologies in case he was barraging me and assurances that he loves the show).

Here's the summary:

  1. Love bringing Joy in, and her time travelling. Need to introduce her asides as a theatrical convention earlier so that the audience understands the omniscience sooner.
  2. Like how the gender argument is woven between Rachel/April and Jacob/Mary. Concern that Jake and Rachel are coming off as unsympathetic - meaning they are no longer likable after this scene and that's a problem dramatically.  In the original production of Odes, Jacob and Rachel had the convention of direct address to the audience through aside, and had the chance to charm the audience and remain in their good graces. Now Jake is coming of as a jerk, and Rachel as a whiner.
  3. Like the development of Conor/Margaret form where they were, but liked their story being shrouded in mystery for longer in Odes.
  4. Fascinated with "gravity" and the physics references; will it all tie back together in the end?
  5. The set. Yikes! Worried about how much building would have to be done, and without any real budget; definitely can't have a real second-story apartment in the high school production.

Of course, Chris is completely on point. 

Joy's asides hit you out of left field in this early draft, and Rachel and Jake have crossed the line to being unsympathetic; I'll get these both fixed in the next rounds. I've asked Chris to trust me on the new Conor/Margaret work; the new stuff is still really early, and I think it's going to be good… if I can craft it right.

And then there's the set. 

Chris is right about this, as well.  In trying to write such a huge story, I've created new playing spaces; what used to be a bar and the hallway to the bathroom, have become: 1) the bar, 2) the bathroom hallway, 3) the interior of the bathroom, 4) the space out front of the bar, and 5) the second-story upstairs apartment that Margaret and Conor live in.  "Yikes," indeed.  We'd need a revolve to make it all work, and even with that, it all stills seems excessive.

I'm confident that I can get this down to three playing spaces: the bar, bathroom hallway, and the apartment.  I think that if I can work it down to this scale, the apartment could be played in a downstage corner of most proscenium stages, and the bathroom hallway in the other.

Alright, time to go get the second act done.

The Physics of Joy: Act One and Jury Duty

I have a draft of Act One!

Okay, I may be one of the few people to be excited about jury duty, but today I am.  Having jury duty gave me a break from my day job, and let me focus all of the normally-wasted-time spent waiting for my number to be called - and there was a lot of time spent waiting to be called - towards completing a first crack at Act One of The Physics of Joy.  I've shot the first 40 pages off to Chris, and will post feedback when I get it.

The Bible Cheat

When I originally wrote Odes, I created a simple "cheat" to get me quickly writing characters with diverse and unique voices.

I had the challenge of a very large, then-eleven person (now twelve; yikes!) ensemble cast, with three distinct collections of people.  The three groups interact both insularly amongst themselves, and outwardly with other groups and individuals in the bar. Each group needed to be clearly of their own tribe, and with so many characters I needed some way for me to keep both the tribal voice and the individual voices unique and honest.

...in fact, I personally found it important for my knowledge be rather shallow.

My trick was to take people from reference material and then to use their essence to fuel my own characters' intentions and behaviors. For me, it didn't matter what my real knowledge of the source material was; in fact, I personally found it important for my knowledge be rather shallow.  Having little knowledge let me use what I perceived as some essence, without getting tangled up in what is true or deeply known about the thing. 

For one group I used an old friend's parents as I remembered them from elementary school. For another I tried to write them as Nora Ephron might.  And for the third I used religious sources - the Old and New Testaments - but only the stories as I vaguely knew the or understood them to be; I am not a religious scholar.

For the last example, sourcing inspiration from the Bible, the tribe at play was Rachel, Jacob, Michael, David, Judd, and Summer.

The Tribe from the 1999 production of Odes.  From left: back row - Carl L. Carter as DAVID, Stacie Hart (part of different tribe), Christopher Marshall as JACOB, Lindsay Brandon Hunter as SUMMER; front row - Marnice Richmond as RACHEL, Rebecca Corry as MICHAEL, Mark Cooper as JUDD. Photo: Matt Hagen

The character of Summer was named for the Samaritan woman the well, which I had good and mixed up with the story of the Good Samaritan on the road, and thought was spelled with a "U", as in "Sumaritan"; hence "Summer".  And this is to my earlier point: it doesn't matter that I didn't know the real story.  My imagined and wrongly understood notion served the purpose of keeping me focused when writing her… that she was part of this tribe's story, and that she was a good person who to tended to assume the best about others.

Likewise, Rachel, Jacob, and Michael (originally named Leah) were named for a love triangle in the Bible, where Jacob desires one, but feels tricked into marrying the other.  Leah became Michael for the Archangel Michael - who I only knew as the leader of an army in a great war in Heaven - because I wanted her voice to be strong, and for her to be the clear conqueror in the end.  David because David was a warrior and a musician; my interpretation being stoic but deeply loving.  And lastly Judd for Judas; again, not because I knew the real story, but because Judas is the ultimate antagonist - one deeply loved who betrays his brother.

All of these characters continued to evolve in to much more this might imply; none of them having anything to do with their source material ultimately. But this little cheat helped me to keep tribal themes and perspective clears, while giving each character a simple thematic spine for me to fall back on when measuring their intentions.

On Remixing & Reimagining

Remixing two plays seems like a fairly straightforward act; take two pre-existing works, strip out the things you don't like, and munge together those things that you do.  Easy, right?  The reality, of course, is crawling through hundreds of pages of disparate versions of the various drafts of both, revisiting stacks of all of the old notes that I already had on these existing pieces (changes that already were known to be needed), finding commonalities where none existed before, and reworking it all to a fresh new beat - um, theme.

Had I thought deeply about this all beforehand, I think I would have seen that The Physics of Joy will be much harder fought for I had made it sound in my head.

Oh, and in quick aside as I'm going through these works, there are some pure moments - a core in Odes and a family in Gabriel/Joy that I really, really love - but, man, is there a bunch of poo that I will be happy to never look at again. C'est la vie.