I’ve been working on several projects for years, years and years. My very clever son reminds me that I have the choice to walk away, clear the decks, and start something I might conceivably finish. It’s good advice, and were I a less stubborn or more imaginative man, I would absolutely wipe the slate clean and drop these decaying projects in a flash.

But, not yet.

About ten years ago I took the fifth draft of a play I started almost six years earlier to a writer’s workshop at the college I attended. My memory is porous, but I can guess at the date because I was not yet familiar with Google Docs and needed a tutorial to enter my script and to read the scripts of the other aspiring playwrights. It was not a pretty process, and had the work of others not been safeguarded, I might have erased decades of work by at least ten people. 

I’ve avoided writing groups because I don’t take suggestions. Also, I’m behind on my reading of the greatest works of the 20th Century; why would I slug my way through other folk’s work in process? I did have a writing coach for a while who gathered the chicks every month to peck at our work. It was supposed to be collaborative pecking, but I was often so perplexed by the putative author’s choice of subject that I offered very little in the way of helpful response.

The playwriting seminar was directed by established playwrights, people whose work had been produced on some major stages. My group of five worked with a very nice guy who had just had a successful run on the visiting artist stage of the Steppenwolf Theater company in Chicago. Impressive. Unfortunately, he was my kind of reader, which is to say, he offered no specific suggestions on revising the play I’d dragged across the country, leaving critical response to the other four wanna-be playwrights in the group.

I’m not going to trash the work the other four presented except to say that each had bubbled up from unresolved issues, and each was essentially a three act complaint. I did read them carefully, looking for choices that might be effective in my work. Knowing how fragile my confidence had become, I was gentle and encouraging to all four authors; after all, I’d only written one play that made it to any stage, and that play, A Night of Terror, was pretty much a sloppy pastiche of horror films and “comically” altered Burt Bacharch tunes.  At least it was only one act. My cohort’s work was exhaustive to say the least.

For all I know, all four have been produced and are packing houses in every major city. 

But I doubt it.

Their work aside, and I am happy to put their work aside, my compatriots thought my play was a pile of steaming rat spume and offered such advice as, “Who would watch this thing?”. That was exactly the question I brought to the workshop, answered with compact emphasis on day three of the program.

I almost packed up and flew home a week early, but we’d given our scripts to some acting students who happened to be around that summer. My actors found me that afternoon and talked about the scene they’d like to play.  They seemed to be interested in the parts and worked with me on shading inflection so the characters emerged as I had intended. They took the play seriously.

That was encouraging and disturbing.

A Night of Terror had been written as a joke: 

“You think you are here for an evening’s entertainment, but you have found …A NIGHT OF TERROR!”

I hoped it would amuse someone, but nothing about it was personal or important to me. The play I’d brought, Changelings, was not really plot driven, which is to say, there was hardly any movement from scene to scene or from the first act to the second. Plot is pretty much always my nemesis, but at least I am aware of the lack of forward progress. I’d tried to move things along this time, but, yeah, plot was tertiary.

Not great, but at least this play was not one of those contrivances in which the butler answers the phone … “Yes, inspector, Major Hargreave was killed with a golf club in the study where he had gone to alter his last will and testament before his sister, Rowena Chompalot, arrived with her paramour, Tony Cul de Sac, the professional golfer and convicted arsonist.”

Still.

As is almost always the case in my “dramatic” work, the bulk of this play was conversation at best and extended soliloquy at worst. The title makes reference to children left by fairies in place of a real child. The changelings in the play were almost entirely transnational adoptees, and they had a lot to say about growing up as outsiders, even in their family. So much to say. No room for plot here.

I sat in a small audience in the theater as the actors offered staged reading. I’m sure the other plays were adequately presented. The actors had labored over Gaelic or Slavic accents, and worked pretty hard in trying to find the rhythm in a hip hop street battle. My scene took place in a meeting room; Robert,an angry 30 year old Ogala Lakota taken from his birth family has described his conflicted feelings about living in two cultures to Toni, a twenty-five year old Cambodian adoptee.

Toni

OK, I’m , I mean, I never thought about a lot of that stuff, but it hits home for me. In a different way, kind of. One of the things I’m  aware of now is that the way people see me is not the way I see myself.  If you stopped me on the street and asked me to tell you the most important things about me, I wouldn’t start with Cambodian. I don’t think I’d even say Cambodian. Or Asian.  That’s not how I see me.  I might say I work in a bank. But… It’s confusing.

Robert said something that really hit me. I’m a little ashamed of being Cambodian and then ashamed of being ashamed if that makes any sense? Sometimes I wonder about how my family sees me, you know? Like do they see me as a Cambodian girl? Am I a daughter, really?  Or a sister?

No forward motion, but when the actors spoke the lines, I felt … vindicated. Was I appropriating cultures? Not entirely sure then, pretty sure now. I heard real voices, though, and real issues.  Good enough then.

I stayed for the rest of the course, tinkered with the script, flew home, and put it away. I take it out from time to time, primarily because I like some of the people who live in those lines. I’m attached to them and their stories. It’s not a play, really, and I don’t have the mechanisms necessary to build dramatic unity. 

As I said earlier, I’m stubborn and a little low in imagination. I might come up with something worth producing, but I’d have to get past the feeling that writing this thing was enough. 

I’ll just read it again and see what else I’ve put in the slush pile for revision. It’s probably time to move on.