Sitting in on a Script Meeting

Paul and Dawson invited me to sit in on their script meeting last Wednesday; they were taking the sundry pieces and scenes that the two of them had written (mostly) independently and putting them in a sensible order.

Now this wasn't the first time in history that two writers put some scenes in order, so I won't pretend like this is headline news. But this play engages Seattle's recent history and a very particular moment in the development of information technology, and our focus on new and instantaneous media raises some interesting structural questions.

About a year ago I had the pleasure of interviewing David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet over the phone. Kronos Quartet frequently collaborates with artists and musicians who work outside the traditional Western musical vocabulary. David talked about needing to invent a brand new process every time they embark on a new project.

I thought of Kronos as I watched Dawson scrawl acronymic scene titles on giant post-it notes, scratch them out, and replace them with some other piece of code as Paul decided on the fly what he is and isn't willing to cut. Tom Paulson and I had a few moments of, "You following this?" because, as artistic collaborators so often do, Paul and Dawson had developed a project-specific shared vocabulary.

"Well, yes, I agree. It's just Oscar --"
"Right. Yes, absolutely."
"I'm wondering about --"
"Right. What about the tweets?"
"Well -- hahaha."

And so on.

There's no "right" way to tell a story, and there certainly isn't a template for a project like this. There are practical considerations -- the passage of time within a story thread, for example -- and considerations on pacing and flow that will guide the audience experience. What's really special about this play is that we're studying an instantaneous form of communication while working in an ancient (and in many ways, lumbering and laborious) form of communication.

We have a staged reading coming up this weekend and we'll see if it all goes together. I for one am looking forward to seeing those giant post-its come to life.