Tag: writing

This is a big week. An awesome week. On Sunday, July 13th, we rolled cameras for the first time on Writer’s Circle: the Webseries, the ongoing adventures of playwright Phil Payton, novelist Becky Porter, screenwriter Jeff Winnick, and blogger Zoe Jordan, as they share a sort of support group for writers hosted by their agent Tina Gellar.

And appropriately enough, we have reached the point in the Danny Writes Plays saga where I first thought “I should write another play with that Phil guy.” So let’s take a look at U-Boat of the Soul.

What’s it about?

Playwright Phil Payton was last seen in Two Guys, a Couch, and the Fate of the World, co-writing a spy play about Dirk Rhombus and his assistant Trina (based quite clearly on his girlfriend Tina). We rejoin Phil years later: he is now writer-in-residence for a theatre company, reporting to his now quite firmly ex-girlfriend Tina. They broke up for good and all six months ago, and three months after that the company commissioned a new script from him. It’s due tomorrow, and he’s barely started. Years after the unnamed Dirk Rhombus comedy of Two Guys, he’s decided to return to that well in a desperate attempt to crank out something, anything, that will fill this contract.

Turns out, one of the company’s other producers, Jacob Garrison (previously seen in Pride and Prima Donnas) has found a rising talent in Becky Porter, and is pushing for her to potentially replace Phil. Director David Locke (also from Pride and Prima Donnas) wants to keep Phil around (if only to prevent another Dance Into the Fire: the Duran Duran Rock Opera incident), but thinks Becky’s not only a strong talent, but a potential way for Phil to get over Tina. Frustrated that Tina’s willing to fire him and that David’s trying to hook him up with his possible replacement, Phil retires to his office in an attempt to write an entire Dirk Rhombus adventure in one night.

Only problem… Dirk hates this plan. Having popped up here and there to explain to the audience such crutches as exposition, supporting cast, pop culture references, and scene changes, Dirk starts berating Phil, claiming that he can do better than this, and takes Phil on a journey to show what Dirk’s adventures can teach audiences about the world, and Phil about himself.

Trina returns, but refuses to be Phil’s punching bag for his feelings about Tina. Jacob becomes Dirk’s boss, reluctantly pulling him out of retirement, despite thinking the espionage world no longer has a place for him. David becomes Jacques, the informant who warns that Dirk’s mission is not all it seems. And Becky becomes Katya, another lead who echoes Jacques’ warnings while also attacking society’s demonization of female sexuality (and through that, Phil’s fear of dating Becky) by deconstructing the “femme fatale” archetype. Phil’s gonna learn some things, and if you pay attention, you just might as well.

So why did that happen?

Sick of hearing about my divorce yet? Don’t worry, we’re almost through.

When my now ex-wife and I split up, I was concerned that, as someone who wrote primarily comedies and romances, this might impact my ability to do what do, a concern Phil shares in this script. A few months later, needing an idea for a writing contest, I pitched this concept to a friend, having already held workshops for Salvage and The Spy Who Left Me. He stared at me quizzically for a moment, then said “Seriously? You’ve tripled your output!”

A year and change later, I needed a new idea, so I came back to U-boat. Despite having made great strides in getting over the divorce, I thought the concept had legs, so as long as I was being indulgently autobiographical anyway, I filled it with characters from past scripts, references to other past scripts, and got to work.

Also, and let’s get this out of the way right up front… I was curious to see if I could write a nude scene and get away with it. Other writers might have no problem writing nude scenes, but having been directly involved in every production of one of my scripts up to that point, I knew that I’d never manage it unless I could look the actor and/or actress in the eye (as much as I’m ever able to, anyway) and say that yes, this is important. This is necessary. And since I was having Katya hold court against North American society’s idolization of sex/crippling fear of nudity (unlike enlightened, topless Europe), something that I’d been fuming about ever since Janet Jackson exposing her breast (not even the whole breast! There was a pasty!) at the Superbowl was viewed as a worse scandal than George W. Bush inventing a connection between Iraq and 9/11 to justify a war. I decided to call out society’s fear of women’s bodies, using Katya’s to drive the point home. (And also Jacob’s, because fair is fair.)

How’d it turn out?

All in all? Pretty decently. The humour’s solid, the only pop culture references are there to be made fun of for being pop culture references, it’s not a bad show. I mean, the whole thing’s pretty rushed. Didn’t even have an intermission, if I recall correctly, and I think that I do. Not that there’s a problem with the spy stuff being sped through, as the Dirk plot only matters as far as it provides the chance to deconstruct the Dirk plot.

Actually, about that.

The whole naked Katya-“why are women’s bodies terrifying” scene? It works. I believe that. It’s a good scene, it makes important points, it even works in the larger play’s context. Sure, Katya’s topless way longer than she needs to be. I can’t deny that. This was pointed out to me about a week before the original production opened, but by then it was too late to fix the problem on a script level. If this script were to re-surface, I’d find better places for Katya to ditch the bra and find her robe.

And the thing is, the scene works because it’s the best deconstruction of spy stories and the best attack on society. The rest of the scenes have their laughs, and advance Phil’s arc the way they need to, but by and large they’re over too fast and don’t say enough. Every scene should have the punch and insight that Katya’s scene does. Every character, inside Phil’s head or not, should be as interesting as I think Katya is. Especially Katya’s “real world” counterpart, Becky.

One time, Brian Michael Bendis wrote an essay claiming that the Green Goblin was not only the greatest Spider-man villain ever, but the greatest overall comic book villain, yet you’d never guess that from his ridiculous first appearance. So it is with Becky. She might be my favourite of all the female leads I’ve written, and you’d never guess that from this, her first appearance. It’s impossible to look at this script and not see it through the filter of Writers’ Circle, both the play and the impending webseries, and Becky the awestruck fangirl just does not measure up to the character we’re going to be filming over the next six weeks. It’s okay if she’s a fan of Phil. I’ll even grant that it’s okay if said fandom makes her want to date Phil, although come on man, are we inserting our own fantasy women again already? But she can and should be more than that.

Would you stage it again?

Not as it is. It can be deeper, stronger. It can say more, do more, and have well-written characters other than Phil and Dirk. Each time I get better at writing Phil, Becky, and Tina, I want to go back and make their earlier appearances work on the same level, and that would take some doing. And, yeah, like I said, if every scene isn’t as deep or cutting as Katya’s… well, why aren’t they? They just should be.

So, this one would need a polish. Not a full overhaul, and not a “burn it to the ground and start over on a white piece of paper,” but definitely a polish.

Repeated Theme Alert

• Man and woman cannot be friends: Becky likes Phil! David likes Tina! Everyone wants to date everyone! There are only six people in this cast and one of them’s fictional!
• The quiet, average guy the ladies unaccountably love: Well, one of the ladies stopped loving him, and at least Becky has an excuse. There actually is something interesting about Phil.
• So how is this one about your divorce? Don’t, don’t, don’t even start with me right now. You know. I know. We all know.
• Writing about writers: It wasn’t long after this script that a friend said “Maybe give the meta-narrative stuff a rest for a while.” Wasn’t terrible advice.

So, we’re entering the final stages of pre-production for a webseries that two friends and I have been working on for a year now. Soon, very soon, we start filming, which is exciting. The chance to see these scripts we cranked out brought to life, and to share them across the Internet. Which of course will be followed by months of stress about how we’re going to get people to watch them, but that’s a tomorrow problem.

Day’s gonna come when I’m going to be talking a lot about the show on this blog. The obvious starting point seemed to be to do a “Danny Writes Plays” entry on the script that we adapted into the series, but… well, I haven’t made it that far, and skipping ahead seems like it kills the flow. So, may as well start catching up.

Which brings us to this: The Very Long Night of Tyler and Selena.

 What’s it about?

Office drone Tyler Jenkins is trying to juggle a special dinner with his girlfriend Cindy and prepping for a big meeting the next morning, when Cindy unexpectedly (to Tyler, at least) breaks up with him, and instead of dinner Tyler leaves to drink alone. At the bar, a woman named Selena bursts in trying to stay unseen. Selena, and her duffel bag of unknown but unpleasant contents, are on the run from notorious killers Vic and Jess, and after trying to do her a favour, Tyler finds himself stuck in the middle, with little choice but to stick next to Selena until he can find a way out… a plan Selena doesn’t care for at all. They run from hideout to hideout, finding safe haven where they can with Selena’s friends and informants, but it slowly becomes clear that there’s no easy way out for either of them, and they’re in for a very long night.

So why’d that happen?

So, remember a while back, when I talked about The Course of True Love and the Curse of the Jade Monkey, and how it had so many flaws I saw no choice but to burn it down to the basic premise and start over on a white piece of paper? Well, here we are. This is when that happened. Average guy, woman of mystery, dragged into quest, hopefully with a few layers of stupid and terrible scraped off.

Step one: I made Selena basically the anti-Maya. Where Maya was instantly and inexplicably attracted to Jordan, inserting herself into his life, Selena basically wants nothing to do with Tyler, but puts up with him out of a shred of respect for the fact that he’s only in this mess because of his misguided attempt to help her.

Step two: no more globetrotting. I saw a play at the Vancouver Fringe called The Doctor is Sick, in which a doctor, who was prepping a lecture on the evolution of cockney rhyming slang, escapes from a hospital and goes on an adventure among the underbelly of the city. I thought, if this show could have constantly changing locations and taxis and whatnot done through minimalist set, surely I could too, and made this story take place over a single night, albeit many, many places.

Step three: realizing that the Macguffin doesn’t matter. The Jade Monkey had a complicated and ridiculous backstory, but neither Tyler nor the audience ever learns what’s in the duffel bag, only that it’s both valuable and terrible.

Step four: no Travis. Well, I ended up backsliding on this one. Intrepid reporter Travis Thompson does, in fact, make a return appearance, but what’s important is that this time he wasn’t given his own subplot. Travis exists solely to advance Tyler’s story: indicating that all was far from well between Tyler and Cindy, then returning to give Tyler key information. He services the plot, rather than trying to steal the spotlight.

Step five: better villains. I’d been experimenting with “funny yet menacing” villains for a while, but for this one… for this one I finally admitted to myself why. And the reason was, I was trying to find my own spin on Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I didn’t want to just copy them, so I tried Helena Von Drax and Manservant, Big Jim the mafia henchman, and Rose and Stern the goons. But then Terry Pratchett wrote The Truth, his 25th Discworld novel, which certainly seemed to have characters based on, or at least modeled in a similar vein to Croup and Vandemar, so I said “screw it, then,” and thus came Vic and Jess, Things Dealt With. Vic, short for Victoria, was the chatterbox, and Jess the strong, silent partner. Although I did what I could through reputation and unseen fights to imply that neither of them were to be trifled with.

Step five: less exposition. Not no exposition, just… less. Well, it was a start.

The concept for this show started coming to me almost immediately after Jade Monkey wrapped for the second time. But regular readers will remember, that’s also when I started work on Heracles for the 2004 Fringe tour. So I had to sit on this idea until Heracles was ready to rehearse. Which took around nine months. The second it was done and rehearsing, I jumped into Tyler and Selena. First draft was done in 11 days. Might be a personal record.

How’d it turn out?

Astute readers will also remember that the thing that started me down the road to scrapping Jade Monkey in favour of Tyler and Selena was the idea of doing it as a movie. And the movie idea was very clearly still in my head, because despite all that stuff I said about The Doctor is Sick, this is a screenplay. It is a screenplay that I shoehorned onto a stage.

That said, it mostly works. The staging difficulties caused by writing a screenplay for the stage do their damage, as every scene requires some exposition about where Tyler and Selena are, but I made that as organic as I could. The wit still mostly works. The characters are still good. It’s still a fun show. Not one of my crown jewels, but not one of my embarrassments, either.

Would you stage it again?

It could use some touch ups… the pacing’s not quite where I’d want it, there is still a clunky “Let’s swap backstories” scene, and Selena could use more of a story. Right now she’s drifting close to Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory, only there so that Tyler can learn about himself. I’d want to fix that before anyone did something with this script, or at least try to.

Also, it’s a screenplay. There’s no getting around that. As a stage play, it lacks the visceral energy that The Doctor is Sick had, something it needed to make the cross-town adventure work right on stage. In a movie, you could get that energy by actually having the characters able to move any amount of distance. Well, and I could punch up the script a bit. That pacing issue I mentioned.

Of course the real issue is that I know nothing about making movies. Permits, equipment, and most importantly distribution are all mysteries to me. So after at least one go-nowhere attempt to film this thing, I’ve started replying to any query about doing this or any of my scripts as movies with “Sounds great, let me know how it works out.”

Repeated theme alert

• Something something pop culture reference: Aaron Sorkin once wrote the line “Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal outright.” I hope he meant it, because on page 6 I stole a line from Sports Night.
• Let’s sit and exchange backstories for twenty minutes like that doesn’t kill the pacing! There had to have been a more engaging way to convey how Selena ended up with this bag.
• Tyler isn’t quite “The quiet, average guy the ladies unaccountably love,” because for most of the play Selena’s tolerating him at best… but he’s close. Still, at least he actually does things to earn affection.
• The funny yet menacing villains: a friend said to me, after reading the first draft, “You’ve done it. You’ve mastered the villains who are funny yet menacing. Now stop.” Good advice.
• So how is this one about your divorce? A huge part of Tyler’s arc is about realizing he’s not in love with Cindy anymore, and that’s okay. So this one’s about letting go.

When next we visit this series, prepare for the return of some old friends from old scripts.

Real talk: today is not going to be a happy day. Who Knows, the play I’ve been directing since March, came to an end on Saturday, and the empty feeling that was sure to follow is settling in. But that’s okay. That’s good. If this is the price to be paid for three incredible months of endless joy working on an amazingly fun play about one of my all-time favourite TV shows with some incredible people, so be it.

And on the plus side, today I get to tell you about one of my old scripts without the usual round of self-flagellation. Because today, dear readers, today… we talk Heracles.

What’s it about?

A laugh-a-minute (minimum) tour through the original myths of Heracles that inspired the legends of Hercules, but with none of the whitewashing and all of the accidental-family-murder and general unheroic behaviour kept intact and, by and large, made funny. After a quick summary of Zeus’ ascension to the throne of Olympus, Heracles is conceived (Zeus attempts to seduce his mother as a swan, then switches to her husband when that doesn’t work), battles serpents that his step-mother Hera threw in the crib to kill him, doesn’t quite learn a lesson about not killing music teachers, decides to be a hero… a lot. A lot of stuff happens. Let’s move to the next section. It’s a better story.

So why did that happen?

It’s a play I wrote over nine months stretching from September of 2003 to spring of 2004, but to trace its origins we have to go aaaaalllllll the way back to June of 1997. The Amazing and Almost Accurate Adventures of Trigger Dandy had just wrapped its one-night-stand debut, and everyone involved was riding high off the buzz of the laughter and cheers that were still ringing in our ears. So of course, the topic weaving its way through the wrap party was “What’s next? Let’s keep this Mind the Walrus thing going! Do another show! We could do this so much better now that we’ve learned a few things! What’s next?”

And with Two Guys, a Couch, and the Fate of the World still a few weeks away from conception, we didn’t have a firm answer. Until an idea rooted itself in some of our heads. Somehow the champagne-fuelled conversation turned to the fact that nobody really gets Greek myths. People don’t even know, by and large, that Hercules isn’t the son of Zeus: Hercules is the Roman name of Heracles, so Hercules would be the son of Jupiter. And there’s a show we could do, we thought… dig up the original myths, warts and all, and make a Trigger Dandy style comedy about them. We even envisioned one of the scenes: Heracles would fight the Hyrda, the serpent who grows two new heads every time one is cut off, but get so into cutting off heads that the stagehands would start running out. Actual prop heads would give way to pool noodles, which would be replaced by paper plates, shoes, etc. until the stage hands finally gave up.

We did some research, looked up some myths, but ran out of steam before long, especially once Jason and I started breaking the idea for Two Guys. But I never let go of the idea. It was always in the back of my head, something I would eventually get to, time permitting. Hell, once Mind the Walrus was into its second season, I was envisioning a “greatest hits” play, the Mind the Walrus All-Stars, that would team up Trigger Dandy, Two Guys’ Dirk Rhombus, and Heracles against an alliance of their various nemeses, plus Ted the Devil from Date With an Angel, Coffee With the Devil. It was explained to me within seconds of theorizing this script that it was a horrible, horrible idea, and I never spoke of it again (until now), but what’s really interesting there is that despite not having written a single word of what I’d decided would eventually be called “The Mythologically Accurate Adventures of Heracles” (really, I do not know what my thing was with long titles), I was so convinced that it would happen that I had already included the main character in the Walrus All-Stars.

Anyway, years passed. In 2003, The Course of True Love and the Curse of the Jade Monkey went to the Edmonton Fringe. It was, shall we say, not a raging success. Small houses and brutal reviews that the cast told me not to read. None of that is surprising now, given the many, many flaws of that script, but after it was over, I started thinking about all of the sold-out hits I’d seen at the Fringe, and tried to figure out why they were hits and mine was not. Part of that process involved taking a long look at the script itself, and we’ll look at the results of that in the next instalment, but it also involved figuring out what the big hits had in common.

It seemed to me that the ingredients of a successful Fringe show, especially touring Fringe shows, were 1) one hour long; 2) fast-paced; 3) funny; 4) portable, meaning minimal set. So I tried to figure out what I could do that would fit the profile, and Heracles popped back into my head. Write it so that the whole thing could be done with three to five people, avoid set pieces, and make sure the jokes keep flying. The following month, while I was on my “impending divorce” vacation to London (trips to London help ease the pain), I stopped by the British Museum’s library to do some research on the myths, then bought myself a notebook at the Globe Theatre’s gift shop and started writing over dinner–that sounded really pretentious and I’m sorry. Those were the places I was when I broke ground on this script. I used geography for narrative inspiration. I’m sure I’m sorry.

Also I changed the title to Heracles: The Mythologically Accurate Adventures, so that the key word of the title wouldn’t get lost if the title turned out to be too long for the program again. You know, like “Jade Monkey” did.

And you’re damn right I used that hydra scene I mentioned. That scene was GOLD.

Now it wasn’t a quick process. As I said, it took nine months to get a draft of this script written and typed up, a process spurred somewhat by us getting into the Montreal, Winnipeg, and Edmonton Fringe Festivals. And when it was done, I had ninety minutes of material for our sixty minute show, so there were a lot of edits to be done by the time we reached Montreal.

And a few more edits once we got there and found out we were two minutes heavy.

And a few more edits once we got to Winnipeg, and our audiences quintupled, and the additional laughter once again pushed us to 62 minutes. (The Edmonton techs were more chill, they’d just signal us if we needed to speed up the climax)

How’d it turn out?

Awesome. Purely awesome.

We remounted this one back in 2009 and it was still funny. Even in a total blackout, with no lights but a keychain flashlight, it was still funny. Maybe not every joke lands in every performance, but there are so very many that DO work that we never had a dud show. After the Montreal leg of the tour, I had to take over the role of Heracles myself, and let me tell you… having a sold-out crowd cheering a show I wrote, directed, and starred in was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. The 2004 Heracles tour was exactly what I needed that summer, and the 2009 remount was a delight as well.

Would you stage it again?

The only reason I’m not saying “Yes, of course yes, can we do it now?” is the sad knowledge that if Heracles makes a comeback, someone else is going to be playing the title role. I had my fun. It’s someone else’s turn now. That said, yes, of course yes, can we do it now?

Next time: the play that had been festering in my head for the nine months that it took to write Heracles.

Salvage wasn’t the only script I managed in 2003. Before it was even done being edited, I had another first draft ready to go. Well, sort of ready to go. Salvage was chosen to perform first because it was thought to be closer to ready for the stage. And they weren’t wrong: my other script from that year was when I truly learned to love the editing stage, as there were a whole lot of rough spots needing to be reworked.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ladies and gentlemen, dear readers, The Spy Who Left Me.

What’s it about?

Five years ago, Tommy Wexland (why am I this bad with last names? I can’t explain it) suffered a blow when his wife Alexis disappeared without warning. Today, he’s juggling Mr. Kane, the new executive visiting from Chicago, his on-again off-again girlfriend Fiona visiting from England, and his overprotective little sister Devra, who’s wondering why Alexis has started getting mail delivered at Tommy’s apartment again.

Soon the invitation to a party delivered to Tommy but addressed to Alexis is unraveling the truth: Alexis was a spy who went rogue, Fiona is an MI6 agent out to bring her in, and the man from Chicago is behind everything. And Devra would like it known that she totally called that something was off about Tommy’s ex.

Why did that happen?

The weird thing is that at the time, if you’d tried to tell me I was writing this script as a way to deal with my wife and I splitting up, I’d have not only denied it but actually believed you were wrong. So let’s leave aside the obvious answer of “Impending divorce” and look at what I thought were the reasons I wrote this play.

Simply put, it’s Len Deighton‘s fault.

As my marriage was crumbling, I’d been reading Len Deighton’s classic 80s cold war spy novel trilogies, Game, Set, and Match and Hook, Line, and Sinker. The two trilogies (which apparently were followed by a third, Faith, Hope, and Charity, which I should really track down) deal with Bernard Samson, a jaded, middle-aged secret agent working for MI6, and a complicated chess game of defections and double agents between his employers and the KGB, particularly the East German branches. In Game, Set, and Match, while trying to recover agents from behind the Iron Curtain and recruit high-level defectors, Bernard begins to suspect that his wife, Fiona (influence on the script already apparent), might have been turned by the KGB. In Hook, Line, and Sinker, he learns that the truth is far, far more complicated.

From this came the story of Tommy, learning that his wife’s life was far more bizarre than he ever guessed, her abrupt departure from his life, and her return, which brought with it even more chaos than her leaving.

And once I’d finished the first draft, I finally read Spy Sinker, and realized that I’d come at this entire project wrong. You see, while the first five novels are told from Bernard’s point of view (in the first person, no less), Spy Sinker retells the entire story from Fiona’s perspective. And that made it clear: I’d been writing Alexis all wrong, letting the more colourful spy antics of Alias’ Sydney Bristow shape her, rather than the bleaker, more grounded world of Bernard and Fiona Samson. Alexis hadn’t been on a fun adventure the last five years. Alexis had been in hell. Her life must have been exhausting even before she went on the run, and that meant that I had to rewrite the entire second half to correct this.

At which point, the script became too weighted against poor Fiona (my character Fiona, not Fiona Samson… lord that makes this more confusing than it has to be). Now my test-readers were convinced that Alexis was the one to root for, and Fiona was no good. (Well, except one reader who kept her draft-one dislike of Alexis and now hated both of them) I felt this was too easy, and thus had to rewrite the first half to make Fiona more sympathetic and level the playing field.

The Devra scenes worked fine, though. Minimal edits there.

How’d it turn out?

Last year, on a Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo panel I was doing on writing, someone in the audience asked what were our most embarrassing moments as playwrights. I forget what my colleague Ben said, but for me, there was only one answer: the night my ex-wife came to see this play. Suddenly the veil was lifted, and I was like I was seeing it for the first time. All the people rushing to assure Tommy that he was a good man, that he didn’t deserve all the things that had happened to him, and the fact that this ordinary schlub had two women–no, two glamorous secret agents fighting over him… the post-divorce wish fulfillment was oozing out of every pore of this thing and I could not unsee it.

Aside from that, though.

Other significant changes were needed to ready this thing for the stage. I had to ditch the narration, because once again having the leads narrate their story between scenes was just terrible, I mean god-awful, but unlike Jade Monkey I managed to figure that out before we started rehearsing. Kane’s comic henchmen, Rose and Stern, had to be made less wackily inept. But the end product was… pretty okay, I think? Sorry, I cannot see past the grotesque wish fulfillment aspects far enough to give any sort of judgement on overall quality. And maybe that tells you everything right there.

Would you stage it again?

Can’t say that I would. Not without a top-down rewrite. Back then I did a lot of “quiet, everyday guy dragged into bizarre circumstance” stories because that’s what Neil Gaiman did in Neverwhere, and I love the crap out of Neverwhere, but man I was not good at it. Instead of an everyman on a classic Hero’s Journey like Neverwhere’s Richard Mayhew, I came just shy of writing an Alias fanfic in which Sydney Bristow meets an obvious author-surrogate and falls for him because he has such a rich inner life despite the fact that he barely leaves his apartment. It’s sad it what it is. I can’t go back. I won’t.

No, if Spy Who Left Me were to return, it would have to change drastically. Tommy and Devra would still be at the center, but the story couldn’t revolve around Tommy. Other than existing as bait, the larger spy plot shouldn’t give two shits about Tommy. Also, around draft three, I had to make a choice. Either the play should be a straight-up wacky comedy, with villains right out of the Dukes of Hazzard, or it could be serious enough that ending in a shootout wouldn’t be a jarring change in tone. I picked the latter. Maybe I should have gone the other way. Maybe that’s how this play would work.

Also, I just learned that in 2011 the title got jacked by the first in a series of romance novels called the “Ex Agent” books. Not sure if that impacts this play or not, but… don’t love that turn of events…

Repeated Theme Alert

• The Quiet, Shy Protagonist The Ladies Still Unaccountably Love rears his whiny, stupid head again. And once more I took a moment to make sure everyone knows he’s good at sex. I had friends, I don’t understand why they didn’t try harder to stop me.
• Funny yet menacing villains round three. Kane was the heavy, Rose and Stern his comic henchmen. Rose and Stern were born from my regret that I didn’t make Supervillain’s unnamed henchmen the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (see what I did there?) of that play. They’re not terrible, but they do clash tonally with everything else happening.
• So how was this one about your divorce? We… I think we covered that, didn’t we? I mean, how is it not?

Next time on Danny Writes Plays, a break from divorce-based therapy-writing to do something ridiculous.

And we’re back. My general inability to make use of my afternoons during the run of a play, coupled with some decent freelance writing work, has once again impacted my blogging schedule. Sorry about that.

So, right, Danny writes plays. Where’d I leave off? Ah yes. 2003. In 2002, my wife and I split up. In 2003, I found out that if it had, at any point, been a trial separation like I thought it was, it wasn’t anymore. I had some worries that, as a writer who specialized in comedies and love stories, the impending divorce would kill my ability to write. Instead, I hammered out two and a half scripts that year with ideas for two more I’d write in 2004.

Hooray! I thought. The divorce isn’t impacting my writing at all!

Ha. Ha. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA–

Anyway, here’s Salvage.

What’s it about?

Years ago, the Sterling Salvage company, run by best friends Amy Thatcher, Caleb Walsh, and Jasmine Bishop (plus assists from their accountant Marcus), roamed the world having adventures and finding lost things. But when Amy died, everything fell apart. Caleb and Jasmine stopped talking and started finding ways to self-destruct. Amy witnesses all of this from the afterlife, specifically a limbo-like portion of the afterlife called the Departure Lounge, and concern for her friends is keeping her from moving on to Heaven. Saint Matthew, who runs the Departure Lounge, tries to encourage her to let go, but accidentally encourages her to go back to Earth and try to fix her friends instead.

A task that’s made more difficult by the fact that in life, Amy had been sleeping with both Caleb and Jasmine, and mistakenly believed neither one knew about the other.

Anyhoo, after making a deal with Saint Peter, Amy visits Caleb and Jasmine, which only makes things worse, then teams up with the more stable Marcus to try and turn her friends’ lives around before Caleb drinks himself to death or Jasmine gets herself killed recovering stolen goods for the Mafia.

Yes, fine. Ghosts and mafiosi. Anyway, Ghost Amy and the long-suffering Marcus launch a scheme to reconcile Caleb and Jasmine while keeping them both alive, because if Amy doesn’t succeed in her quest, there’s no going back to Heaven. Key words are “ghostly,” “torment,” and “eternity.”

So why’d that happen?

I had a dream (yep, that line again already). The main plotline was basically there. Caleb (or who I would come to call Caleb, nobody in the dream had names… but he was played by Leonardo diCaprio) is visited by the ghost of Amy (Jewel Staite), who implores him to seek out and assist their former partner (Reese Witherspoon), who’s taking shifty jobs from a shady former acquaintance of theirs (Fred Ward from Tremors). Which is the basic premise of the play. With other plays based on dreams, it’s more about capturing the essence of the dream, the thing that created a strong enough emotional reaction that I remember it long enough to write an outline. In this case, all I really did was split the villain of the piece into two characters: Marcus, the former acquaintance, and Lilith deSalvo, Jasmine’s sinister boss. Well, I also had to come up with a way to wrap it up, gave Amy more stage time, and added in Saints Peter and Matthew.

See, a couple of years earlier, I’d written a short play about an athiest finding himself at the gates of Heaven and having to deal with surly clerk Saint Peter, with a cameo by party-Saint Matthew. It turned out incredibly well, was super fun to write, and so I decided to bring the saints back for another go-round.

How’d it turn out?

Let me tell you, 2003 was the year I learned to love the editing process. That was the year I started workshopping my scripts with a select group of friends, friends I could count on to tell me what needed work. So by the time it hit the stage for the first time in spring of 2004, I’d managed the following:

1) Amy was now afraid of being alone, so afraid she couldn’t go to Heaven by herself. This improved her previous motivation of just being too darned nice a person to move on while her friends suffered. Seriously, she was more saintly than the saints in the first draft. That girl needed some flaws.
2) Amy no longer appeared to give her friends a final farewell. Because three weeks before opening night, someone finally pointed out that it undermined literally everyone’s character arcs.

We remounted this one a couple of years back, but eight years had taught me a great deal about writing, and the version we’d staged earlier needed some further changes. Some scenes just needed a light edit, some a complete overhaul, and some had to be written from scratch because 2003 me didn’t know they were necessary. To wit:

1) I realized just how underwritten Jasmine had been. In the new version, she gets just as much stage time and development as Caleb, including her own ghost visit from Amy.
2) While still giving Matthew more ghost powers than Amy, when he gets dragged to Earth to help with the plan, he’s still a ghost and not an undead thing like Rufus in Dogma.
3) The wacky scheme to escape Lilith was rewritten from the ground up. The first one was just ridiculous.
4) As part of that, Lilith and her henchman Big Jim were made less comically inept. Lilith became more dangerous, more willing to kill inconveniences at a moment’s notice, and Big Jim, now just Jim, stopped being quite so mind-bogglingly stupid.
5) In the first version, Caleb believed in his ghostly visit from Amy. Now, he (and Jasmine) assumes it was a dream, but is still motivated to reconnect with Jasmine.
6) Matthew’s motivation to help Amy on Earth is refined: instead of just being worried about getting in trouble, now neither one of them can enter Heaven unless Amy succeeds.
7) All scenes with the saints were made 80% less lame.

And the 2012 version, while maybe not my best work ever, was still pretty damned watchable.

Would you stage it again?

I don’t know, probably. It’s improved every time I’ve taken another crack at it. It might still have further to go, but that’s okay, I doubt I’d have to burn it down and start over like some of the others I’ve mentioned.

Maybe the characters could be deeper. Maybe the mob plot is still a little cartoonish, despite my best efforts to scrape the wacky off of it. Maybe the flashbacks are still a little shoehorned in. And if any of those things are true, then a ground-up re-examination of the plot would be necessary, but I think the characters still work. Especially once I stopped under-writing Jasmine.

Plus playing Matthew or Marcus might be fun and I haven’t gotten to do that yet.

Recurring Theme Alert

• And now for a new recurring theme, So how was this one about your divorce? This play is very much about loss, about the empty pit that comes with losing someone important to you, and the damage it can do. I don’t know that Caleb and Jasmine’s struggles to forgive Amy for all of the secrets she kept had to do with my issues regarding my ex-wife, but it would make a great deal of sense.
• Funny-yet-menacing-villains, take two: Lilith was always more competent and legitimately threatening than Helena Von Drax, my previous effort, but Jim was even more cartoonish to balance it. Well, until the 2012 version.
• Man and woman cannot be friends: apparently woman and woman can’t be friends either if they’re at sea too long. Marcus was the only one on that boat not getting any…
• Mild amounts of pop culture. Batman references. That’s not so bad, right?

Next time: the other 2003 script gets extra workshop time, and man was that necessary.

Been a couple of months since I last did one of these. I could say that I was enjoying the spike in comments following my post office blogs, and tried to shift to topics of more general interest. Might even be true. But there’s another reason. Deep down, I was avoiding returning to this topic because I knew that it would mean talking about how a script managed to go from “this is the best thing I’ve done” to “this is too embarrassing to show people.”

So buckle up for the rise and fall of the Jade Monkey.

What’s it about?

Jordan Bleachley, a shy, awkward graphic designer for a local newspaper, is living a quiet life, typically alone in his office, until the night Maya Tarlington crashes into him. Maya’s a globe-trotting woman of mystery, roaming the world having adventures, and decides that as long as she’s here, she may as well insert herself into Jordan’s life. Soon he and his two closest friends, investigative reporter Travis Thompson and travel columnist Saisha Porter (also Jordan’s ex), are pulled into Maya’s latest adventure: finding both halves of the legendary Jade Monkey, said to make whoever wields it unstoppable, before would-be supervillain Helena von Drax beats them to it.

Yup. Soon the whole gang is tracking the second half of the monkey to Indonesia while Jordan and Maya try to figure out if a timid shut-in and a globe-trotting madwoman can make it work.

So why’d that happen?

I had a dream. A dream involving a… mildly sexual encounter with an exotic woman of mystery who my dream-friends immediately distrusted. Despite their misgivings, I decided to help her on her quest, attempting to find a better reason for this choice than “I saw her breasts the night we met and if I help her I might get to see them again or maybe even touch them.”

Now, I’d recently joined a writers’ circle led by the playwright-in-residence of one of the big professional theatre companies in town, and in this group I confirmed something I’d been afraid of: as of Knoll, I’d grown stagnant, leaning on dialogue riffs and wacky premises instead of properly developed characters and emotion. I decided that this dream, whose details stuck with me throughout my shift at whatever movie theatre I was working at that week (odds favour Westhills), would be the script where I started to push myself to inject some real passion into the love story.

The love story that still involved a wacky premise. And a meet-cute. And an intrepid reporter. And like four comic-relief characters written to be played by one actor.

I’d have probably been shocked, maybe a touch offended, if someone back then had implied that Jordan was based on me and Maya was the personification of my secret desire to be a) swept away and b) found interesting by an international woman of mystery. I know this because people implied characters were based on me all the time and I at least acted shocked and offended each instance, even when it was blatantly true. And in this case, I didn’t think Jordan was secretly me at all.

And yet it is demonstrably the case. Right as my marriage was beginning to crumble I suddenly write a script in which the lead character is a quiet, shy, shut-in who runs across a bold, inhumanly friendly woman of adventure, who sees how deep and creative he is behind his awkward exterior and decides that not only is he worth knowing but she’s also going to bang him? Merciful Zeus, the wish fulfillment is just dripping off this thing.

But maybe I missed it because I was so enamoured with Travis Thompson, a character I’d experimented with in writing classes because Trasmetropolitan’s Spider Jerusalem made Gonzo journalists on a crusade for the Truth look so damned cool, and I wanted to write one. And including Saisha gave Travis a romance plot of his own, because why wouldn’t the crusading journalist be just as useless as me at telling girls he likes them?

I included a role I called the Titanically Talented Bit-Player, who would play Helena’s faithful Manservant, Jordan’s editor, an informant named Jerry the Snitch, and Jacques the pilot, who flies the gang to Indonesia at the top of act two. This was inspired by the extras from Supervillain. I decided this play needed some minor, often single scene characters, so why not have them all played by one person, and why not make all of them just as entertaining as Supervillain’s delightfully bitter cocktail waiter?

As for Helena, and her trusty Manservant, this was my first attempt to write villains who were both funny and menacing. Because any villain out to reunite the halves of the Jade Monkey has to be a little silly, right?

Right?

How’d it turn out?

Oh man. Where to start.

In 2002, when it was first staged, I thought it was great. I’d pushed myself to add more depth and passion to the love story than I ever had before (not hard, I think my only successful romantic pairing by that point was Illuminati, and we all know what I think of that one), and I was proud of that. Thus, I thought it was good enough to take to the 2003 Edmonton Fringe Festival, despite the fact that most Fringe shows are 60-75 minutes and this one came in at two hours including intermission. But during the not very successful Fringe run, one of the cast put the idea of filming it as a movie in my head, and I started thinking of what I’d change to adapt it for film. And I began to see problems. So many problems. Because I had pushed myself into new territory… and the first time we try something, there are usually some kinks to be worked out. On that note.

The meet-cute is terrible, even for a meet-cute, and what’s worse it’s excruciatingly unmotivated. Second worst I’ve ever done, possibly, after Illuminati in Love. At the time of writing, I suspect I’d been influenced by a Kevin Smith blog from a series about the casting process on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. In said entry, Kevin Smith talked about how the studio had put pressure on him to cast Heather Graham in the female lead, but she’d balked at the role because she didn’t understand why the character falls in love with Jay. Smith had trouble answering, because, as he put it, who knows why anyone falls in love with anyone? The only answer he could think of was “Why does her character fall in love with Austin fucking Powers?”

And thus did I decide I could use the same logic to skate by the question of why, exactly, a world-travelling treasure hunter could possibly decide to hook up with a graphic designer who barely leaves the office. But I couldn’t. Because, 11 years later, it stinks of the aforementioned wish fulfillment and I want to punch their flirty scenes in the face.

Flirty scenes which, by the way, are nowhere near as engaging as they needed to be. It takes this thing until the end of act one to get out of first gear. Right before the act break, everyone escapes a trap laid by Helena and leaps onto a plane to chase down the remaining half on the Jade Monkey. Right after the act break, Jordan and Maya sit on the the plane and exchange backstories for at least ten minutes. Once we had to cut the intermission for time at the Fringe, it became all too clear that this little narrative choice killed the show’s pace like an overly wordy pause button. Any momentum we’d gained was brutally murdered by exposition and monologues.

Wow. Four paragraphs and I’ve barely scratched the surface here… time for an “everything wrong with this script” speed round.
1) Nearly every scene that the villains appear in features Travis complaining about how stupid the plot is. Admitting the plot is lame doesn’t make it not that.
2) Speaking of Travis, I thought his angry-ranting-but-he-really-cares shtick was pretty good… until I saw Dr. Cox from Scrubs do it about 50 times better. I thought “Oh, that’s what I was going for,” and was sad.
3) Half of the Titanically Talented Bit Player characters serve no real purpose. Mitchell the editor provides details that get repeated, and Jacques is only necessary for the plane scene, which the play would be better off without.
4) The Titanically Talented Bit Player also breaks the fourth wall at least once, which is not something the rest of the play does, so it kind of sticks out.
5) “Travis most of the time” and “Travis crushing on Saisha” are like two different people. A switch flicks and he goes from bargain-basement Spider Jerusalem to stammering mess on a freaking dime.
6) I’ve written my share of quiet saps who end up in shenanigans, but Jordan has to be worst of them. And by worst, I mean least interesting to watch.
7) But at least I made sure to have a conversation between Saisha and Maya establish that Jordan’s great at sex. Because that was necessary, apparently.
8) “Tarlington” would be my least favourite last name I came up with for a character if I hadn’t also come up with “Bleachley.”
9) I wrote this thing and I have a hard time getting invested in anything that happens. What chance does anyone else have?

I will say this. I do kind of like the resolution of the jade monkey nonsense. In front of everybody, Helena reunites both halves of the monkey… and nothing happens. Because, as Jordan puts it, “It’s not modular. It’s broken.”

Because fuck every movie in which some ancient artifact was broken into pieces but can be magically reunited every five thousand years or when the planets align or whatever. Because really, honestly, who thinks like that. If you’re going to break something because it’s too dangerous, YOU LEAVE IT BROKEN.

Anyway.

Would you stage it again?

We staged this one twice. We went through no less than five Mayas over the two productions. The two people who directed it left theatre entirely afterwards. I used to think it was because the show was cursed. Now it’s because I think the script is shit.

Trying to think of how to rewrite the script into “Jade Monkey: the Movie,” I came up with so many flaws (as you’ve seen) that I decided there was only one solution: burn it to the ground and start over on a white piece of paper. Because I still liked the concept, just not the execution. Watch the skies… we’ll get to how that turned out.

But as for re-staging Jade Monkey, in short, no. No a thousand times over.

Repeated theme alert

• This was my first attempt at funny-yet-menacing villains. But not the last.
• “Man and woman cannot be friends.” Travis and Saisha spend the whole show crushing on each other, and Manservant’s got it bad for Helena. Which makes even less sense than Maya liking Jordan.
• Pop culture references: Why a Jade Monkey? Homer the Astronaut. The whole B-plot is born of a Simpsons reference, and its resolution is a near-verbatim recreation of my reaction to the climax of the first Tomb Raider movie.
• “Let’s swap backstories for fifteen minutes like that’s not pacing Kryptonite!” I was still doing that last year.
• The Quiet, Shy Protagonist The Ladies Still Unaccountably Love. Somebody shoot me.

So I tried to think of something interesting to talk about, and all I could come up with was a spoilerific discussion of certain choices made in the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary special. But that would have been a lengthy diatribe about Doctor Who’s magical rules of time travel in order to address a criticism not from any of my current or potential readers, but from an internet entertainer whose work I enjoy when she isn’t disliking Stephen Moffat. In short, I’m not certain how interesting it was actually going to be. So, lacking any other pressing topics, here’s a look back at one of my scripts that’s actually almost timely.

There was another 50th anniversary last week: the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. So let’s look back at the script I wrote about just that: the conspiracy comedy Knoll.

What’s it about?

It’s the assassination of JFK, told from the perspective of the second gunmen from the grassy knoll.

Saul and Roscoe have been hired for a job. An assassination that will change the course of history. They have to kill President John F. Kennedy, while letting Lee Harvey Oswald take the fall. The play follows them over the course of a week, from getting the job, to setting up on the titular knoll, to the aftermath two days later.

So why’d that happen?

I mentioned earlier that in University I was super into conspiracy theories, yes? This led me to buy The Big Book of Conspiracies, an illustrated guide to the 20th century’s most popular conspiracy theories. It’s a fun read, if dangerously easy to buy into if you’re of a sort that’s eager to find evidence of sinister plots and hidden aliens. It’s got MKUltra, attempts to kill Castro, claims that the moon landing was faked, claims that the moon landing found evidence of alien visitation, stuff about Mars (including hypotheses that the orbit of Mars’ moon, Phobos, indicates it’s either hollow or artificial), dark secrets of Catholicism, a theory that ends in the sinister phrase “Earth is a farm, we are someone’s property,” and, of course, an entire chapter devoted just to the assassination of JFK.

At one point, I was big enough into this book that I considered trying to adapt it to the stage. Have various men in black guide you through the choicest conspiracies in the book. More of a performance piece than play, I guess. I got most of the way through a scene before I lost faith in the project, both its stageability and the odds of it attracting lawsuits from the publisher. Getting actual adaptation rights from Paradox Press, a division of DC Comics, a division of Time/Warner, seemed far too much of a struggle. So I put that aside and worked on other things.

A while later, in playwriting class, I toyed with an idea called “Conspiracy Cafe,” in which the second gunman from the Kennedy conspiracy hides out in a diner for a spell. I remember almost nothing about it. Don’t think it went over well. Don’t imagine it could have, because from there the concept morphed into Knoll.

How’d it turn out?

Pretty okay. Okay enough that it’s been performed four times: at the 2003 Pumphouse One-act Festival, at the 2003 Vancouver Fringe festival, back in Calgary for the 40th anniversary of the assassination (which was a day I really began to wonder why we were so bad at marketing, as the local paper did a full page on the anniversary and we weren’t mentioned once), and then the son of someone I’d been in a writing class with bought the rights to perform it in the 2006 Calgary Fringe. Despite its flaws, this is one of only two scripts that someone else has bought from me thus far.

Which is not to say there aren’t flaws, because there are. This is the show where I became concerned that I was getting complacent, becoming too proud of my banter and wordplay and not really pushing myself to improve. A writer’s circle I joined a few months before this script was staged for the first time proved those fears were accurate, and that the script needed more depth, the characters needed to be something other than a vessel for repeated use of the word “ooze.” I thought that was funny. It was not particularly funny.

Also the playwright running the circle was adamantly opposed to Canadians writing plays about America, but that’s his thing. Did cost us when he turned out to be adjudicating the one-act festival it premiered in.

Would you stage it again?

Probably, yeah. I mean, we did just hit the 50th anniversary, it even feels like the time. But it might still need some polish. I did my best (at the time) to add more depth and feeling, but I could probably go further. There’s still an over-reliance on what I hoped would be amusing comic banter. There are still opportunities to expand on who these guys are; that is, who the script needs them to be, not who the Big Book of Conspiracies says they are.

Yeah, Roscoe and Saul are taken right out of… I hesitate to use the phrase “real world…” let’s say published theories about the “real killers.” According to some authors, Dallas PD officer Roscoe White (whose chin was a close match to Oswald’s chin in the infamous backyard photo) left a journal confessing to being the real assassin, naming a co-conspirator named “Saul.” Further, they write of a man photographed leaving a Russian embassy in Mexico and labeled “Lee Harvey Oswald” despite looking nothing like the real Oswald. LA County Chief of Detectives Hugh McDonald, who said the photos were sent to the FBI the day before the assassination, claimed to have found the man in the photos in London, where he identified himself as “Saul” and also confessed to the killing.

Almost got sucked back down the rabbit hole there… anyway. These days I’d be more inclined to try to build these two as characters rather than believe I was telling an untold true story or somesuch. But still, it’s a fun piece.

Repeated theme alert

• Still overusing the word “creepy.” Well, I only use it twice before breaking out the thesaurus (“shady” gets a few uses), but it’s a word I could have stood to let go by this point.
• As mentioned, this was the breaking point for my style up to this point. I began trying to wean myself off the “banter” style I was so clearly fond of.

When next I visit this topic, we’ll look at how I tried to push myself into deeper emotional territory, why I considered the result my best script ever, and why I was so, so wrong to think that.

First off, I am both surprised and gratified by all the comments my last blog post is getting from current and former postal workers. Thanks for finding the blog, thanks for reading, and thanks for the supportive comments. I can only hope that some of my other posts, less directly related to your own struggles, can also entertain you. On that note…

Gonna try to blog a lot more this week to make up for a lengthy absence. And to continue hammering it in as a habit. And clearly, I’ve stumbled onto the one thing my audience craves.

Derpy wombats.

I kid. Now, I’ve pretty much exhausted my supply of post office stories (save for the odd case of the dude on 12th Ave), and I don’t have any past regrets I need to send an open letter to just now (not to say I’m out of regrets, just that I don’t feel a need to discuss any of them) so it’s time to return to my ongoing re-examination of my old scripts.

The year was 2000, Lethargic Lad had just wrapped, and things continued to get silly in the spy parody Supervillain!

What’s it about?

Former henchman-turned-supervillain Hank Scorpio has a vision: that the global domination game can be won if you’re just willing to avoid all the classic mistakes villains love to make and be smart about things. With his temp/Grand Vizier Jake McCoy, chief enforcer Katya Greatsex, and the prophet Tellius, he sets out to prove the bad guy can win. Opposing him is arrogant superspy Jack Bunt, whose list of defeated villains is almost as long as his list of female assistants killed in action, and his new assistant Jessica Sydoskyk, who he refers to as “Sidekick.”

Hank must foil the spies and rule the world, without giving in and telling Bunt all the details of the plan. But… it’s such a good plan, it seems a shame not to talk about it…

So why did that happen?

Two sources of influence here: first of all, an email forward titled “Things I will do when I am a supervillain,” a list poking fun at classic villain screw-ups like assuming your death-trap will kill the hero or buying into statements like “He’s just one man, what can he do?” Second, the Simpsons episode You Only Move Twice, in which Homer goes to work for charming, friendly, boss-of-the-year supervillain Hank Scorpio. Yeah, not even going to try to deny the connection there. What point would there be? I named my theatre company after him, I’m not going to be able to claim the character name is a coincidence.

So after reading the villain list, I became enamoured with the notion of a villain actually trying to avoid the cliche screw-ups, and decided to give that story a whirl. I also threw in a trope Terry Pratchett often took shots at, the trope of the sinister Grand Vizier who will inevitably turn on his master. Hiring a random temp, Jake, as Grand Vizier was Scorpio’s attempt to circumvent that.

How’d it turn out?

Fairly funny, I’d say. Funny enough that it made a return appearance to the stage a full eight years later, with only minimal polish.

Some of the jokes are a little forced. Some of the banter remained too wordy. But a lot of the humour holds up okay. The many trials of Sidekick, from dealing with Bunt’s blunt-object approach to espionage to the unwanted advances of Katya, still entertain me. Hank and Jake make a decent comedy duo when the banter’s clicking. Bunt’s cavalier disregard for Sidekick’s safety still makes me chuckle. It’s rough in places, sure, but there’s still an appeal under it all.

We also tried a gimmick when this play first went up: alternate endings. We gave the audience the chance to say how they thought the play should end, and if we used theirs the next night they got in free. The idea was that they’d bring friends to see their suggested ending. Also, tickets were two-for-one with a used ticket stub, to further incentivize repeat viewings.

Alternate endings included Katya and Sidekick kicking out the menfolk and taking over, the Independence Day ending (Hank rallies everyone to fight a sudden alien invasion), the Charlie’s Angels ending (Jessica, Katya and Tellius are the Angels), the henchmen-blow-up-the-base ending, and the popular “return of the surly cocktail waiter” ending. Plus what I stubbornly referred to as the real ending.

Would you stage it again?

Maybe. In the right circumstances. I’d probably want to continue to polish it, clear up some of the rough spots, improve the pacing, but it holds up okay. It’s far from my best comedy, but the jokes work more often than they don’t.

It’s a B- spy parody. Not great, not terrible, which makes it hard to say anything in-depth about. It was a chance for me to tell silly jokes about spy movies for an hour and a half, ending with a decent monologue from Hank and a lot of fun exasperation on the parts of Jake and Jessica. It’s good enough that I’d rework this script instead of starting over from the basic premise, not so good that I’m quick to give it to people as a sample of my work.

Repeated theme alert

• This entire play is a pop culture reference. Bond movies, Shakespeare, the lead character is a Simpsons reference… it would be harder to find a page without pop culture references on it.
• I surely did like the word “creepy.” I used the words “creepy” and “creeps” so much in this script they begin to lose meaning.
• The Outsider: I always found it beneficial to, when dealing with odd premises like this one, have a character who is outside of the situation. An ordinary person who can act as audience surrogate. Steve in Apocalypse Soonish, Greg in Illuminati in Love, and now Jake. Works pretty well.

This month has been known amongst my friends as “Super September,” with at least one party, often landmark birthday parties, each weekend. It’s been a long, tiring, very busy month. Super September serves as both an excuse for not blogging in like a week (also some temp work that left me exhausted with a sore back for a few days), and a great set-up, as we continue to look at plays about super heroes.

But this time, instead of comic book creators, we tackled actual super heroes in The Death and Life of Lethargic Lad, written by myself and my colleague Chris Munroe.

What’s it about?

It’s based on the Canadian comic book-turned-long running webcomic Lethargic Lad, which uses the mostly mute super hero Lethargic Lad and his various friends/foes to parody super hero culture: the comics, the movies, the cons, the fans, whatever is big in the news or capturing creator Greg Hyland’s attention that week.

 

We focused on the major cast members. For good guys, the four “replacement Lethargic Lads” that turned up in a parody of the “Death and Return of Superman” story from the early 90s and then stuck around to be the principals: the Last Son of Lethargy, the Lad of Steel, Little Green Boy, and the Evil Cyborg Lethargic Lad. On the side of evil: Lethargic Lad’s primary nemeses Evil Smiley Face Guy and Mr. Mimico, plus the Part Time Lethargic Lad Revenge Squad: Evil Kitty Cat Guy, the Quizmaster, and Lady Bad Girl.

When Evil Smiley Face Guy and Mr. Mimico finally succeed in killing Lethargic Lad, the Replacement Lads spring up to carry on his legacy while the Part Time Lethargic Lad Revenge Squad plots to conquer the world.

But mostly they all sit around and argue about TV, movies, and comic book nerdery. And then the Evil Cyborg Lethargic Lad turns on everyone. ‘Cause, you know, evil.

So why’d that happen?

Many of my nerdier friends at that time had become huge Lethargic Lad fans. It spoke to my love of things geeky and made fun of them in just the right way, much like Hijinks Ensue does now. One day, Chris Munroe decided to email Greg Hyland and ask for permission to write a play about his characters. To my shy, quiet, nobody-will-ever-say-yes-to-my-dreams amazement, Mr. Hyland said go for it, and I decided I wanted in. Chris agreed to co-write the project, and soon we were crafting an outline and picking which scenes we were each going to write (for the most part, I wrote the heroes and he wrote the villains).

We found places for as many of the Lethargic Lad supporting cast as we could: Walrus Boy was made the owner of the coffee shop where the Lads hung out, Guy With a Gun Gal (a character designed, I assume, in reference to a Punisher storyline not even I’ve read) makes an appearance, Mr. Cheese is there solely to make fun of how ridiculous the plot of Batman and Robin was, we put in references to the No-Mutants (a team featuring no mutants) and Poison Uma Thurman, a character created to mock Uma Thurman’s portrayal of Poison Ivy who Chris re-imagined as a villain whose schtick was poisoning Uma Thurman. And, just like in the comics, Lethargic Lad’s one true love Lethargic Lass was a cardboard cutout.

I also found a way to include one of my favourite running gags. Every time something particularly bizarre happens, or there’s a continuity error to cover up, Greg would include the feature “Greg Talks to a Frog,” in which a giant frog would berate him about what was happening. In our script, this took the form of the Narrator being berated by a giant frog about once per scene. I thought it was funny. And done right, it certainly can be.

How’d it turn out?

You know what? Two of us worked on this thing, two of us should get to reflect. So joining us live via having emailed me last week, here’s the Internet’s Chris Munroe.

Three lessons I took from Lethargic Lad:

1) Ask for what you want in this life. The worst that can happen is that you’re told no, and sometimes you’ll offer nothing (nothing!) in exchange for the stage rights to your favorite webcomic and the author/artist, who’s never heard of you, will just give those rights to you out of the goodness of his heart, because why not?

2) To participate in the production of something you’ve written, you need to be able to sublimate your creative ego. The product will be different than what you put on the page. I have an enormous amount of respect for Dan’s ability to do this well. As to my own ability in that regard, we’ll leave the question hanging…

3) Reference-based humor will date. Rapidly, and badly. This is a show from the early 2000s, based on a comic from the 1990s, and WOW does that fact show. Both Dan and I were willing to go very deep into the genre-convention-based lampshade hanging and, while as an exercise this proves interesting to look back on with a decade or so’s hindsight, it shows on every page. Would a third writer who knew nothing of comic books or the culture that surrounds them have helped moderate our instincts in this regard? We’ll never know, as neither of us thought to invite one to give thoughts on the finished product…

Oh man. He ain’t kidding. The pop culture references were thick on this thing. Thick. And grotesquely dated. Future archaeologists could find a copy of this script and figure out it was staged no later than the fall of 2000 based on the references to Ally McBeal, Ironic by Alanis Morissette, and the endless shots at Batman and Robin. Throw in the fact that four of the main characters are references to a Superman story from 1993 (not technically our fault) and a running gag that depends on you having read the Superboy comic from the mid-90s (totally our fault), and yeah, we could’ve used someone to remind us what was going to amuse an audience rather than each other. Sorry, Munsi, do continue.

…I use the phrase “finished product” very loosely here, as I find the script reads very much like a promising first draft that desperately needs a few editing passes to trim the flab. Jokes are repeated again and again, character/plot points are told, not shown, and we both seem to be operating under the belief that drawing attention to plot holes in an occasionally humorous way makes up for the utter lack of interest we have in actually closing them. Overall the “plot”, such as it is, exists as little more than a minimalist frame upon which to hang comic-book inside jokes, working on the assumption that the audience at the actual show will know enough about ‘90s-era event comics to take that journey with us. If memory serves, they did not.

Fact. The lampshade hanging is both fast an furious, and not once did we consider that if our characters (mostly the Frog, also Walrus Boy and Lady Bad Girl) were complaining about the story this much it might be a red flag.

Which is a shame, as re-reading this I was surprised at how many of the jokes actually did still work for me. Poison Uma Thurman, in particular, is a super-villain concept that does still make me giggle, what with her poisoning Uma Thurman and all, and beyond that I think a lot of the banter, the bickering and the patter still hits more than it misses, even with a decade’s hindsight. It’s not that the material was BAD, as such; it’s just that there was far too much of it, spread too long, without enough framework to back it up properly, which led in the end to a script that was much less than the sum of its parts.

I don’t know why I thought for so long that “wordier is wittier.” I still catch myself thinking that sometimes. “I can make this awkwardness Hugh Grant-adorable if I just make the sentence three times longer than it needs to be.” No. Stop it. Streamline that banter, whittle the jokes down to something more rapid fire, and have less people yelling about how stupid this all is and we’re on to something.

I remember almost nothing of the production of the actual show, as I was on the other side of town rehearsing a different show simultaneously with this (Cabaret? Rocky Horror? For the life of me I can’t remember which) [Rocky Horror. He was Riff Raff. -Dan] and had to split my focus between the two. And the role that was basically “amusing, largely mute background business” wasn’t getting the lion’s share of my attention due to this fact, which is a shame, as I recall the actual performances being light, breezy fun, and would have benefited from more time to devote to what I was doing. I have no idea if the SHOW would have benefited, but I personally would have.

Overall, Lethargic Lad is a good summary of Dan and I, as writers, for both good and ill, at that time in our lives, operating completely free from editors, with all the problems that creates. A decade later I use editors for my writing. Lots and lots of editors. Broken Escalator went through eight different readings during three editing passes before I considered it sufficiently workshopped, and I was tempted to give it a fourth pass before finally releasing it. That’s me today. Me a decade ago, unencumbered by any significant editorial voice other than my own belief that I was hilarious? Lethargic Lad didn’t stand a chance…

I, too, have since learned the value of an edit, and the value of people you trust to tell you what does and does not work. We’ll get to that more as we move on.

Would you stage it again?

Like this? No. Very much no. The humour fades exponentially the further away you get from the late 90s. But there are elements in there that work.

Perhaps what we’d need to do to make a Lethargic Lad script work is completely change our approach. Rather than try to replicate the “hangin’ round, mockin’ comic books” narrative of the webcomic, if we made this a full-on mockery/celebration of the tropes and cliches of nerd culture. Move away from specific references (“Wasn’t it dumb in Iron Man when they did this”) to something more overreaching (“Them’s surely a bunch of white dudes you’ve assembled to save the world”). I mean, nerd culture is in the mainstream now, and we could have fun with that. Not that we will in all probability. We both have other projects on the go and neither of us is likely to go back to this well any time soon.

Shortly after the run of Death and Life of Lethargic Lad I envisioned an outline for a sequel, Lethargic Lad Returns Forever. It also involved a cast of at least 14 and many, many outlandish props and costumes. I never bothered to write a word of it down. I couldn’t imagine anyone being excited to do it all again, and started writing smaller scale comedies with more character development.

Well. Eventually.

Not right away, as the next installment will show.

Repeated theme alert

• “Sittin’ around coffee shops.” A lot of my plays involve characters just chatting in coffee shops rather than, you know, doing things. I can’t believe I didn’t mention this trope in Apocalypse Soonish, given what a serious offender it is on this score. Anyway, 75% of what the Replacement Lads do is quibble about 90s pop culture in a coffee shop.
• No Simpsons quotes! But I did borrow a turn of phrase from… some sitcom. One character says “Get out!” in disbelief and the other replies “I’m out!” Not Seinfeld. What was it. Some lesser Friends clone, I think. Oh well. Hardly matters.
• That said I did lift a few scenes from the original Lethargic Lad comics, but I feel that’s allowed in this case.