an update on thus always unto tyrants

I haven’t posted anything on this platform but that doesn’t mean that I have abandoned the project that I’ve been working on. If anything, the practice of posting essays here once a week that I was engaged in help me write my back to the real project that I need to be working on right, the play, Thus Always Unto Tyrants. I’ve been writing and I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve hit a vein, and the last six month have been the most productive I’ve been in a couple of years, and (fortunately) that productivity has taken place away from this platform. Still, I wanted to post an update on the project here, in part to help establish at something that is on its way to becoming real. I’ve also been working on a series of essays intended to supplement the play and I intend for this post to serve as the re-introduction to the essay series accompanying the play.

Since I last posted anything here, the play has gone from scattered notes and a rough draft I wrote five years ago to a a complete 13,000 word play. (This is about the length I was shooting for when I began- I’m not sure how long this translates to in terms of run time- many sources say a minute to a a minute and half per page, and at 60 pages that puts this somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half?) In any case, every scene is written, the structure and action of the play are set, and the editing I am doing now concerns sharpening dialogue and honing in on voice.

It’s at the stage where I can only do so much editing sitting at my desk. I need to hear the words in other people’s mouths. I’ve begun workshopping the play, including hosting a group of actors at my apartment to perform a full read through. (By serendipity, the read through happened on March 15th, the ides, which, as the day of Caesar’s assassination has a lot of meaning to the play.) It’s exciting to get to this point- it’s taking another lurch towards becoming something real- but it’s also nerve-wracking - it’s taking another lurch towards becoming something real. Hearing the words spoken aloud by actors is a new kind of experiment. It’s helpful- hearing how the words ring gives me a better sense of what is flat, what is sharp, what is tune and what I want to keep out of tune- but its also painful (embarrassing) to hear the words, especially the words that are out of tune (so to speak). I’ve also been in close communication with the person who I intend to direct the play. I’m interested to see how the play develops as it enters the next phase of the process, one where other collaborators become more involved. I intend for the play to be very (and here is where my lack of practical theater training starts to become clear) image heavy, iconographic, expressionistic, and, as playwright, I can only do so much to determine that. I think right now the play is a little too literal, too linear, too narrative. I hope that as I spend more time bringing in other people, people with more knowledge of theater proper, it can grow into something with more movement and more abstraction.

I’ve never written a play before and there are a lot of things I’m trying to pull off. Sometimes I worry that I am biting off more than I can chew, that I’m bringing in too many big themes, that by bringing in Abraham Lincoln and Shakespeare and all that stuff it’s too much, over the top, pretentious, and I mean on the one hand, yeah, obviously, of course, but I do hope you trust me that it all makes sense to the logic of the play, that nothing is wasted, that the play will be agile, that I know what I’m doing. Besides,I think at this point if you are going to bother writing you might as well go for, you might as well go all the way. Now isn’t the time to hold back, out of fear of embarassment of seeming pretentious or worrying that the material will get the better of you. Now is the time to take everything and go all in, put all your chips in the middle of the table and see how the hands unfolds.

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