"Waiting for Gadot" (complete)

I know clicking through a blog can be annoying, so I've stitched together all the posts that made up "Waiting for Gadot" here. I do think the best way to read the play is to read each scene/interlude and then, before moving on, reading the follow-up behind the scenes "autopsy" post where I reflect on what I've written so I've linked to these in between each scene or interlude.

100 Things to Consume Instead of "Waiting for Gadot"

Here's a list of things to read, watch, listen, or otherwise consume, rather than my play, "Waiting for Gadot." This play is the first major piece of writing I have done in years, so I didn't want to boost my ego by simply pushing my play alone--in the interim I have still been a consumer of all different forms of media, and as a fan I would like to point people in the direction of a number of these different works of art as well.

Under "final scene"

This is the end, my only friend, the end.

"Waiting for Gadot," final scene

Make sure you read in order!

Pardon the Interruption

Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about theatre. The house isn't empty as I write this; a cold February rain isn't falling outside. It’s not night. Sometimes... we lose the power. But for now it’s on, and so let’s talk very honestly about theatre. Let’s talk very rationally about moving to the fourth wall…and perhaps over the edge.

Under "Interlude" - final

That was the last interlude.

Interlude

Things are about to get a bit... different, let's say.

Under "scene three"

I've noticed that I formatted these posts differently. That's what happens when you work on something piecemeal over the course of a few months and yet post it as you work on it. If I just wrote the whole thing and edited it in one file as I went, it might not have happened... But I think posting it on the blog has been as much a reason for writing this play as anything else. If I didn't post it, I might not have stuck with it. Now I can see the end and I plan to have it all wrapped up within a few days. I watched the first episode of Horace and Pete a couple weeks back and the way that Louis CK describes creating and posting that show up on the internet makes me think of this play. The medium is the message (or massage) and all that.

"Waiting for Gadot," scene 3

A personal, explicatory scene. I won't say much here, because I want to save it for the autopsy.

Under "interlude"

Hello again. As you might be able to tell from the dates of the posts, I wrote the last interlude partially in response to Hurricane Irma hitting us in Florida. We didn't get much damage, but Tampa seems to finally have been hit by a hurricane, which hadn't happened for nearly a hundred years. What did happen was that my house lost power for a day and a half and it made me reflect on how much I take for granted what electricity allows us in the first world. Now let's dig into the interlude!

Interlude

Political and plot happening. Not so sure it's meaningful plot, but events do occur.

Under "feature"

"I still feel like episode 8 of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN set a challenge." Warren Ellis, talking about the weirdest episode of David Lynch's magnum opus. Ellis's working on a revamp of a whole '90s comix universe in The Wild Storm, so it's fitting that he should reference Twin Peaks which itself has returned this year from its truncated end in the early nineties. I've watched the first part of the finale now and will be putting on the second in a minute. I said to a friend, "This show started when I was 1." Then I realized I was wrong about that--I'd confused the year of the prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me with the original show. It's actually a few months older than I am, falling in that weird almost a year between the days Taylor Swift and I were born. There's a reference you probably didn't expect! Well, let's get to the autopsy...

The Feature Presentation

I'm not the biggest fan of strong pronouncements like "And now, something completely different..." And yet, moving into this scene, I want to say just that. This is a shift in the play and I will discuss it in some detail in the autopsy post. We will soon return to our regularly scheduled programming, if anyone really needs to know what the future holds with Pompo or Carl. And now, something completely different...

Under "interlude"

Back when I first wrote the monologue of "interlude," I had recently shaved my head, so no wonder Pompo would do so. I initially scrapped this consideration of hair as too specific for Pompo's introduction into the play and rewrote the initial interlude, always knowing I would return to this one. That's why now, as I've posted it, my hair has grown back considerably. A co-worker asked me one day this week if her memory was right and I had all my hair cut off in May--when I replied in the affirmative, she said "Your hair grows fast!" I'm still processing that comment. I guess some or most people can tell if hair grows fast, but the awareness, day in and day out, that such an observation requires is beyond me. It's like someone saying "that paint dries fast!" and thinking, did they sit there and watch it dry? Or I could say the same with the grass growing. Let's get to the jump here...

interlude

You have to wonder--does Pompo have the same tape recorder as Carl?

Under "scene two"

You all know the drill. We're doing a post of play--either a scene or an interlude--followed by a post of reflection on that scene.

"Waiting for Gadot," scene two

Hello there.

Long time no see! Well, I guess a few months doesn't hold up to even more years like my previous gap in blogging. So what's happened in the interim? Wonder Woman was very successful. I went to Italy for a week over the summer. Brand New recently released their last album. Some other stuff I don't want to get into here because other people have discussed it better than I can. In some ways, ironically, it was because I knew how this scene opened that I think I was able to put it off for so long. I can't explain it! But now it's written and I know the next interlude and then a weird bit in the middle that I don't have a name for yet... Some of the interlude is written, so I might have that up this weekend too. I'm actually going to complete a play! Can you believe it? (Pompo can. In some ways, he's from my earliest completed play--a comedic short story I wrote in middle school that I later re-imagined as a play, which was largely just a collection of inside jokes between me and a friend of mine.) Also, if you've been here before, you'll have noticed the blog design has changed (and might again)--this is because pasting into Blogger has been very irritating with the original formatting and rather than become a coder and breakdown all the issues in the HTML that makes things look different than I want, I just changed the blog color to shove all those problems under the rug.

under interlude

Well, I just saw Wonder Woman. It was a solid movie, but falls under the usual strains of superhero fiction (and film in particular). I had a conversation with my friend after about how one problem with the film could be tied to a glorification of violence, but unfortunately that's par for the course with the genre and action films a bit more generally (and yet we both liked John Wick). It's a war movie with a woman who can stop bullets--it makes it a bit harder to make the film distinctly anti-war. There's some irony there since (spoiler) Wonder Woman literally kills the god of war in the film. Still, a good superhero movie with some particularly intriguing moments. I'm interested to see where this Wonder Woman/Batman romance or whatever it is goes in Justice League, but to be honest, I'm not all that invested in superhero movies. (I'm going to read some Dan Clowes tonight to distance myself from it. :P)

Interlude

Open Interlude 

[Enter Pompo in front of curtain. Pompo appears quite similar to Carl but is wearing a shirt with the word Pompo on it and a cartoon version of his face, which somehow exaggerates his features to be unlike Carl's.]

under scene one

As Carl mentions in scene one, I am currently reading The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. "I have been thinking about Tomas for many years," Milan Kundera says of one of his main characters near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and I wanted to begin the play with Carl thinking about Wonder Woman in that way.

"Waiting for Gadot," scene 1

The previous post is an introduction to this play. Feel free to give it a look-see if you haven't yet.

A note on the characters: Loyal readers will be familiar with Carl from "Found" earlier in this blog. Carl is the main character of "Smitten," a novella I wrote in college which was continued in "Found," of which I've written a small part and posted on this blog. The Anthropologist is a character from a poetry sequence at the end of my self-published book you are a little bit cooler than i am (a play on Tao Lin's you are a little bit happier than i am) which I might post on the blog in the near future (or edit this part out of my post if I decide I won't). If you read through all that nonsense, I'm sure the play will be at least a bit more interesting!

Covfefe

Hello! Long time, no see (he says to no one but the blog). Life has happened over the last few years, but I have wanted to do a bit of writing for some time now, and a few circumstances, like planets, aligned to form the perfect motivation.