III: So close to something better left unknown

I was in the car with Robyn a few weeks ago, when the song "Give Me Sympathy" (or is it "Gimme"?) by Metric came on. I hadn't heard it before, as my general avoidance of current music means I tend to miss out on a lot of things. I thought it was a rather nice song, particularly since it namedrops the Beatles ("Come on baby play me something like Here Comes the Sun." How sweet a sentiment.)

Anyway, I stand now on the edge of writing a new play, my first in a long while. Well, I wrote this version of Half-Past in October (with substantial rewrites as recently as April - including many of the best lines I contributed.) I never did write a proper follow-up, hence my reputation as a potential one-hit wonder. How terrifying.

The original idea in high school was to follow up Half-Past with a play called "Funeral for a Freak," but it was over-ambitious and ultimately doomed from the start. I don't think I ever showed anyone, but the unfinished script was on Interneta for a while. Then there was Night Sessions, which was a pretty decent little script, but largely influenced by my group members on that project. I think it was my idea, but I said to everyone "What kind of character would you want to play?" And then the refining process brought it very far from my initial draft, for better or worse.

Then there's the work I've done for others. As far as Fringe scripts go, I still think "Murder in the Wings," which I wrote for Ana Yavari, was as good as the original version of Half-Past. But by the time she took me up on my offer to write it (which I did in an extremely short amount of time) it was too late and the script was doomed to never live. I wouldn't want to put it on now, just because it was inherently a high school thing.

And of course there's "No Way My Life," which I'm also extremely proud of. Like "Murder in the Wings" it wasn't my idea, but I was glad to help Chris and Pat flesh it out, pitch a few jokes here and there. My main contribution had to do with ironing out the end of the play, because the way it ties up, with the secretary being the leak, is very much in my style.

So I never wrote myself a true follow-up to Half-Past. There was Summer at Sixteen, which was mine but written for Ana, which never happened. It's a screenplay rather than stage, and actually somewhat intriguing, worthwhile, but not great as is. It's not like I haven't been writing of course... for a long time I was very prolific, and then my pace has sadly slowed with age. And there was just never any call for anything else, there was always just a new venue to do Half-Past. Meanwhile, books and short stories and poems called. You see how my life intersects with the writer character from "Cast Party."

Outside of a few little scenes, nothing major, I haven't up and written anything brand new for the stage in a long time. Like I said, I had no reason to. And now I do. Suddenly the world is counting on me to follow-u Half-Past Eight PM. But honestly, how the fuck do you follow that up? It's a juggernaut. I'm wracked with self-doubt. I'm trying to purge it from myself before even attempting, which I aim to by the end of this night. I've got a premise and an outline. I've even got a first line. Now all I need is a spark.

It's just proving a bit harder to remove myself from that world than I might've thought. Ever since I wrote it, I've been haunted by the idea that my writing career peaked at 16, that I wrote the best thing of my life back then and everything else since then is deep in its shadow. Well that of course is nonsense; like I said the best parts of this show were written in October or April, or of course ad-libbed. I told anyone who would listen that pretty much my favourite audience moment of the show came at the end when Beth delivers a little monologue about how she and Perry slept together, but he was all needy and that's why she went to England, and then Mark is (in the words of the script,) "Catatonic with shock" until Beth finally puts him, and the audience, at ease, by saying "Mark... I'm fucking with you." A roar of approving laughter ensues every time.

I had no idea how that one would play. Obviously I wouldn't have written it if I didn't think it'd get a laugh, but I was worried it was simply too flat of a moment, but Perkins and Patricelli really nailed the feel of that moment. See, here's the thing. Until this draft of the play, Beth had been a fairly flat character. Like, in the first draft, she was wooden. In the movie, Alyssa breathed some life into her, but the dialogue didn't really serve her all that well, it was still pretty basic. I hadn't done anything to make the crowd excited for her arrival, aside from having Mark talk relentlessly about how much he cares about her, which doesn't do much for the audience.

I think at some point, probably in April, Cary came to me and, amongst his various other notes, must've said "For crying out loud, give Beth something interesting to say or do." Prior to this there was the very ambiguous exchange between her and Perry in the flashback, and then whisking her away at the end - like I said, a flat presence. The icebreaker was the platypus dialogue, which was largely ripped from real life, and helped me finally get a hold of Beth's voice, seeing how she would interact with Perry. Then suddenly she was an interesting enough person that she would have just as much fun messing with Mark as Perry seems to, and it's even a little cruel because she knows he believes her a lot more than he would Perry, but she can't resist. And that of course led to the pitch-perfect "Does she?/basically dominates him/and he?/still cheats/that guy/I know!" exchange that really hammered home how close these two were. I was proud of myself for writing that, and how much I loved seeing them act it out.

And now it's new characters, new relationships, new jokes.

Thinking back to Saturday night. A friend of mine once told me not to mope so much, because nobody likes a mopey person. And I do mope, although not as determinedly as I did back then. I mope, as I did on Saturday, when I am far past the drunk line at a party loaded with people I can't talk to. I hate to come back to that feeling but it really is something. For a little while that night I was just staring at the fire, trying not to hear the conversations around me, wishing I still had my mental equipment so that I could bring myself to be interesting, but at that point, drunkenness had brought it to expiry and all I had was "Hey I know you a little, will you come for a walk with me and help me sober up? No? Fuck!!" Luckily, someone eventually did engage me, as mentioned in the actual recap of the evening. That's all I really want, when I'm sulking off by myself, is for someone to come by and break the ice, because it probably means I have lost the ability to do so myself.

I consider myself a pretty complicated guy, but only because I make everything a bigger problem than it has to be. Eating socially. Meeting people. Dating, or not dating, or whatever. I fixate on problems. There was one draft - the not very good one - of Half-Past where Perry had this gigantic speech to Mark telling him about his problems, and I was proud of it until I sent it to Cary, and he read it and he was not impressed, and then I re-read it and thought "Oh man you're right. I fucked this one up."

That was the draft, the now-missing intermediate draft between October and late April, where all the characters suddenly had gigantic monologues and Cary detested it. I wound up reformatting it to dialogue - and rightly so - but the point of that draft, I think, was for me to find my footing and try to discover for myself what kind of material I was actually going to add in, because it was the first really new stuff I had brought in in years (October's script was largely a reconfiguration of the original as best I could get from the movie.)

So I may or may not be a very complicated guy, and I may or may not fixate too hard on my own problems.

I refer to the line from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning -- "Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not." You may or may not know it as the title of an Arctic Monkeys album, but it goes back a ways and it holds up.

I ran into Ryan Lai today. Well, not really "ran into," more like met up, I suppose, since I asked him what train he'd be on then went on it, because it was convenient to do so. He told me about one friend of his who'd slept with another's girlfriend. Really shocking business, really. It's just not how you do it.

There's been a lot of stuff along those lines lately, stuff that will probably inform and influence, but maybe not directly inspire, the new play. The plot's pretty set out, but the mood needs tweaking.

Work, work, work. It's time I did some. If this is to be my job, I ought to be dedicated. It's just a matter of starting. This has been an extreme of procrastination. Trying to unwind myself.

Here we go?

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto