January 5, 2014

The temperature in Minneapolis is reportedly lower than the temperature on Mars.

Actually being produced professionally changes the way one approaches playwriting. For one, you’re always trying to pare down the number of equity contracts necessary. In a historical scene– such as the deathbed of Lincoln, where I am now– it requires you to think of excuses for falsification. You have someone say what the doctor said, rather than having the doctor there to say it.  You take words from the Senator and give them to the Secretary, who is already on stage. You conflate. You condense. You arrange scenes to enable doubling. If actor A playing character A could possibly be character C in the next scene, you create enough business to allow for the costume change. You know that for most people in the business saving money will be a legitimate reason for playing fast and loose. You know that most scholars will accept that with a shrug and make their notation. Edward Albee said in Valdez that one should not do that, that one should write the play one writes and let the producers worry about the rest. But that was Edward Albee. I won’t say it isn’t kind of fun: like building a house on uneven ground.

Move-in is back to January 31. Everybody but me forgot when closing day was. Call from Cameron that the mortgage empress, though approving everything, and not actually needing a couple of documents which he insisted were needed, has “a couple of questions.” This threw me into blue fury right there in the antique store, where I was looking (unsuccessfully) for a desk. Why is it that authority (especially when it’s exercising itself toward no necessary end) infuriates me so? I do recognize it as a flaw in my character, though my reaction might be less vehement had I encountered much authority that was as wise as it was arrogant, as vital as it was self-protective. The mortgage system is a special case: by greed and intentional bad practice it nearly brought the financial system to its knees. Having been saved, it pretends its saviors were the cause of its problems, that malicious borrowers had duped it into bad practice, and arrays itself in vigilance against us. Most of what we go through in a day is quite unnecessary–authority erecting a wall of baffles and busywork behind which it can work in secret. I try not to think of this too often.

Every project I touched yesterday, from moderate to minor (it was one of those days) fell immediately apart. The truck doors were frozen shut. I went looking for furniture without having measured the rooms. Bla and bla and bla. It is a very dark Sunday morning, and from now on until dawn I shall write.

The moon and Venus rise in my east window and set in my west. This is what I’ll miss most desperately. Though I am now assuming that this move will ever come to pass. My being ahead in the packing almost insures that it will not . . . .