THE BOY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD

an absurd fairy tale

PLAYWRIGHT meets HUMAN GUY. PLAYWRIGHT has stomach-punching intuiton that HUMAN GUY is about to get his heart stomped upon. MUSE thinks this would be a fabulous tragedy to write! PLAYWRIGHT fires MUSE.

PLAYWRIGHT doesn't write.

GIRL, the five-year old incarnation of our writerly-blocked heroine, gets ticked off that PLAYWRIGHT is wasting their life not writing. GIRL takes over.

PLAYWRIGHT still doesn't write.

The powers that be send MALE MUSE. (And damn, is he hot!)

MALE MUSE commands PLAYWRIGHT to instead pen a comedy about aforementioned HUMAN GUY, conveniently residing as far away from her as humanly possible while still being on the surface of this planet. PLAYWRIGHT would mostly prefer to get MALE MUSE naked.

GIRL, newly in-charge of an adult life, interviews HUMAN GUY, who tells her the East River is quite possibly comprised of slow-flowing strawberry soft-serve ice cream. GIRL falls madly in love!

And that's not even the backstory.



It sorta evolved...

Originally, this was to be a totally different play. So different, in fact, that I'm not even going to describe the initial idea, because I still intend to write that play. But here's what happened...

Life.

Yeah. That about sums it up.

Ideas evolve in the process of living and interacting with other human beings. So I lived, I pondered, I wrote about it, I got feedback. And eventually this play took shape. Here are some of the posts that document that evolution.

The character of GIRL, being PLAYWRIGHT as a child, is highly autobiographical. Getting GIRL onto the same stage as PLAYWRIGHT but in separate characterization was quite a process. Babbling Jill is the first post in which I separated myself into different characters. In Same As I Ever Was, I used baby pictures to describe myself and how much I haven't changed since then. Then in Dramatis Personæ, Baby Jill finally gets to converse with the adult Jill(s)... and a few of the fictional (and real) characters that inhabit her universe.

There were just as many (probably more) steps in the evolution of the male characters, but I'll not narrate that here. It's too intricate, and besides, I may be using earlier incarnations of them as starting points for other projects. But here is the post in which I first announced the concept. And in Theme: see "awe" I was able to articulate an artistic manifesto of sorts, as to what I wished to accomplish on a personal level with the content of the play.



Now for some excerpts...

Meet Girl is how the play begins. In his turn, though the character is unnamed and the scene has already been significantly revised, you get a peek into the mind of MALE MUSE. In a harmless bit of voyeurism MALE MUSE and PLAYWRIGHT (also unnamed here) have some fun. While we watch. And in a loaded question (ew!) I and my commenters ponder the ins and outs of on-stage... um... I have to just come out and say this... bj's.

Yep. Paper dolls, paper airplanes, continental scorecards, voyeurism, and on-stage kneeling. Fun, huh? Welcome to my brain.