But if this play's so good, how will you get a ticket? Easy. I wrote a proposal in October to get it into the festival and they went and published the proposal as the blurb in the program. This wouldn't be a problem if we'd already written the play. We had not. The project was so far from being started that we were still actually considering doing what we'd proposed:
Just as newspaper coverage of current events yields a piecemeal narrative built on the structure of days and weeks, so would this play be built on discreet scenes, each yielding slightly more information than the last, or different information altogether. Focus would shift as the story is told, as would rhetorical style, syntax, and pace. This is how a story exists in the popular consciousness--in film, print, television, radio, the emerging blogosphere--and so too then on the stage. But newspaper will be privileged, as it is in the streets of Toronto, where every day the headlines of half a dozen publications vie for your attention, your sympathy. The story stands at the center, while around it narrative is spun that selects, excludes, exhorts, and constructs--not only truth, but the beholders of truth, the reading public.
Specifically, we're working on adapting the coverage of the Walkerton water debacle into a series of scenes, a pointillist narrative, for the stage. Every scene a new day, a new perspective, with new facts and personalities in play. We're bringing into fighting quarters the notions of public trust, betrayal, and assumed audience.
That's posted on the venue's bulletin board and it's in the festival program. Imagine my surprise to see that cheap academic alligator bellyrub up for all to see. Boy was I glad right then that we're not dependent a good turnout to collect our fee ($0, for all you starfuckers out there). There will be tickets aplenty, folks. Buy two and stretch out.
To say we've sold them a phony bill of goods would be an understatement. We spent about as much time seriously trying to realize a play that had something to do with that proposal as I spent writing it. Then we scrapped it all and wrote something we'd actually go see ourselves.
At 9 pm tomorrow I'll have knocked the first item off my "must do" list for 2006. 2 more to go.
I forgot to mention it after our Don Cherry back and forth but consider yourself and Ginny to have a standing invitation to crash here should you wish to visit Montreal. I have a nice little place here with a backyard and everything.. just getting everything together right now.. but an excellent location and definitely large enough for guests to stay.