Open Wardrobes

For the last month or so I have been playing around with ideas for a one-man show I want to write and perform. Yesterday I spent several hours taking the various bits and pieces I had written and tried to put them into something resembling a coherent draft. I made a good start on that yesterday while Kelly and I sat at Nina's Coffee Shop in Saint Paul (that's the one that sits above Garrison Keillor's bookstore). Kelly has been working on her NaNoWriMo book (she's at over 18,000 words so far, not bad for just 8 days) while I worked on the show.


Writing a one-man show is very different from anything else I've done. It certainly imposes a great limitation on the piece, one which I've never had to deal with before. Normally while I have a sense of roughly how many characters will be in a play I still have to freedom to change it as the story requires. But here, how ever many characters the story needs, they all have to be portrayed by the same person. And in this case that is myself, since I intend to be the one to perform it. Claudia asked me the other day how the show was going, and my response was that it is rather daunting to put something together that you are 100% responsible for. As both the author and sole actor, I can't blame anyone else if it doesn't go well!


So yesterday I pieced some things together, made some notes about bits that need to be worked in later. I know the central conflict at least and am working through the overall shape. Once that's done I will try and get some feedback from others to see if I am going in a good direction or not. I am at the stage of trying not to worry about how good the piece is, but just to write. Maybe I will have to scrap it all and start fresh, maybe it will all work. Most likely it will be somewhere in-between: there will be pieces I can use, other parts will need to be tossed, and I will start to rebuild the piece into something better.