Open Wardrobes

With the first weekend of Doubt over, I've had several days off which has given me time to work on the commedia dell'arte piece. Kelly and I spent Monday afternoon (off from work for Martin Luther King Day) at the Tea Source, as usual one of our favorite writing hangouts (with some great baked goods from La Patisserie in addition to the wonderful tea). I spent several hours working on the commedia piece which is nearing its climax. Commedia scenarios were often very complex, and so I've been trying to work in as many different threads as I can. The challenge of course is to get them to all come together in the end. I went on for several pages with one false start on Monday before I found the right direction for the scene I'm working on. Sometimes seeing a few wrong ways for a scene to go helps me identify the right way. It's been interesting working on a piece like this where the characters, after a fashion, are pre-exisiting. I want to give them my own flavor, but the general outlines have been around for centuries, I'm just coloring them in a little as I'm sure the actors of the original commedia all did. It's a good example of how sometimes having set factors in a piece can help. Staying as true to commedia conventions as I can has actually helped spur this piece along. Having certain parameters to work within has freed me to focus on the story. I've been participating this month in the Playwrights' Purge, a companion to the Binge, where you write something, anything, every day for 30 days. This has been my project and having that extra impetus to be writing every day has been helpful. We're about halfway through the Purge right now and I have a rough draft nearly complete! At this point my only concern about the Purge is what to work on once the rough draft of the commedia is done. That's a good feeling.