Open Wardrobes

On Sunday morning, before I had to head off for my Sunday matinee of Doubt, Kelly and I decided to go sit at a coffee shop for a bit. We tried a new place here in Saint Paul, on Payne Avenue, called Polly's Coffee Cove. We soon realized this was the neighborhood spot - everyone else seemed to know everyone else. It was a nice spot. Kelly did some reading while I continued and finished the first draft of my commedia piece (still needs a good title, hmmmm...). I'm shooting for something around an hour and this looks so far to be more, so that gives me some room to trim (or perhaps shoot for a 75-minute piece?). I was surprised at how quickly the draft went (23 days), but it helped a great deal that I had a detailed outline drawn up before I sat down and started writing. I mentioned in an earlier post that I did this to try and more closely follow the style of the true commedia, where the actors would post a detailed scenario (showing the scenes and entrances and exits) and improv the show from there. I don't normally do an outline when starting a new play and so it made for a fun change of pace for me. And seeing how quickly the draft went once I had the outline, I see the benefit of it! The Playwright Purge (i.e. write something everyday for 30 days) I'm participating in finishes up next week, and so I've started chipping away again at an Adaptation I'm working on to round out the Purge, and then will start looking at revisions of the commedia piece once I've typed the rest of it up. On the Adaptation I'm in the middle of a bit with an interesting technical challenge - how do you portray giants on stage when they need to interact with normal-sized characters?