Scripts

"The earth...turns...around. Like a rotisserie."

-- Ichabod Crane, in Kathryn Schultz Miller's stage adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving

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I've just highlighted lines and scribbled basic character analysis (circles of concentration, approach/avoid/standing, tactic-victory units, discoveries and beats) for the two scripts I received from the Children's Theatre. It's going to be fun; I can tell already that kids are going to love this. It's been a year or so since I last read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but plowing through it again is a pleasure. I'm playing Ichabod, after all.

The stage conventions we follow are similar to reader's theatre: Actors pop in and out of characters with hats,warping face and voice, making their own sound effects. You push a gate open, and you mime and creak. Your dog attacks someone, and you growl. And so on. It presents a crazy challenge. The style asks not for subtlety but almost over-the-top characterization. I imagine it's more about extremes and Vaudevillian virtuoso, diving into decisions, ambidextrous acting.

The second show, An Algonquin Cinderella, has me playing a young brave, the middle sister, and the Strong Wind. This last is a sort of godly, princely presence who falls wistfully--cloud over sky, gusty gusto--for the "rough-faced girl." It has the meditative, ancient tone of many culture-driven plays. It's a far cry from the prat-falling Ichabod and the almost melodramatic travails of Tarry Town, but it promises intrigue and childlike wonder, magnificent as feet feeling soft moccasins for the first time, gliding over twigs and roots in a fresh but foreign forest.

C. S. Lewis (the overly quoted and unquotable, sure, but the hell with it) once said that he enjoyed writing children's stories more than mature fiction because he could "put more into them and, thus, get more out of them." I hope doing children's theatre makes for something similar. I think it will be: Children laugh more, wander in awe longer, appreciate with Zen-like impulse the joy and twinkle of the moment.

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Just today, I settled payment limbos and committed my Cincinnati address to heart. It's a different script, sort of, and I'm the playwright and director and lead, an odd conglomerate marching into life's living production. I'm stepping on a well-worn road, I know, in tracks of defined and daring tread; still, with the nerves and nay-saying come highlighted words and scribbles to myself, convention for contention, and the through line of action deserves to be heard. Someone seems to pat me on the shoulder, chuckling, confiding that all things work for good, and that no one needs to worry or work. Just recite, play, and hold out your hand.