Monday Mortuary (June 29, 2009)

This week the Mortuary brings you...

Wait.

Surely there is a better way to introduce these cut plays without sounding like the bloody Crypt Keeper.

I'll work on that.

One of the plays cut this past Sunday was Megan Mercier's text-less saga of connection and personal walls, i don’t know why i always do this, but i spend an awful lot of time thinking about it while doing temp work in a warehouse. Megan had this to say about the process of creating the piece and the process of staging it:

the script was written with kurt, but tim ultimately played the guy role for 3 out of the 4 weeks it ran.

i didn't write this ABOUT working in a warehouse, per se. it just so happened that, in my continuous course of spontaneous employment, i spent about four days working from 7am to 3pm as a temp at the Threadless warehouse during one of their summer blowout online sales. I walked up and down rows and rows of Threadless t-shirts, packing orders, and vacillating drastically between feeling like a waste of human being and feeling creatively charged by the mindless tasks. no one ever talked to one each other, even though we all worked together for a week. there was something about being so isolated that made me feel incredibly lonely and resentful. i spent that week feeling unaccomplished, unloved, a failure at connecting with other people and maintaining relationships. i tend to emotionally isolate myself as a way to stay out of other people's hair as well as protect myself from getting hurt, but it leads to a lot of guilt and missed connections. i was trying to write about that relationship and the staging became sort of relative to the environment i was working in. i don't like to rely on other people to do or feel anything for me, and therein lies the conflict.

this is a modified script reflecting how the play looked in the second week as opposed to the first. ironically, getting this play to flow was a minor trainwreck because i didn't want to rely on anyone else to move my set pieces for me in the transitions. originally, i moved the cheese mat between each section and the chairs because the point was that i'm always trying to control everything and end up screwing it up. this is exactly what happened in the shrunken world of the play which lead to incorporating three other cast members to help with transitions.

so yeah. art imitates life, i guess.

also, a cheese mat is a wedge shaped gym mat. apparently, "cheese mat" is a colloquialism from whatever holler i sprung out of.

On paper, then, this is what that play looked like:

i don’t know why i always do this, but i spend an awful lot of time thinking about it while doing temp work in a warehouse

megan mercier © 2009

“this time tomorrow” by the kinks plays.

PART ONE:

a large red cheese mat stands upstage center with a heart taped out on either side of it. one heart side faces the audience with a chair set under the left downspot and one set under the right downspot.

megan enters with a paper lunch bag and sits in the chair under the stage right spot. she opens it and takes out a sandwich. starts eating it. kurt walks in with an identical bag and sits in a chair under the stage left spot. he pulls out an identical sandwich and starts eating it. megan looks at him, awkward smile. he looks at her, she turns away. megan pulls out a carrot with the greens intact and starts eating it. kurt pulls out an identical carrot and starts eating it. kurt looks at her, awkward smile. she looks at him, he turns away. kurt and megan both pull out little bottles of milk, open them, put straws in them, and start blowing bubbles in the milk in a staggered fashion, each waiting to see if the other is going to do the same thing. let it establish before turning to look at each other and doing the same thing together. while still blowing the bubbles in their milk, they stand and walk towards each other center as the red light swells before all lights dim.

TRANSITION:

cheese mat is turned so that it creates a wall between kurt & megan. the chairs are pulled in closer on either side of the mat.

PART TWO:

kurt enters the same as before and notices the big red heart. he goes through each motion the same as before. only checking with each bite to see if megan is doing the same thing, which she never does (she holds each object as he does and in the moment after he looks, she peaks around the mat. he does not see her. one by one, she throws her companion prop off stage right as kurt eats them. when he still doesn’t see her, he charges at the mat with megan standing on the other side to brace it so that he bounces off. this happens 3 times. after the third time, kurt gets the sandwich & carrot and tapes them one at a time into the heart. he turns his side of the mat to show megan but she has already stood up and is exiting stage right. he leaves stage left blowing bubble in his milk.

TRANSITION:

mat turns so that the side with the lunch items tacked to it faces toward the audience. chairs are pulled immediate side by side in front of the mat.

PART THREE:

megan enters the same as the first time, she sits in the center in one of the chairs. she goes through all the actions, each time looking to see if kurt is coming, which he never does. (there should be a blue light if we can manage it). music fades as megan turns facing the audience, so that there is a moment where the only sound is her blowing bubbles into the milk. lights fade to black as megan sits alone.

CURTAIN

Excuse me, Bilal. I also wanted to include in this Monday Mortuary an item from Youtube. I wasn't originally going to cut this piece which was inspired by this found video, but in the end, it was time for it to go. Anyway, I don't feel the need to put the script for "My New Youtube Hero or The Day Hell Bent For Leather" on this blog. Suffice it to say, I got to kiss both Tim and Kurt, and I let them totaly destroy my first Ovation acoustic guitar. Here is the youtube video that inspired my piece. I in no way meant to make fun of this "dude." I was looking for a classic documentary of a metal band that was shocked on film being told that their heavy metal hero was gay, Rob Halford from Judas Priest, but instead of finding that gem, I found this fellow amongst the metal men himself defending his (and my) heavy metal icon. And I thought that that was daring and ultimately comical.
- John Pierson