Rewrites

Started working on Dead Authors with an eye toward smoothing out some rough spots before sending it to the Terry Schreiber folks. Not major excavation, just some touch up stuff.

Bette had long said to me that Ben's writing that he reads for Amanda could be cut some . . . and I noticed while reading it at the Fringe a few weeks ago that it felt a tad longish . . . and then I remembered something that came up during feedback at a reading years ago: is he supposed to be a bad writer?

Well . . . no . . . the idea was . . . he was supposed to be good. I had written something intentionally a little pretentiously arty, but I thought it had merit . . . but that kind of question brought me to a decision it suddenly became clear that if we are told that Ben is the greatest thing since sliced bread, then whatever I write as Ben is not going to be good enough . . . if I withhold Ben's writing entirely then the audience will believe he's that good because we say so . . .if we say he's that good and the audience is sitting there saying, 'That wasn't that good' then we've lost them. At any rate, with that in mind: off with his head and good ole Ben's writing is great because we say so . . . the only thing that remains of it is the first line, which was something Hemingway said in the opening of the play . . . a couple of other minor tweaks, and I'm hearing the last 26 pages or so tonight at the workshop and away we go . . . it'll be interesting to see what happens.

The other thing I'm wondering about is whether we need an act break or not. Since the final act is 28 pages, is it worth it? Maybe just storm through the whole thing without intermission? This is something I'll have to decide eventually, but not necessarily right now, or even before sending it in.