The doctor is in

I spent a large chunk of this morning performing surgery on Old Hickory. It was painful but it had to be done. I hope the piece will be better for it. When I first started with the writing I wasn't sure where it was going, but kept writing . . . amusing myself no end (and others as it turned out) but still unclear where it was headed. I finally did get through a first draft and then sent that off to some competitions. Between sending it in and being accepted by EAT I made changes, largely to the ending. Bette thought and I concurred after thinking about it, that the original last third was a whole different play; different tone etc. There was some good writing there, but it wasn't of a piece with the rest.

It made much more sense to have it be one story driving the piece rather than a litany of women who done him wrong (or that he did wrong). So I changed the ending and had a rehearsal with Wallace. He was so helpful, asking questions firing out ideas, and each one seemed to bring more! It was pretty wild. I wrote it all down and started pondering.

Another factor was that the competition asked me to whittle it down to forty minutes . . . so taking all that in, today I went in and cut cut cut. It's funny in looking back on the original draft how much of it was off the beam. Funny, yeah . . . but it's another play. This play it seems is about Old Hickory and the Ex wife and the intersection thereof.

The struggle is to make it make sense. to not lose the charm, to keep the gothic sort of feel . . . the suspense . . . we'll see . . . more surgery may be required.

Oh, and one more thing . . . when the competition wrote me they told me how much they liked the ending of the piece (not the current ending by the way) funny how this stuff works. I hope they'll like this one too!