One Week In.

From an acceptance letter to a production gathering steam in a mere week. And yet, the road ahead is long (no it’s not—I constantly worry whether we’ll have enough time to pull this off) and full of obstacles—expected ones, as well as the unforeseeable (those delightful little “unknown unknowns,” to use Rumsfeld-speak, that keep me up at night or catch me off-guard while riding the train in a sea of brusque commuters). After sustaining a financial freakout on Wednesday—when I pulled clumps of my flowing locks from my head as I reeled at the discrepancy between the estimated costs and my personal assets—I recovered and sent my acceptance package to Manhattan Rep: a security deposit, and playwright release form.

Side note: On the matter of copy righting one’s script, it is a known fact that one may establish a dated seal of authenticity upon one’s intellectual property merely by sending the item to oneself through the U.S. Mail in a sealed envelope forever to remain unopened. (There’s something very Dada about all of this. That people must trust that’s your script in there without actually knowing. They just have to take your word on it; some kind of bizarre faith or honour code or something. But it could really just be a bunch of shredded Chinese newspapers, or takeout menus, or some really awful poetry for all anyone knows. One could mail oneself dozens of “scripts” and claim to have written dozens of plays. You can trust me, though. I mean, would I go through all this trouble for a fake play just to get your attention and respect? Haha, yeah, just tell everyone I wrote a script, and that’s it's going to be produced … and make it all seem very real on my blog, but, little would everyone know, that it’s actually a well-thought out and orchestrated hoax? Hahahaha. I mean, where would I even have access to Chinese newspapers? Or takeout menus? Or … bad poetry … Trust me. This is all real.) So, being a playwright with an original script on its way toward production, I felt it necessary and proper to establish a claim to my work. So, in a US Mail ReadyPost envelope I mailed a copy of my script (really, it’s in there) to myself. Two days later, I found it crammed in my mailbox. Sweet. I promptly took it upstairs and announced to Tim that my little plan had worked. The play then sat on my desk for the rest of the night. Well, that is until I took a closer look at it. I looked at the upper right-hand corner—at the four oversized stamps of a turn-o-the-century baseball player--$1.68. And only then I noticed that precisely what I had desired, the stamp from the routing postal facility through which this envelope passed on its journey from Manhattan, NY to Jersey City, NJ—from me to myself—the time and date stamp which would “firmly” establish that my script existed in this form at this moment--that I claim it as my original idea—was completely and utterly absent. Perplexed, I turned it over and searched the back of the envelope. Blank. “Tear here to open.” Do not tear to open. But wait. What? How did it … How did it get here without getting stamped by anyone at anytime? Did the time-space continuum breakdown? Was it delivered via wormhole? Tim! You’ve got to see this. Such is my luck. But, if that’s the worst thing that happens …

Initial problems to tackle: money (see all previous posts), the bicycle, and the director/actor. Okay, the bike. My grandfather purchased a Schwinn road bike last year that will surely be an effective representation of a Tour de France-caliber racing bicycle. Right? Yes, of course. All we need to do is get it from central PA to Jersey--a feat which should be accomplished next weekend.

An addendum to the bike issue: the staging of the apparatus. To save money, we considered constructing our own type of support for the bicycle on stage. (Right, out back in the tool shed, on our work bench. Let me just warm up the radial arm saw.) But in the end, it looks as if it may be easier to just buy a trainer stand; it would support the bike mit actor, be light enough to take into the city, and mobile enough to re-position during the show it self. I’ll admit, I am bit skeptical about this last point. Initially, I had imagined the bike on stage pointed straight at the audience, and remaining that way for the entirety of the show—Spalding Gray on a velocipede. My teammates expressed to me that the audience will be staring at this guy for an hour, so let’s give it a little variety—as well as a sense of the shifts in time & space. The idea is to use periodic blackouts, as determined by the script (oh, wait, there are no blackouts in the script) for rotating the orientation of the bike 45 degrees stage left and right. We’ll see. A director is a voice I would like to add to this conversation and others.