Training: Writing the Play

So, July 2008: a couple months out of school, unemployed, and living on my aunt and uncle’s futon. Before an afternoon searching for jobs and emailing resumes around the city, my uncle Tim and I would spend the morning slouched on the futon watching the live feed of the Tour de France, as pirated from a foreign sports network. Sometimes we got lucky and could watch the coverage on Versus, and other times we were relegated to watching the live blog postings. But most of the time, German or Hebrew or Spanish or French filtered through the thick humid air to my dozing ears. Hours of microscopic, pixilated, perpetually buffering video of scrawny men cycling though the French countryside—we savored every second, and waited in anticipation for L’Alpe D’Huez, the battle of giants on the legendary slope. Le Tour de France: the greatest display of sport, at times a dramatic spectacle, and at other moments a portrait of the endurance and triumph of the human spirit. There was potential for a story here, and maybe even a play.

At the end of the month, we all began working in a certain play festival in Manhattan. Exposed to a variety of works—not all of them particularly good—we felt confident that we could actually all write our own plays and get them in next year’s festival. One acts, with small casts and low technical needs, they would conform to festival guidelines and could be produced by our apartment troupe. Simple enough, right?

And so, August came. We found our subjects and brainstormed. Though busy with a lame unpaid theater internship, I was still unemployed. So I found myself with blocks of time to kill in the city between interviews and before rehearsals—so I wrote. Later, sweating at my computer, I would take the scribbled product of an hour and type. I researched L’Alpe D’Huez and the epic races which finished on its slope; I read captivating accounts, and even watched archival footage on YouTube. Exhausted men sprouted wings and glided up the ascent, while others cracked and were reeled in; while some became heroes for the day and stood at the peak of their career for only an afternoon, others cemented victory of the Tour itself—le Grand Boucle—and joined the ranks of the legends; and a certain few found drug tests and ignominy awaiting them at the summit. Eventually, from this slightly obsessive state (I lamented having neither a bicycle nor a stationary bike to write from; though I could not properly capture the feeling of riding a bike, I tortured myself running up local hills enough to adequately unleash my acerbic, self-deprecating, and meandering inner monologue) emerged a character and a dozen or so segments of his monologue. Rearranged and formatted, proofread and read aloud in our living room to a captive playwright, yadda yadda yadda … by the end of the month, I had something of a play.