In
April of 2018, Sierra Martinez, Evan Vance, and I drove downtown to the
Tattered Cover and brainstormed for their senior play.
As
always, the assignment was this:
Find
book titles that catch your eye.
Find
a phrase from various books that are interesting to you.
Eavesdrop
on conversations for interesting phrases.
Once
we had spent some time there collecting all these various things, we went back
to the school and wrote it all on a whiteboard to see what kinds of ideas surfaced.
The
list included the following:
A
Ghostly Light
Midnight
Garden
Metaphysics
Pax
Dragon
Teeth
“had
his eyes closed to both”
“Bonk,
I didn’t want to say that.”
House
of Spies
Memory
Rescue
Cattawumpus
Garbagio
The
title A Ghostly Light made us think
of a lighthouse. House of Spies stuck
out too. By the end of the day we had the rough idea of a witness protection
situation set in a lighthouse. The twist would be that the agents would turn
out to be the bad guys.
I
started working on the rough draft in September. The working title was Garbagio, just because I liked the word.
But it ended up not fitting the plot. The word “cattawumpus” also caught my
eye, but it didn’t fit either. So I plugged “cattawumpus” into the thesaurus
and it kicked out “zigzag.”
The
cast included two seniors and three eighth-graders. Sierra Martinez (senior),
Evan Vance (senior), Makenna Mora (8th), Katarina Taylor (8th),
and Brody White (8th).
“Bonk,
I didn’t want to say that” led to the idea of a character having her own version
of empty-handed combat like Kung-Fu or Karate. This led to Carmela and her Whack-Pow
skills. My wife Sarah knows all about manicures and nail polish so I added what
little I learned from her to Carmine’s character.
All
the characters came from names of people who were actually in the Witness Protection
Program.
Frank’s
character included my own child-hood daydream of becoming an astronaut. I pursued
the idea of him being a reluctant criminal.
Henry
the witness became an easy-going person who was fearless until things went bad.
Marion
was the opposite—someone who was insecure until things went bad.
I
saw Teresa as a kind of mafia-hairstylist.
The
lighthouse setting sounded interesting but it wasn’t essential to the story and
it would have been a real headache to build the set.
I
changed the setting to an abandoned warehouse, but I kept the sea-side setting.
This led to the possibility of a tugboat passing by. This element ended up
being extremely key to the plot.
The
ending was kind of fuzzy for a while. I mostly knew I wanted the image of the
bad guy’s feet in the window as he hung upside-down. The final moments of the
play would have failed if not for the excellent actors. They made it work.
They
made the whole play work. They did such a great job.
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