Used to be I didn’t worry about the beginning of the play “Leave” too much. But both directors who’ve looked at recently had the same reaction. “When is this first scene taking place?”
That would be this scene.
A woman is visiting the grave of a young man. Which young man, we don’t know yet.
We also don’t know, right at the top, who this woman is, or how important she’ll be to the way things play out in the story.
I’d always thought it didn’t much matter when exactly the scene took place. I just assumed it was sometime in the near future, after the funeral that filled the grave.
That was lazy of me.
Not only was it vague, and subject to misinterpretation, it was a missed opportunity.
The instinct both of the directors had was to try and tie the scene to the narrative of the rest of the play. Which makes perfect sense.
One director suggested that maybe it literally be set right after the last scene of the play, a continuation of the funeral scene with everyone visiting the grave. We don’t want to give away the occupant of the grave, but we don’t have to in order to tie the two scenes together. At the end of the play, usefully enough, that same female character, Anne, is left alone for a moment at the grave by the other characters. She’s the last to leave. In fact, we don’t see her leave. She waits there by the grave, a moment to herself. The fallen soldier’s ghost is standing there with her. She doesn’t see or hear him, but he interacts with her, and the audience sees this. So at the end, Anne isn’t really alone.
Anne’s last lines as she stands at the grave at the end of the play (right now) are, “I’m sorry. Watch over my boy.” She’s speaking to the spirit she hopes, but doesn’t know, is present. She regrets she was unable to save him, and asks him to serve as a guardian angel for others still in combat.
The director thought maybe we could see the last person leaving Anne to her moment of solitude, walking away in his funeral garb. Thinking it over, I was worried someone just walking away might look like a mistake.
OK, what’s his last line before he goes? “You coming?”
To which Anne replies, “In a minute.”
He goes, she stands by the grave and says her last lines.
That works. Any way to push it back further? “You coming?” seems almost as weird a first line as starting a play in silence.
Then I realized if you just remove the ghost and his lines from that scene, the last page of the play is two people standing by a grave, with occasional silences for contemplation.
At the end of the play, the audience gets to look behind the veil, because they know the ghost for who he is. They feel the same loss the characters do. They get to watch him reach out to the others one last time, and try to say his goodbyes.
If we see the same moments at the beginning, sans ghost, we just know someone’s gone, something’s missing, and we get to spend time with a couple of characters trying to find that something in silence.
A moment’s pause with two people by a grave. Then, the guy by the grave says...
“Damn your heroic ass.”
Pause. He starts to leave, turns back to Anne.
“You coming?”
“In a minute.”
He goes. She says,
“I’m sorry. Watch over my boy.”
She could be talking to God just as easily as trying to make contact with the person who’s dead.
Then Anne launches into the speech at the beginning of the play.
I still need to finesse the transition into the material. The original beginning is a bit presentational, almost a direct address to the audience as much as a cry to heaven. Coming off an actual moment between two characters, it might be bumpy shift.
But the idea is kind of perfect. We get to see the same moment opened up with a new element at the end, when we can fully appreciate its impact.
And the play becomes a circle. The cycle continues. That can be both good and bad. War continues. People keep dying. But other people keep surviving, and manage to stay together. Mixed blessings. The things you lose help you appreciate and hold tighter to the things you have left. And if you still have something to lose, you have a reason to fight for change.
Toe in the water now. On with the rewrites of the rest of the play.
(This new version of "Leave, or The Surface of the World" will kick off Urban Samurai Productions' 2011 season in February.)
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