The Script: The Infinite Line Between Me, Lolo, and Lolo
A young man relates with an audience his relationship with his aging Grandfather’s active imagination. But when a tragic event is unearthed, the question of “Whose imagination is it that’s truly overactive?”
Here I am at the scene of where many of my plays have been written and cried over – Eon Coffee in Hayward, CA! The wi-fi is SOMETIMES sporadic. Which sometimes is a good thing especially when I need to WORK! LOL. Anyways, wanted to work on my Day 4 play here.
The process:
Got here at noon and finished the first draft at around 2pm. A good 10 minute length. I don’t know why, but my page to minute ratio has been off lately. Ever since ESPERANZA MEANS HOPE, I haven’t been to confident in my timing. That play is 53 pages, but the production run-time with TWO different productions has been between 80-90 minutes. YAY for being a full-lenth, but boo in trying to guage how long my plays are. I’m a stickler for following rules… most of the time, but when a play is submitted to a 10-minute play festival, I expect that play is going to run for 10 minutes. My play, MAMASIHERO, was 10 pages, but it runs at 11:57.
Today it took 2 hours for the first draft and then about another 2 hours to get it to where I want it and then maybe 30 minutes to find the title.
At any rate, THE INFINITE LINE BETWEEN ME, LOLO, AND LOCO clocks in at 9 pages, and when I read it it’s still under 10. Go figure. What’s this section about… oh yeah, PROCESS. How the heck did I come up with this story? I think I wanted to explore the device of “breaking the fourth wall again”. It worked pretty well with MAMASIHERO and haven’t written anything like it in a while.
But like all things, the characters and the situation that they are in somehow dictate where the play eventually goes – and boy I didn’t know how DARK this was going!
Fyi, this was done as a free-write with no outline. Depending how I feel later today, I might want to break the next story.
The Story:
According to my log lines, it’s about a grandson trying to take care of his grandfather. Cute. Sweet even. But then his grandfather kinda forgets where he is and because this has become a “normal” experience, RIZAL, goes where his LOLO goes even if it’s to a fishing village near Cape Town South Africa. As they go there, LOLO feels remorse for leaving there, even though RIZAL thinks that this is a part of his grandfather’s imagination. But LOLO’s guilt is because he feels like he left his wife, Rizal’s LOLA, there. In desperation, RIZAL has to break it to LOLO that LOLA is in Colma instead as she passed away a year earlier.
Now this is where the story take a 180 degree turn up the z-axis: this revelation leads into the fractured mind of RIZAL as he’s the one holding back a secret that leads to his eventual residence in the loony bin!
Lessons:
– I learned how not to be conventional in the fact that there is a ghost in the story, but this even though the ghost is of LOLA, this is one pissed off grandmother. Unforgiving and vengeful and maybe a little mad (cray mad not hulk mad). The sweet side of me wanted the LOLA character to be able to forgive RIZAL for what happened to her, but that’s too conventional. I NEEDED to explore that other side.
– Follow the story and don’t worry about the page length. From Day 1, the subsequent plays have begun to dwindle in length. I know I shouldn’t worry about it, but I guess I saw that as a let down in imagination and lack of words to give my characters. Maybe because the play yesterday was such a struggle, I didn’t know if I could ever get over 5 pages of dialogue again. Just have faith I guess.
– Don’t be afraid to be “ethnic”. I was a BIG TIME criminal of this. Just so conscious of whether I’m alienating the, honestly, larger audience by writing from my Filipino-american perspective. I guess the question I keep coming back to though – If I don’t write a play with a Lolo or Lumpia or the hurt of disappointing the parentals, then who would? I mean, I’m lucky to know other Pinoy writers, but in relation to the number of other writers out there… just me.
General thoughts about 31 plays in 31 days:
I think that it’s interesting for me to concentrate SO HARD on one play at a time for during the duration I’m working on it. And then because I know I have to write another play tomorrow, neither the play previous or the play in future, doesn’t enter into the periphery. It’s cool to know that I’m starting to develop that level of focus… and love for each of these plays and for these characters.
okidokes. on to the next play tomorrow!
The Script: The Infinite Line Between Me, Lolo, and Lolo