The Play I Never Set Out to Write, Part One: The Origin
By Janis Kunz, East Sierra Branch
At first I resisted the idea of writing a play. I don’t have time, I told myself. Writing is very hard for me and I always beat myself up about it, I argued. Plus, it’s so cliché: An actor who says, “I’m writing a play!” But my brain didn’t listen to me. My brain had other ideas. It didn’t care about my reservations. Nope. It began writing opening sentences….
It all began at a dinner with my brothers, a fellow actor, and her family. We were at our local Denny’s, THE place for us actors since it’s the only diner open after shows close. My fellow actor told us of a play she was writing. Then my younger brother made an off-hand comment to me, “You should write a play.” “Yeah right,” I countered. “(In an affected Dr. McCoy voice:) I’m an actor not a writer, Jim.” But I should know he never makes off-hand comments. He always knows just how to strike a chord in me to get me to rise to a creative challenge. Like when he said, “A real actor laughs in character,” when I broke character during one of our many adventures as children where we would pick favorite characters and pretend to be them all day long. At the dinner, he sealed my fate by saying, “It could be a ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ parody, similar to those stories you used to write for us to read, and you could call it ‘Reeves and Brewster.’”
That was all my brain needed. It pictured what the entire thing would look like in the tiniest of nanoseconds, and after that brief flash, began to reconstruct the elements. The compelling, I-have-to-write-this-now, elements. The two title characters would be trying to solve a mystery (since the plays we performed were murder mysteries this would make it easier to actually get produced, because who wants to write a play that never gets put on?); they’d be similar to Wodehouse’s brilliant creations but with new traits to make them their own people; it’d be set on a train in the English countryside, a riff on ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ and also all those stories where murder happens in a sleepy little village; the other passengers would have intriguing lives and things to hide; there’d be hidden identities and dead bodies like in ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’; there’d be a crazy climax involving shouting, London bobbies, and multiple reveals; and two humorous criminal characters from the old stories I’d written would make a cameo. With one sentence, my brother had set the entire thing in motion. I paid him back by making him read and critique my first scene after I’d written it.
Come back next month for
“The Play I Never Set Out to Write, Part Two: The Process.”