Monday, October 5, 2009

Thesis Update

No play I have ever written has been nearly as frustrating as my thesis has been so far. There's a number of reasons for this, but the most important is this: this is only major play I've written where the emotional arc of the play doesn't necessarily dictate the physical arc of the play. I Feel Fantastic was about two men struggling with decisions regarding antidepressants. Condition Blue was about a disgraced detective who can't live down his disorder. Both of these contained readily available plots. My thesis, at least how I originally conceived of it, is about a young man struggling to overcome grief and depression in a world that has little tolerance of the former and zero tolerance of the latter. As an emotional arc it works well, and I've pretty much had that arc plotted out from the beginning. And while that would work fine it and of itself as a novel, but as a play it's lacking of the one thing any solid play needs to get an audience following along: action. I can't stage internal monologues, and if the play is just the emotional arc as I've envisioned it, the play would be so rife with monologues that it almost might have well been a one-man show, which is not what I want. So I've had to come up with some kind of physical action- a backdrop in which to display and accentuate the emotional arc I've established.

Just a warning, for those who might care, but there's going to be future spoilers ahead.

This has been the hardest part, because usually plays are designed with a physical arc in mind, and the emotional arc develops as the story fleshes out. I've been tripped up because I haven't been able to conceive of a physical arc, certainly not one worth using, because for me the physical arc isn't all that important in this piece- in my mind it is clearly about Thomas (the protagonist's) emotional development. But that physical arc is the skeleton of the play- without it I can't even start writing. Sure, I've got an important plot element: Jocelyn (his best friend's) suicide- but this is what kicks off the emotional arc, and is the event that throws Thomas' physical arc out of whack. This means that I have to give Thomas an ultimate objective, some real-world goal that transcends his internal well-being. Knowing what I know about the emotional arc, this needs to be an objective that is multi-staged, something that he has a specific series of tasks to accomplish to reach his goal.

An important aspect of the play's concept is the idea that his struggles with grief depression are simply not tolerated (let alone accepted) in the world that he lives in and hopes to succeed in. Based on my own personal experiences as well as the stories I have gratefully been told, I determined that Thomas' ultimate objective ought to be career-oriented. While I originally conceived of Thomas and Jocelyn as high school students, this development caused me to shift the story ahead to make them college students. Thomas' ultimate goal is a post-graduate program, something that will set him on the fast-track of his desired career. This, I determined, was too large a goal for the scope of the play. So I took it one step back in Thomas' plan. He wants to get into a fairly prestigious internship; this internship, in Thomas' mind, is what will guarantee his placement in the post-grad program of his dreams. It is whether or not Thomas succeeds in getting into this internship that will provide the central question of the play's physical arc. Thomas is currently in a summer job that he is heavily focused in performing above and beyond expectations in; he hopes this will give him a killer recommendation for the internship, which will in turn determine whether he gets into the post-grad program he wants to get in to, which will in turn determine whether he gets the jobs that he wants to, which will in turn determine whether or not he will be successful and happy in life. For those of you who are fans of Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story (a book that provided a great deal of inspiration for me,) this precarious house of cards Thomas has based his future and potential for happiness on is a classic example of a tentacle: a present source of stress that bears with it the added pressures springing from a series of future events. It is this summer job that is thrown out of whack by Thomas' grief and subsequent depression.

Once I had worked all of this out, the next step was easy: what kind of job, internship, career is Thomas trying to pursue? And the answer: education. For the most part, I prefer to stick with what I know when I write, at least as far as subject matter goes. But it goes much deeper than that too. One of the traits I have that I am most proud, and I know developed in large part due to my experiences overcoming my own depression, is empathy. Empathy, and along with that a desire to help others, had to an integral aspect of this career field. Furthermore, it has to be a field where depression can, to the unaware, appear to be a major liability. All of these factors contributed to what I felt was an easy decision.

The beauty of this structure is that it allows two arcs, the physical and the emotional, to exist simultaneously while at the same time taking different directions. It wasn't hard to determine his relative success along the two arcs. It also allows me to have Thomas fail to achieve his physical goal (after a tumultuous end to his summer job, he is flatly turned down for the fall internship) while at the same time coming to a positive conclusion to his emotional arc (ie, coming to terms with his grief and depression.) After all, this story is, ultimately, my own story. And my story, at this point, is about having hope for the future, pride in my experiences, and the advocacy against oppression towards those with depression. So this story should end on a similar note.

Even with this structure in place, this play isn't going to write itself. I've still got a number of other plot elements to develop, the most important at this point is the development of Jocelyn as a physical character in the play as a ghost/vision/dream/hallucination. I definitely want this happen at some point, if not at multiple points through the play. This will allow what would otherwise be Thomas' internal monologues into an actual dialogue with dramatic action.

I'll post more as I develop, but I think I'm close to being able to sit down and pound out a first draft. I'd love feedback; how do you guys feel about this idea so far?

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