Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Themes & Outlines

We had a big Wasteland meeting last night, in which the producers unveiled the seven outlines for the seven shows we’ll be putting up in November/December.  The seven organizing principals have held up well, and will indeed be the 7 shows we produce.

A hell of a lot of time was spent parsing through two months’ worth of material, then organizing it by theme, then scraping and molding it to feel cohesive.  We still have a lot of work to do, but the show outlines look very exciting.  I think we’ve managed to write about 6.5 hours, and the remainder will come together by the end of August.  We’ve got films, experimental videos, stage sketches, fake video games, musical numbers, audience-interactive bits, and jokes to produce, rehearse, and polish.  There’s not nearly enough room in our schedules to do it all, but luckily the producers have the power to bend space-time.  All my other projects take a back-seat until Christmas.

My personal challenge in the next two weeks is to rewrite a series of sketches for the War/Aggression show, tentatively titled “My Thing Is Bigger.“  I’d written a fun running bit about a unicorn terrorist attack and the media’s exploitation of the event, which would periodically interrupt T.S. Eliot’s late-night program.  (We’ve begun referring to these running motifs as superstructures, to differentiate them from the 3-act structure we’ve built around Eliot’s show-within-a-show.)  After discussing this episode with Tucker and Haas, we decided we were missing an opportunity to actually discuss issues surrounding the Iraq War, the fictitious “War on Terror,“ and the trouble we Americans have dissecting the conflict.  The unicorn runner, fanciful as it is, is going to be reworked to be a little heavier, a little more palpably linked to the global events of the last six years.

The difficulty, of course, is actually writing a series of scenes about the Iraq War, without undue levity or condescending heavy-handedness, starring a bunch of fucking unicorns.  The point is not to engage in discourse about the war, but to pull our comedy from the aspects of the war that are most real, most difficult.  I think our team can pull it off, so long as we use these: