THE NEXT PLAY I WRITE

The next play I write will be one of triumph.  It won’t be a comedy.  Not really.  The only thing funny in it are the things that happen to other people.  It’ll be the story of a white man trapped in a white man’s world.  Struggle, conflict, triumph.  The climax ends in the lead character standing atop a heap of smoldering bodies of his ex-girlfriends.  Wait.  I don’t want to jump ahead.  It has to open with him – let’s call him Clyde – in front of a bright, orange, glowing scrim, lit up with rear projection of blazing fire.  He’s in silhouette, pounding assailants into submission.  And this is just his lunch hour.  We, as the audience, know this somehow.  I don’t know, maybe there a subtitle on the scrim or it’s in the program.  We just know it, that’s all.  Throughout the play – and I don’t have specifics yet – he’s put through the ringer.  Ex’s, bosses, all of his enemies conspiring against him.  The world is tightening the screws and, at times, it looks as if he’s not going to make it out.  But he does.  He is the one who has the last laugh.  Not literally, of course because it’s not a comedy, as I said before.  Clyde stands on the fiery corpses of his ex-girlfriends as he laughs.  Okay, so he does laugh at that point.  Blackout.

 

 

I get to win this time.




-SLL