A weekend ago, maybe two... it's really hard for me to contextualize time backward... Anyway, at some point in the recent past, I was invited by Jerry Rapier of the Plan B Theater in Salt Lake City to participate in their annual fundraising event. It's a 24-hour play competition, meaning at 8pm, myself and four other brilliant writers (all of whom were more apt for theater, for me it's been years) sat down in the empty Rose Wagner theater. Jerry brought cupcakes and handed over a stapled packet of three headshots (those fuzzy actresses pictured above) with a handwritten title and subject.
My title: Sticks & Stones. My subject: The removal of an anatomically-correct statue of a Hopi fertility god from outside a museum in Blanding, Utah.
Google that mouthful and you'll probably end up with a extensive list of source material that I probably should have read. I sat at my keyboard until 8am pestering my wife intermittently for cold reads and polish. Here it was, my theatrical debut into the SLC theater crowd, and I knew that I needed to stick to my rules, write something staged in the gaps between good and greater good.
In the morning I dropped Matt at her ballet conservatory, and handed Jerry twelve heavy pages about teen pregnancy in an LDS, single-mother household.
Everybody else wrote comedies. Sidesplitting comedies.
At 9pm, I was in a dark theater, listening to Bill Allred crack jokes in a kilt. And then some perky ska music led into my stark depiction of good intentions gone awry in the wake of... like I said... an unexpected teen pregnancy. And the theater was silent. And after an eruption of laughter, Matthew Bennett seriously knocked the audience out of the park with the best of the aforementioned sidesplitting comedies. We had each written a 10-minute piece in 12 hours and after another twelve hours, we had theater. Reviews were stellar, and I was introduced to an audience that is probably a demographic polar opposite of those of you who are following the series.
In the aftermath, as I strolled around beside the catering, I was approached again and again by eager audience members that wanted to know how my play fit into the continuum of the series. I'd left the ending open, and there was a little evolving debate about who was right. The overprotective mother? The uninformed teenage daughter? The know-it-all aunt? I was asked again and again, a single question that I could only answer with a shrug: Who was right?
The answer was, I guess, they all were. And simultaneously, none of them were.
That might feel like a cheat, but the episodes I'm writing for the series share a similar unresolved quality. That doesn't mean that they aren't complete stories, the events close nicely at the end of the 45 minutes. But, I'm hoping that there's some grey area (to use Hafen's term, some ambiguity) for you to mull over who was truly justified. I want you to judge my characters for their actions, and you will. I want you to evaluate whether they are engaged in the right pursuits. But, I'll tell you right now...
There's not one of these stories that revolves around a question of good versus evil. And the simple reason for that, evil is boring. It's triviality, banality. We are trained to recognize and dismiss outright evil. It can't be reasoned with, and therefore often serves little purpose beyond bluster. But our true moments or refinement happen as we evaluate our position between varying shades of good. As we stake out our desire.
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