Ideally

Hey, you fine folks out there in the Blogosphere. This is Mel, otherwise known as the writer of Standing Still Standing. We just started rehearsals for the show, and I’m tremendously excited, at the same time that I’m rather exhaustified. Then again, I tend to not sleep when I’m bumping up against deadlines, and what other deadline is as intimidating as handing a new script to actors to read for the first time? Yikes. I’m not always good at hearing my stuff aloud (oh, I’m well aware of the irony, so we’re not going to dwell on it) because it makes me forty-nine kinds of nervous. But the first read let me breathe a sigh of relief —— the play is (mostly) funny, the cast is fantastic, and we have a staff to die for —— So. Whew.

The play is a little nuts. Maybe I should prepare you. See, it’s about a couple whose marriage is struggling because he has chronic fatigue. They love each other desperately, but it’s a hard thing to deal with. The story, to me, needed to be told. This wasn’t an ordinary love story —— and yet it was. Is. So how do you tell it? How do you express the angst and joy and frustration and intimacy all at once? How do you show these people to be real people, and this problem to be a real problem? A lot of people in the world think chronic fatigue is a woman’s disease; who knows why, but it’s assumed by the general population that more women suffer from it than men. So before I even got started, there was a strike against Ben’s character: he’s a man suffering from a woman’s illness. Strike two was that he sleeps. A lot. How do you make a play about sleeping interesting? Yikes. Mel, why are you telling this story? Really, why?

The first time I drafted the play, I had just got back from study abroad in London way back spring 2001. While there, I saw some of the most amazing theatre I’ve ever seen in my life. Saw the RSC in Stratford, saw big musicals on the West End, saw shows at the Royal Haymarket and the National Theatre. I also saw a lot of tiny shows in random places. One of these was Marsha Norman’s ‘Night, Mother. I saw it with several friends (three cheers for Mark Ailshie, who found the listing in Time Out and suggested that we go). The show is a small one to begin with: just a mother and a daughter, in a unit set playing in, I’m pretty sure, real time. So it worked amazingly well in a bare, low-ceilinged room above a bar in Greenwich. The show was really very good; I was moved by how real and raw everything about it felt. My eyes smarted for a long time afterward. So one of the early drafts of Standing Still Standing, at the time called Ideally, was modeled on ‘Night, Mother: two characters on a unit set in real time. Grace comes home from work to find Ben dozing. It’s like any other day for them. Their ordinary conversation spirals into an argument, and it turns out Ben has been planning for sometime to move out. He loves Grace so much that he thinks it’s in her best interest for him to leave (no spoilers here, I’m not saying jack about the current version’s anything, no worries).

Back to my earlier question: How do you make a play about sleeping interesting? Yeah, Ideally was not interesting. It was SO boring. Ben, set up to be a difficult character to like anyway, was an impossible person to like. He whined and dragged his feet and whined some more. Grace was too much the saint: it was not believable these two got married in the first place. Ben and Grace, who were such flesh and bone people in my brain, were talking in circles on the page. Not real, not grounded, not interesting. Exchanging barbs about Lara Croft and Mrs. Fields. Whatever. I cringe to look back on it. So while it had been a noble idea to try to be Marsha Norman —— Yeah, wow, Mel crashed and burned. Which happens a lot when you first write down an idea. The crashing and the burning leads to good stuff later on, I promise. I hope? Hmm…

So I tried a different tack. I tried to get inside Ben’s brain. To see things the way he saw them. To go online with him, to see him chat it up in CFS support groups. To see him dream about losing Grace and not be able to win her back. To feel the confusion and frustration that has to come with one being so out-of-control with one’s physical being.

That brings us to the play where it is now. Ben and Grace are still the core of the story. All the craziness surrounding them —— not to mention the weird dreams that fill Ben’s head when he’s sleeping twenty-two hours straight —— just serve to make Ben and Grace that much more solid and real. I think it’s easier now (at least, I hope it is) to accept Ben’s plight and to sympathize with his cause. Ben and Grace’s marriage is still in a precarious spot; but then, truthfully, whose isn’t? You always have to work to maintain what you have; Ben and Grace just work harder than most. It’s the fight that makes me like them. And they’re adorable together, so that’s bonus points. Rock on.

See you on the 9th. Until then, I’ll be making cameo appearances right here every Tuesday. How’s that for a dill pickle?