One of my main projects this year and next is creating a new show with our spoken word/hip hop theatre collective, Pen-ultimate, which comprises myself, Martin Stannage (aka Visceral), Ali Gadema (aka Frisko Dan), Niven Ganner and Samira Arhin-Accquah (aka Lucid).
The working title of the show is A Night On the Tiles, and is based around a high-stakes underground Scrabble game played by a group of gangsters and word wizards. Think of the poker scene at the beginning of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but with racks and tiles instead of cards and chips.Â
We got some funding from the Arts Council to spend a week researching and developing the concept, during which time we structured the plot and fleshed out our characters, and are now putting the finishing touches to the first draft of the script. We're hoping the show will be directed by NYC performance artist Will Power, and will open at Contact in November 2009.Â
Unfortunately, the scenes I've written so far are too long to post here, and there's a tendency at this stage to want to keep the material under wraps until it's more ready for public viewing, but I thought I'd share a bit of the preparatory character work to give an idea of how we've been working so far.Â
We decided as we're all poets in one form or another that the whole script should be written in verse, or some sort of poetic stylisation. To this end we all wrote a character monologue, in a poetic form of our choice. The first job though was to write 57 facts about our characters. This is an exercise given to me by a director I've worked with called Dawn Walton, and I find it a great way in to a character. You end up finding all sorts of interesting details in order to fill the quota of 57, and it bypasses the usual character biog/cv, which can get a bit tedious to write.Â
My character is called Tyler Bourbon, a hard-drinking, coke-sniffing, high-flyer who comes from a wealthy family and enters high-stakes Scrabble games for the thrill - he doesn't really need the money. I chose to write his monologue in Ottava Rima -Â a form which in it's original Italian can be used for high tragedy or high comedy. When translated into English though, it takes on a more comic tone, the rhyming couplet at the end of the stanza producing a punch-line effect. It's the form that Byron chose for Don Juan, and is made up of 8 line stanzas of iambic pentameter with an A-B-A-B-A-B-C-C rhyme structure. It seemed a good choice for a character who thinks he's dashing and heroic but is really a bit of a joke, and whose artificially induced courage fails him in the cold, sober light of day. Let me know what you think.
My favourite things in life are words and coke -
The former flow much better with the latter -Â
And though I don't think academia's a joke,
It taught me that the letters aren't what matter
But the words you make with them which can invoke
The gods to bless a man disposed to patter
But coke bestows a gift for chatting shit -
Mouth! Show restraint - my nose is lacking it!
And when it lacks restraint my courage grows
Till I no longer fear the consequences,
Emboldened by the drugs my tongue profanes
As dopamine conspires to con the senses,
But when my surge of serotonin wanes
My nerve evaporates and then condenses
Into a cloud which overhangs my head,
Till the rainy day my habit lands me dead. Â