Write or Flight?

Late Friday night, as part of the UnHinged Theatre Festival sponsored by Flush Ink Productions, I and seven other playwrights were taken to previously undisclosed locations around the city where we would be given 24 hours to write a play. Each of these places was calculated to be unsettling in some way or another. I was nervous, but not because I'm afraid of haunted houses or anything like that. It's just that it's been a long time since I last wrote for stage: about fifteen years. It's also been a long time since I've written under a hard deadline--maybe fifteen years since I last did that, too. What if I got writers' block? It's happened before. What if my play just sucked? That was a possibility. After all, I'm awfully rusty.

So off I went to the Rum Runner to meet up with all the other writers and the other people involved for the first time. It was confusing. I was trying to go over various story possibilities in my mind while dealing with questions about tech issues. They wanted to do a Blair Witch Project sort of idea, with streaming video of us during the writing process, but the video stream website was confusing. I felt like I was being bombarded with irrelevant material while all I wanted to do was start writing before I got too tired. It was already too late, though. I was tired--verging on exhausted. Although I'm typically a night owl, for the past few months, I've been sliding more and more into a diurnal state, and now I had to mix it around.

We finally received our locations. One writer, who had a fear of ghosts, was being sequestered in a theoretically haunted hotel room. I was a little envious. It sounded cushy. He'd have a warm place and a bed, when he was too tired. One was writing in a creepy, cold basement in an old building. I was being placed in a ramshackle warehouse with a theatre space. Another was in the emergency room of a hospital. I didn't envy her. In my opinion, that is the most stressful of all locations. I don't recall the other locales. My mind was too busy.


( This big, black room became my home for the next fifteen hours. )