Outline

Using my post-it note technique I have come up with a story line that I intend to follow for a while to see what it produces. It's a detour from my original vision of the piece, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it does get to the same point, I think (the scholarship on Ophelia vs who Ophelia actually is) but through an outside character.

The professor then, who was originally going to be interspersed with Ophelia, will become the main character. In fact, at this point I only have Ophelia appearing once in the entire piece. Now this may change since right now it is only an outline. The next step is to write through some of these scenes and to see if they work. Then I still won't know if it's the right story until I get up on my feet and try it out.

So back to our teacher. At this point, Sophie is the name of the teacher, and she will open the piece with a lecture about Hamlet, as if it is the first day of a high school class. She will get side-tracked by the subject of Ophelia and madness. Then through "scenes" with her sister, we will discover that she has recently lost her mother, who had been classified as insane. The piece will then focus on her perception of insanity, her fears of becoming insane, etc. She will also be forced to make a choice. I believe she will be offered a position at a university, and she will have to decide whether to take it (and move and accept success) or not.

I developed this story from the story of Ophelia. Basically, I put all the moments of Ophelia's life (that we see in the play) on post-its and arranged them on a wall. I then developed corresponding moments in my created character's life. They don't mirror each other, but rather the events in Ophelia's life inspired the new events.

Of course, actually getting down to the writing is my next step, to see if this version is the one to explore. I find writing in this manner rather terrifying, but I am ready to explore.

Physical Writing and the Power of the Post-It

Though my Ophelia project has been somewhat on the back burner for some time now, it keeps coming back in to my consciousness. Ideas continue to swim around, crystalize, dissolve, reform, and poke me back into action.

I recently received a grant to work on Esther, a project that my husband Jonathon and I created a year ago. Our first version of Esther was slightly avant-garde, by which I mean exciting, new, and innovative but also, unfortunately, confusing and not sufficiently dramaturged. We saw the seeds of something better, and applied for the grant hoping to add a playwright to our team. This past month we hired the lovely and talented Chris Cragin to join our team. We have brainstormed some new paths to take, and in the process, Chris introduced me to a system that has blown my mind with it's simplicity and appeal.

Large Post-Its. That's it. We put each scene, or story part, on to separate Post-Its. We placed them, as we wrote them, on a large white wall. We moved them around. We physically began to write the story.

This appeals to me in many ways. First of all, I can get very lost in the writing world of computers. I can't lay out all the pages and read them, printing them seems wasteful, and the words that aren't currently on the screen seem to fade into a strange netherworld and cease to exist.

Second, I seem to be equal parts an intellectually based and a physically based person. Though I am not a dancer, I need to move, and often I need to move in order to understand. I need to alternate periods of deep thinking with periods of active moving. The idea of being able to physically maneuver pieces of a future story or script is so simple, and yet it changes everything.

I intend to mess around with this new process at this very moment. Though my Post-Its are small, and I will use the shower door as my wall, I am excited about what this exercise will reveal to me about the story of Ophelia, and how I want to explore that story.

A Short Story

I've been working for these past few weeks on getting my creative writing juices flowing. In the midst of daily writing exercises, I stumbled into this story, based solely on the word ivory. When I arrived at the end of the story, I realized that it was Ophelia who was the heroine, although perhaps an Ophelia of a different time.

Ivory

She stood in ivory. Drenched in ivory. The very thought of the color on her skin was absurd to her. Her skin, being the color of ivory, faded into the dress, into the wall behind her, and slowly she disappeared. All that remained were the fruitless details of her being: eyelashes, hair, a slight red in the lips, floating on an infinite ivory canvas.

Her skin was wet, trapped by the silk fabric, which clung to her with every step she made. The sweat was cold as it drizzled down her back, and suddenly she pictured herself as a Greek marble statue, condensation from the air collecting around the cold marble, fixed in place, in a position of victory or defeat, hollow eyes reflecting the face of the viewer.

She placed her shoes on her feet, not delicate pumps that pinched her toes, but the shoes she had arrived in, converse, three years old, held together by a hope. She grabbed her jacket, an old leather bomber she had borrowed from her father one year, and leaving her t-shirt and jeans behind, she edged her way out of the shop, into the brisk December air. The short train of silk shuffled behind her on the snow, and she laughed thinking that indeed the whole world had become one sheet of ivory, one sheet of silk, and that she could disappear into it all.

Before the shop girl could realize what had happened, she hopped on to a bus, headed home. She giggled to think of the girl stumbling into the dressing room to discover the discarded clothes, thinking she might suspect that her customer had melted away, part of the snowy landscape that disappeared in the spring.

Her stop came, but she did not exit. The bus was warm, her sweat was fading, and under the jacket she felt solid, firm. When the bus came to what appeared to be an empty field, she pulled the bell. “There’s no stop here, miss,” the driver said. “No matter,” she replied, “this is where I belong.” Reluctantly the door steamed open and she stepped out onto the field. Trudging her way through the snow, the bottom of the silk slowly deforming in the cold moisture, she felt the nettles in her body begin to fade. As her skin numbed, the pain she had been dragging along with her all these years was shed, one thorn at a time, until she felt the freedom of anesthesia. Relived, tears fell from her eyes in gratitude, and she sat in the snow indian style.

“I’m supposed to drown,” she thought, “but the famed river is nowhere in sight.” Instead she began to scoop up the snow with her frozen palms, and let it fall over her face. Slowly, surely, the snow built up around her until all she could see, all she could feel, all she could breathe was snow. Ivory everywhere. And she did fade. And she became part of it. She was part of it all.

Possibilities of Progress

I had a wonderful and inspiring experience last night helping run the reading series at Red Bull Theater. We did a piece by Howard Barker entitled "Gertrude: The Cry". I don't know if you have ever read Barker's work, but the piece was written in what I like to call a modern poetic style--heightened language written in a sort of free verse form. The story was of Gertrude from Hamlet, not writing before or after the play, but actually writing a different version of events based on what could have happened. The only characters from Shakespeare are Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet, the rest are all new and re-imagined. What struck me about the piece was the possibilities it opened up. I could write a play or a one-person show centering on the character of Ophelia, without worrying about including particular elements from the play. I know the character inside and out, and so could write her without worrying about betraying her. It could also start before the play began, in her life before the tragedy (not before all tragedy for her, but certainly before the worst of it).

In Barker's play, Gertrude does not die, but marries a man half her age and, one assumes, returns to rule Denmark. It might be interesting to explore what would happen to Ophelia if the building blocks of her insanity from Hamlet were removed. Would she grow into her potential as a wonderful woman, or is there something in her that would have brought her to insanity anyway? Is the insanity lying dormant in her, waiting to come out?

I am not sure which way to begin my work. I do not wish to abandon my previous idea, but I am thinking of doing an exercise in playwrighting and beginning a version of Ophelia based on the Gertrude I have just seen. I believe this will inform my future piece, if not grow into something of its own.

I have been feeling the urge to write more and more, despite having just read Annie Dillard's insightful yet frustrating The Writing Life, in which she begs (in true successful artist fashion) that you not enter into the world of writing because it is a horribly miserable life. Which reminds me of a phone call I had with a successful actor and relative of mine, in which he said to me, "I hear you're an actor. Why would you want to go and ruin your life like that?" I say to all you artists out there, you know very well why artists must be artists. If you're miserable, please, go into another field yourself, but don't attempt to discourage the rest of us away from this wonderful way of life. Is it difficult? Yes. Do we struggle? Yes. But is it worth it? YES.

Excuse my diversion. I have been feeling the need to write partially because I feel the need to get in touch with my self-expression. In my acting work I have received the comment recently that I have mastered the art of interpretation, but not of self-expression. I must admit that I have mainly focused on interpretation, thinking of acting as an interpretative art (though always using the self as a starting off point). This idea of acting as self-expression is exciting to me, and I'm ready to jump into it. I think writing is what will help me to dig into my self-expression and translate it to my acting. Besides, I've always had a dream of living like a hermit in a house on a lake and writing all day long. In reality, I go insane when I sit all day (which is one of the reasons I'm an actor), but in my daydream, it's perfect.

Project (Obviously) On Hold

As you may have realized, I have not been posting for quite some time. As sometimes happens, life has stepped in, and I have had to shelve this project for the time being, although it is still percolating in my brain.

My husband received a grant this past summer to start a non-profit. Much of my time is now split between being his part-time volunteer managing director, and pursuing my acting. I have also been away for several months. This summer I taught play composition to little (I mean little) children. After that I travelled to Wisconsin for some much needed family bonding, and then Jonathon and I took our honeymoon to Greece and Turkey.

Now that I have returned I am taking scene study class, hopefully interning at a wonderful theater, and working at our non-profit.

All of these things have been very inspiring, and I can see that I am growing both as an actor and as a human being.

Ophelia, however, is never far behind in my thoughts. Ideas are still percolating, although my days in the library are not possible at the moment. For instance, I have begun to think about playing with the structure of my play. Originally I had several scene ideas planned out, alternating between Ophelia and my professor character. Now I'm beginning to think that I should really rest on the five act structure of Shakespeare himself. Perhaps using the acts in the same way Shakespeare used them, although the content would be very different. Or perhaps starting in the five act structure, using it as another way in which to trap or confine Ophelia, and then allowing her to break out of it. I am also thinking of modernizing the story much as Jonathon and I have modernized Esther together. Perhaps this Ophelia is not Shakespeare's, but a parallel character, or perhaps she is Shakespeare's Ophelia, but she is living in modern day. This would give me the freedom to write her words without feeling overshadowed by iambic pentameter.

As I continue to think through these things, and perhaps begin to try them out, I will continue posting my thoughts. Thanks for reading them.

The Lady of the Hour

How to portray Ophelia is key, of course. And it is different from deciding how to portray her in the productions I was in. If I had the opportunity to play her in production again, I would want to try something completely different, simply because I could.

One of the reasons she is so intriguing is that Shakespeare leaves much of her character up to interpretation. I believe that's why artists have been drawn to her over the years, and one of the reasons actresses love to play her even though she is a small role.

In my production last year I played her madness with a good dose of rage, a freedom from social norms, a desire to implicate and expose the corruption she saw around her. And later, with her brother, the sadness of her loss. If I had the opportunity to play her again, I might toy around with the idea of her madness bringing her a great sense of calm. As if all her sadness were too much to bear so she just disconnected from them and entered another realm.

So first I have to decide where in Ophelia's timeline we are in my piece. I said originally that I wanted to avoid an Ophelia who is simply "looking back" on all that has happened to her. But I also would love to see her after everything has already happened to her with a sense of acceptance. I said earlier that I want her to be reacting to what the professor is saying, but I think that could be through image rather than a direct reference. Always better to show than to tell. Part of me wants her first entrance to be the opposite of the professor's first entrance. We could have her distraught, in her father's jacket (an image I love though I haven't used it), with a soundscape occurring while she is in silence. The verbal, intellectual appearing against the nonverbal feeler. This would also give me room to have two complete character arcs that cross in the center. Ophelia begins in pieces, and ends with a sense of acceptance. The professor begins with a firm grasp of things and ends in pieces.

But who is this Ophelia? I guess I should start with my character analysis from when I played the role. She can begin where I feel the character is, and then go beyond that, to a place where Shakespeare's Ophelia was unable to go.

THE Library

So it turns out that I didn't actually take research notes while I was prepping to play Ophelia. I read many, many things, and then let them naturally synthesize their way into (or out of) my system. This means that I needed to make a trip to the research library where many of the Opheliac books are housed.

The research library in Manhattan is quite an intimidating place. There are no instructions for the lost researcher on how to acquire books, and there is little explanation as to why these particular books were chosen to be set apart from the rest. You must make your way to the third floor with little to no guidance, discover the carbon copy request forms, take the to the correct librarian, and sit down to wait for your number. All of this ceremony and secrecy may be confusing, but it certainly makes you feel important and legitimate.

Although I requested several books in the main reading room, two of my requests sent me to the even more separate, even more secretive Room 300. This room houses all the Art and Architecture books and has it's own rules and ceremonies that reminded me of many an intellectual thriller that involves deep research in order to discover the culprit. I turned in my slips, gave the librarian my seat number, and sat in silence, waiting for my books.

I had two hours to spend, not long enough I know, and I spent it all on one beautiful book entitled The Myth and Madness of Ophelia. This book was written as a companion to an exhibition of Ophelia paintings and photographs around 2001. The first two articles are written in response to the character of Ophelia, and what she has come to mean in our culture, rather than her actual role in the play. They seems to mirror one of the few lines I have already written, "she has become greater than the sum number of words she actually speaks in the play".

I could go on, but this entry is getting a little long. I believe now that the books I will encounter written specifically about Ophelia will encompass not just her role and the interpretation of that role in the play, but also the mythical figure she has become. If I remember correctly, however, the books on HAMLET are not so kind to her, and will provide me with more material for my scholar character. I turn next to Michael Pennington's book on Hamlet, which was one of the materials I read during my research last year that was somewhat helpful, and somewhat irritating. I imagine a great deal of research will be needed for this piece before I am satisfied with my characters voices. Perhaps I have a direction for the professor, but I am still not clear as to how I want to portray the lady of the hour.