Unedited Director's Notes from Bone Deep; or, The Skeleton Play

 Pre-production notes, transcribed from a yellow steno pad.

 

BONE DEEP
Introudction/expectations: an announcement detailing the shape
The behmouth: the biology of the library; its might and decay
memory: flashes of recollection, a shuddering asking, a scramble.
Arugment: nobody can get along until thunder crashes.
The story goes: trying to tell the the story. A true story.
Dance to music: a phonograph goes on; two dances slow and somber / joyous
A monster in everyone: they all become a monster; except one
Diving in the weeds: a collective lecture, overanalyzed
In betweens: transitions, limbos, zen, midnight parking lots.
Stargazing; they watch the stars, wait to the end “<name?> <name?>”
Hopes: what they’d hoped to do if they’d lived longer
Outrage: a small inconvenience blown up to terrific size
Loss: what they’ll miss and why it mattered “I miss…” increasing intensity
sex jokes: throughout
Bone puns: throughout
Tea: sipping tea, making up fictional gossip

PROCESSES
Skeletonize: what is felt? what is the bone deep way of saying what you want to say?
Spare ribs: lending assistance when they need it. Being ready to pick up slack.
Doot: punchiness, irreverence, a lack of fear leading to disregard of social boundaries.
Truth: a chase, always ungrasped, worth the effort.
Bone Down: get a little raunchy, bodily, soft and longing; all softness
Eternal Grin: smiling in “inappropriate” places, strange laughter.
Clickety clack: move without muscles, clatter, jerk, hop, skip, fall, loosen up.
Be a worm: take give time to digest.
Handprints: connect to a long history of survival.

SAFETY: CONTENT/TOPICS
Mental health
Self-harm
suicide
health
disability
death
drowning
medication
economics
race
racism
sex
sexuality
genocide
war
killing
food
shit
illness
love
substances
school
kink
language
swearing
dreams
pollution
apocalypse
social media
futures
injury
violence
geography
pregnancy
cars
history
abuse
neglect
politics
america
home
climate
nature
oceans
gender
sexism
work
money
sports
theatre
pop culture
science
biology
space
family

The Audience is not more important than your safety.

What do we do to prepare together? By ourselves?
What do we do to debrief / come down? together? by ourselves?

Call/response?

How do we tap out?

How do we want to talk?

What do we feel comfortable saying? Hearing?

really enjoy talking about? Hearing about?

What do we think is really meaningful?

What boundaries do we need respected?

What is safe territory?

What do we do if a line is crossed accidentally?
(deliberately/repeatedly: removed from the show.)

What’s green?

ROUGH SCHEDULE (DEFUNCT)

Stage one: safety and warm up, ideas, material
Stage two: running, cutting layering,
Stage three running, refining dialing in
Week 1: build material, images, vocabulary
Week 2: first half, second half, then ALL.
Week 3: run a lot, play a little.

Skill:  flow > making connections
skeletoness / movement
teamwork: response and responsibility
poetry: evocation, what can’t be said
seduction: luring the audience

Compliments: I will give you lots.

Pressure: Lots. We’ll try not to make it too much.

MORE DETAIL FOR GAMES:

The behemoth: an ode to the dripping thing you live in for the moment; excerpts from books. Heavy ambiance. Explore the space. Wake, stretch. Describe its bodily functions, its problems, the joy of knowledge, the terror of abstract data, what can you observe? what needs to be done? upon reflection, this is maybe an item for throughout?

memory: pass a cup of tea, when not holding it, be silent and move in resonance to the memory or listen. Pass the cu p when you’re done. Complete X number of rotations. Pass as soon as you want. Connect the dots, above all, keep talking. “I remember…” Wind.
What are the images? what are the bone deep fragments of the event sthat have made you? that you hold close? they do not have to be true; they do not have to be fiction “I remember…”

Argument: talk until someone finds a position and then the fight begins, nobody can agree. pick apart what they’re saying. At some point, someone should realize this should realize this has nothing to do with the actual discussion and fight to keep things relevant. Or thunder crashes (possibly too nihilistic)

The story goes: “the story goes…” a story that complicates; discussion of structure what story is the most true? Build slowly on the facts but create an immediate need followed by an immediate problem. Why is this the fundament of story? Why do we keep coming back to it? tell a story about a character who wants something (from someone else?) restart at any time? trade stories? pile on? meta-discussion? Discuss a story that doesn’t exist?

Note on transitions: complete them underneath/as part of scenes.

MUSIC
Polka, funk, swing, classical, opera, jazz

Costuming: a little distressed, a little elegant, a bit of carnival, a little skeletal,
a monster, academic?
puppets of…?

Props: Books, papers with cool writing, instruments a mug, hats, blankets, cloth, rope, tights (disposable)

Conflict:
push against meaninglessness
Push against the mundane
Push against forgetting.

How to set the cast up for success?
-Opening lines
-fallbacks
-songs
-some scripted stuff
-a toolbox for poetry/questions

————————————————————-

Spoken word about libraries and group up. Spine? > answers? Nah. Getting out of the library? Beckettesque spasms? Temporary distractions? To hold on to memory?

Oppositional against a constant.
Inter character conflict?
Milk? opinions?
Optimistic
Pessimistic.

Turning points? forgetting? immobility? Rain? Dark? (Changes the play space.) The environment / system presses. Breakfast club but dead; different in archetype creates fiction, archetypes begin rigid, gradually soften/fade. Blend w/ the actors? or the reverse? running slowly out of energy? (BURNING ENERGY UP!) Ends tender, quiet, physical.

——————————————

ARCHETYPES

The sun
The devil
The fool
The joker
The lovers
Brash captain
Trickster
Hedonist
Melancholic
Doctor

A CHOICE

To move on o not?
Every day the library grows and rots farther its cancerous passages expanding.
They know the library and its joys.
A choice between known work and unknown freedom. Sort of.
    the possibility to be back with their families, to go home, to start again, to be out.
    the possibility that it’s too soon to move on, that there are answers here, colleagues

A CHOICE
Trying to find answers in the deep but there is always only ever more data on and on. More noise; time passes; they weaken and fade slowly. then the stars and a fearless silence.

3 maybe four shifts.

Text comes in, is fiddled with to REVEAL ITS SECRETS.

———————-

Meeting w/____

Paper maché bones
limited budget
changing scale
group movement in dance
giant bones as larger whole
choreographic structure
lighting by flashlight
“bigger skeleton” - one consciousness
different actors
playgrounds
growing older
how you’re learning
why am i here
observe the living
eurydice — sarah ruble
timescale / avoiding crunch

—————

Things you believe about the library:

it goes on without end
it is haunted
everything in it should be taken literally
it is the mind of the world, sum of all thought
this is all a dream
it smells wonderful
it is a rotting corpse
everything in it lies

Levers:
to prove you’re right
to win someone over
to conceal a harsh truth
to heal old wound
to party
to find answers
to get home
to fall in love

X

a crumbling illness
twitching
luggage/baggage
horny
skeleton aviator

——————————

Skeleton academics have traded their flesh for endless knowledge, access to every scrap of recorded history, and jar after jar of memories; each has a specialty, an opinion crafted on years of reading, an exultation for the minute of remembrance, the analysis of humanity’s many twitches, milk and coffee flow freely down here in a library that drips and regurgitates like some vast processing organ, which it is —- and unending machine for making meaning, but why? and for who? to fight against a gradual fading, becoming part oft he scenery, or being swept into the great air war that buzzes outside. A gargantuan bureaucracy floats on the back of the library, even sometimes, pencil shavings come raining down. That is where decisions are made, overflow exchanged with the rotting elites of the dead city. A cup of coffee, drink deep.

—————

By latest accounting, they are the only researchers remaining in the eternal library. The last cadre to be assigned. Maybe the whole thing is at risk of demolition or abandonment; maybe it was abandoned already. In any case, it is sleepy, sometimes lonely work, pouring over books, consuming data, forgetting. What glittering question first lured you here? what have you found since? Minds have long been canned like soup; to extract images — in this way this is a library of the dead, of all that has come before. They are riding high on the past. What significance there lies? What can we learn from our bones, our forgotten burials, the fragments of times-left-behind? how can that keep us alive? how can its value be proven or at least convincingly argued? or should it all be left to wither? there is only the past or only the present or only the future. All the while the rain continues to fall.

————

 In what form is the proof their instructors are looking for? a paper? a story? a dance? a song? numerical observation? a simple command? tell me a story about why it matters. To quote Dr. Chuck Tingle, “to prove love.” If this is all an accident, what an accident! When the light dims and the flesh falls from our bones what do we cling to? and would we cling at all? what is the value of hanging on? what is the value of letting go? What is the value of anything? prove your answers but you are swimming upstream, having only half-remember images of human experience, or is it imagination? and obscurely written texts. Can any story really hold in the face of death? probably no, but why should that mater? then again, what is the danger of such things? (like hero stories.) What is left of use when we are scrapped to our essential forms and actions. A grinning frame, on which hangs a whole galaxy of bacteria. Begin with a lesson in scale.

————-

Meeting w/ _____:

-Skeleton researchers in an eternal library, looking for analysis
structure?
“I like cool shit, I like weird.
“I like that in my makeup and my art.”
“A lot of our work on the wolves was from what the actors wanted.”
Designing a role
“it’s a little macabre”
“organic”
We did improv, like getting characters into bodies.”
“Exercises in boundaries, check ins”
Green, yellow, red areas.
green light for touch

————

goals: convince them that 
nothing is real
it’s a simulation
love is real
the future is the only thing that matters
convince each other that this is NOT a solipsistic universe

Play the socrates game with the definition of love / sex / death

Each night, the performers die and are given an hour to find the meaning of life, AND PROVE IT. Each night, they probably fail, but get a little closer every time.

Play a game of questions.

Take turns advocating for nothingness.

——————

Find the meaning of life AND PROVE IT.

1 hour, tonight.

Tools;

Books, moby dick, something from camus, idk. thrift store romance novels
instruments
craft supplies
cardboard
big ol’ markers
a chalkboard
music
printed poetry
randomly generated dance scores

debate formats
logical fallacies
truth trees / logic
conversational strategies
perspectives on history
“I am because we are”
anti-solipsistic argument
improv structures
emotional safety tools

—————————

they’ve been researching for a long time and they have an hour (or a day, broken up?) to come up with an answer before the library falls dark. In any case it ends with stargazing and waiting. in the middle, and argument; why bother continuing. What is this worth? In the middle, a declaration of love and a mediocre, bony kiss. A dance that expands out of a circle of coffee drinking. Bone puns whenever possible. AN orchestra tuning up. Is it okay to have kids? What are some unanticipated issues with being nothing but bone? What are some joys of being freed of your flesh? when/how do they interact with the audience/ How do they reach out? which songs are performed for the audience and which for the skeletons? at the end, the audience becomes the research committee, in between; debates where the winner is determined by audience poll or ballot. An election????

——————-

other odd formats
a round table
a team huddle
an auction of memories
an internet review of life
a stump speech
a radio address
a light night phone call

Activities: reading, dance circle, playing catch, marching in circles, a beehive, tearing cardboard, folding origami, drawing, masked dancing, campfire stories.
“I miss having a penis,” “I miss tits”

Playing pretend: a troubled marriage, a parent/child “i’m proud of you” conversation, a eulogy. Sports announcers. Air warfare.

Along about the desert. Roadtrip?? (no.) “I miss…” “I remember…”

————-

An insanely narrow blip. Each human is to the smallest form of life as a planet is to its solar system. We are to a molecule what the milky way is to the sun. roughly speaking. These are bewildering vastnesses. The universe we can see is a fragmentary piece of the universe as we estimate it.

Something is happening. Was there really any other choice? How could something NOT?

Cons of this angle: existential crisis. The idea of nothing is uncomfortable to regard.

At turns miraculous and horrible. At the same time, it is difficult for me to justify looking at anything smaller. Maybe this is just anxiety.

———————

structure to fall back on ALPHA
1 a dance, a mystery, entice the audience
2 an introduction to the place and the problem
3 someone questions he feasibility of this whole thing
4 many years pass; characters change
v a breakthrough or several argued over fiercely until things seem hopeless
6 “let’s just drink”
7 fragments of memory; a relationship changes
8 last minute panic, the team comes together
9 the argument is presented
10 exhaustion, then stargazing

Songs/dances can b presented between scenes, time allowing
PROBABLY TOO LONG/COMPLICATED/BAGGY

—————

Alternate plot structure: BRAVO
It is already 100s of thousands of years into the research process, and the researchers are coming up on their deadline. Characters are introduced in this scramble. As they try to remember what the assignment was in the first place, thereby introducing the problem.

One by one, the skeletons present their arguments and one by one the others dismantle them for lack of conviction, failure to address certain factors in their universalizing theory (what about shitty people? what about the feeling of being miraculously alive, which they remember only faintly now? does their argument address the allegory of herman melvilles moby dick, which is just ONE PART of existence but must still be represented along with all other books and all other things

answer cannot JUST be satisfying; TRUTHFUL, no greeting card bs
eventual exhaustion This has happened many times before; it will happen many times again.

The storm clears; stargazing.

TOP OF SHOW— EMERGING FROM THE DEEP TO SHARE THEIR RESEARCH
PSYCHING UP FOR STUDYING

A MORE CONDENSED FORMAT IF SHORT ON TIME

————

NOTES ON PLOT STRUCTURE BRAVO

has the most internal meet, least exposition
lacking a “crisis point”
easy to adjust timeframe
clear turning points have to be built in
researchers can grab paper, art stuff, instruments to help make their point
turning points: phases
argument presented, theatrically
argument torn into
it gets personal
they drop it and move on
repeat
introduce game elements?
sound board keeps time or maybe the researchers do as part of the argument format?
scoring noises? buzzers?
con: not a lot of room to wander
pro: not a lot of room to wander
pro: cyclical, unresolved. The point of “resolution is when everything has been taken apart and everyone is tired.

————
slang

“hip” as in “cool
numbskull
bonehead
boner
ribbing
kneeslapper
brain shit the bead
skussy(1)

[(1) in my defense, this was a friend's idea and will not be making it into the show. I am not sorry for including it here. -ed.]

———-

characters
-skeleton with massive death anxiety?
pirate!
what matters most to them?
what brings them joy
MISTAKES
skeleton cowboy!

———-

structure breakdown
6+ five to ten minute scenes
brainstorm 10-12 concepts minimum
scenes picked in FIRST WEEK
sequence locked early SECOND WEEK

Alternate framework: skeletal cabaret. Series of spoofs on visceral human situations, played both for comedy and intensity.

Scenes should contain
tension, movement, a relationship change,
a change, a reveal


Primary tensions (recurring)

the skeletons are going to disappear soon and be gone for good (the sewer, the ocean)

Day by day they forget a little more; sometimes in the middle of discussions

They have been here longer than they can remember. (Bored.)

————

big questions
what does it mean to live “enough”
life isn’t fair
what is the meaning of life?
explain why it matters
how do you prove you’re not the only one?
why bother?
how do you keep things interesting with the same people for a very, very long time (perel)
is it ever enough?

must explain, must PROVE

Remind the audience that they are living in a form of infinity; a terrible, beautiful accident / miracle / mistake.

memento vitae; remember that you are alive

yay we don’t have to do morality playyyyy

lighter option for central tension: boredom vs play: they die if they get too bored.

——————

audience interaction
why is the audience there?

review panel?

in the process of dying; the skeletons are acting out “their” processing of death (ugh)

there to be a theatre audience; the show is the show and the performers are skeletons.

The audience are themselves but the Theatre is the Library.

———————-
thursday meeting notes 1/12

cues may be able to be improv.
_____: cool but major concerns about budget
organic, meaty, decayy, drapery

flashlights????????
S. outlines on the wall (cardboard bone shapes)
—audience interaction?

_____; scrap muslin
if some barn stock disappears that’s fine! (neat!)

_____: separate costume pieces tied by strip/ribbon

light base layer w/ black negative space

book chained to skeleton
no pants???
cowboy skeleton.

designers welcome in rehearsal

7-11 tech, maybe cut friday

talk to patty about clowning
gravedigging scene from hamlet

library as bone structure
library is alive

smokefall — in utero sounds.

Potential focus:
theory/academia
academic institution
bodies

architecture groaning

soundscape: instrument, ambient, dietetic sounds

WHAT HITS THE FAN??

—————

First impression         >>>>>     Last Impression
mystery, energy, wonder            calm, loss, fullness

how do you get from A to B?
frustrating conversations
a realization: they are going to die for good
fretting about the above: still with a problem to solve, a REPORT to deliver
eventual exhaustion and resignation, struggle, acceptance

You are dead at the beginning, you will die at the end.

——————

THE GAME: collectively writing a COMPREHENSIVE (X) page report on human existence.