Letter to Roy Conboy

Roy,

Did you say to write a ten minute piece, or a ten page piece? Yipes! I did ten pages, then I got into it so much that I wrote another piece to go with it that's 5 pages long, since I owe you a coupla more pieces anyway, I hope you don't mind...otherwise I'll have to toss out every other word....who knows, it might be more interesting that way...

I tried to salvage my Sept 11 dialog...that I was too shy to turn in as I thought it was a buncha crap...and it ain't improving with tinkering....I think I can only write about what really happens to me...in mea maximum culprit confessional mode... that's why I love this monologue process.

It's just hard trying to find a venue where I can develop multiple voices outside of myself...(other than becoming schizophrenic or a Gemini, that is). Any suggestions on who to read? I've a few playwritng books I'm looking at. I think I'm panicking over structure here. I know how to do it in a poem, which is organic—it just happens, but it seems dialogues need another approach. More distant, more removed, more LOGICAL! (My brain rebels...)

But what really moves me are those quirky, if sometimes historical monologues. I love anything from Billy the Kid (Oandatje)—the cannibal spaniels, or the monologue from the Long Day's Journey (O'Neill) where the character gets hypnotized by the sea and discovers God and everything enroute to Buenos Aires, and the one from East (Osbourne?) where the penny drops and the character realizes he gets what he deserves, the scrubbers, not the bird he's clocking. Or Maureen's speech in the Beauty Queen of Lenane..when she's crossed over reason after murdering her mother...It's not like I haven't been exposed to the theatre...

Maybe it's the epiphany of self-realization that moves me, I think, but it seems I have to blunder up onto it, which means going back to the piece again and again until I discover what it is I want to say as I'm usually the last to know. Ah well...


Maureen