The Story So Far Pt.1

On August 26th, 2009 Mrs. Lesley Howe sent out an e-mail to Artios Graduates letting them know that she intended to put on a series of one acts February 2010. This had been done before but this time, being a writer herself, she wanted to give people the opportunity to write original plays for the show. I personally was immediately intrigued and my brain began buzzing with story ideas.

Very soon afterward, James Legg contacted me, equally excited and asked if I would be at all interested in collaborating with him on a script. I was totally fine with this because I had never successfully collaborated but I had been wanting to work on that in the interest of personal growth. We set up a meeting time on a Wednesday night, he brought the pizza while I supplied the root beer. Neither of us had any clue what our skit would be about because we both assumed the other had an idea but we didn't let that stop us.

Our first step was to settle on a genre. This led to us listing all that we could think of: SciFi, Drama, Comedy, Dramedy, and finally, as a providential joke, Musical. We wrote these down on post its and stuck them to a wall. Drama and SciFi were quickly removed for obvious reasons, but the more I stared at that little yellow square with MuSIcAl (my handwriting is really bad) written across it, the more I liked the idea. Finally, I looked at James and posed the question, "What if we did write a musical, James?" This was followed to the obvious question, if a song is two minutes long how could we fit that many into a ten minute one act. That answer was obvious, short songs. The next roadblock was trickier, could we write that many songs? I was confident enough for James to consider it, though I could tell he was doubtful. He picked up the guitar and started to pick around.

We next had to come up with a story. This led us first to setting. Again, ideas were freeform tossed about. We eventually got down to three options: a treehouse (James idea), a radio station (my idea), and backstage of a Broadway show (we can't agree on whose idea that was). Clearly, the first two were eliminated leaving us with the backstage of a show.

After that came plot. We had the starting point of the theme for the evening, "New Beginnings." What kind of new beginning can happen in a play about a play? Well we took the obvious route there: a new actress getting her first break. We decided to up the stakes and make it a sold out crowd. It wasn't dramatic enough so it was decided that we make her the understudy, so her break wasn't expected, thus increasing the nerves. We tossed around a number of ideas for other characters, one specific one to hit the chopping block was the understudy's obsessed fan. From there we merely organized the whole story using post its. The whole process at this point had taken a mere two hours not counting the forty five minutes we lost at the beginning of the meeting to go help a friend who'd locked his keys in his car. While with his girlfriend. And it was raining. She forgave him and they got married this past April.

At this point, James and I felt really good. We had a good and solid story that could easily be made very entertaining and we had decided on all the characters. But, looming over our heads was the horrid knowledge that we needed to write songs. And write them by the deadline. And we had no clue where to start. Then, we were saved by my adolescence and one of my favorite bands in high school. I set into a diatribe. "The thing that drives me nuts about musicals is how unexplainably, everyone knows these songs." "Where are you going with this, T.J.?" "What if all of the songs were parodies of showtunes?" "Can we do that? Like, is it legal?" I cited a supreme court decision in the early 80's that said it in fact was. That settled it. We immediately started considering what songs to use where and in thirty minutes we had the complete list: "Just Can't Wait To Be King", "Food, Glorious Food", "Memories", "ABC Cafe", "Anything You Can Do", "For Good", and "You're the One That I Want". James went home planning to work on the script over the coming weekend. He didn't count on God making me particularly enthusiastic. When he awoke the next morning and checked his e-mail he discovered that he had received the first draft already.

Two weeks and two rewrites later, James and I met again to read the craziness out loud. Revisions were made, and the final draft sent in. All that was left to do was wait to see if our script would be chosen.

-T.J. Mercer