Tag Archives: tempest

Getting ready for NanoWriMo

Posted on by Bill Chance
Underwood Typewriter

Underwood Typewriter

November is approaching rapidly and I have the usual annual decision to make. Do I do NanoWriMo?

One thing is nice this year. Usually November is a nasty busy month for me at work, which makes getting the time… and especially the energy, up for the fifty thousand words extremely difficult. This year, October is the tough month and November will be easier – except for the first week. The first week is brutal – so I’ll have a slow start but should be able to catch up. I have to take some vacation time, so maybe I can even go on a bit of a writing trip.

As you may have guessed by now, I am going to give it a go. (my Nanowrimo page) I have tried four times and made it once. The other three I wrote myself into a corner and couldn’t get out. They weren’t total losses – I still had a few tens of thousands of words that I might be able to use someday. Probably not. Crash and burned NanoWriMo paragraphs are hoarder houses of writing – piles of useless mouldering crap that seemed useful once, but really needs to be chucked into the dumpster out on the front yard.

I will say the one year I made it was a bigger thrill than I thought it would be. That year I picked a novel idea that I knew had no dead ends. It was an old man, caught in a life-or-death situation, reminiscing about his life during lulls in his struggle. I knew that if I was stuck I could always come up with another memory.

When my word processor said I had hit the fifty thousand words, I uploaded it and discovered that by the official count, I was still about ninety five words short. It was amazingly difficult to write one more little cluster of paragraphs at eleven fifty on the last night. I almost couldn’t squeeze it out.

So this year, my idea to avoid the dreaded dead end plotting is to develop the ideas ahead of time. I want to have about a hundred scenes listed out so all I have to do is write each one, five hundred words or so each, and then I’m done. No possibility of sliding off into the ditch.

The other day I saw The Tempest at the Wyly theater in downtown Dallas. I had seen it before, but I was still impressed. What I think I will do is update the basic plot lines of this last Shakespeare play to modern times. I’m tentatively making Prospero a deposed drug kingpin named John Prosper. Starting from that point, most the other characters start falling in line.

I’m working on Ariel… that is a key character. Setting too…. Maybe an actual island is doable… maybe in a lake. Do I want a supernatural element? Haven’t decided that yet.

Of course, I won’t follow the Shakespeare plot too faithfully. For example, somebody, probably more, will have to die. I do have my writing station set up nice… one less excuse.

So much writing. So little time. Wish me luck.

My secretary setup

One place where the magic happens

We are such stuff as dreams are made on

Posted on by Bill Chance

I remember when each and every building in the Dallas Arts District went up – starting decades ago when I worked downtown and they built the Art Museum and I’d sit in the sculpture garden and eat my paper sack sandwich lunch (it was free back then, believe it or not). Then the Symphony hall, and the Nasher. Finally, the completion of the district with the Opera House and the Wyly theater (there is still one more theater under construction).

I love the area and hope that Dallas can make it into the vibrant urban spot they want. So far, it’s a beautiful but usually desolate destination. It hasn’t reached the tipping point where the vast population out in the suburbs think of downtown as a place to go – but the city is working on it.

One fact that I was definitely wrong on is that, as much as I loved the Wyly as architecture, I was afraid I’d never be able to actually go to the thing. It felt like a gift to the wealthy, a plaything for the rich, and the poor proles like myself, the workin stiffs, would never be able to afford to visit.

I was mistaken. I read that the Dallas Theater Center was producing The Tempest at the Wyly and I surfed over to check out the price. It cost about what a 3D movie is going for. Well, I love me some Shakespeare, so I clicked on to a Tuesday night and bought a couple tickets. I was as interested in the theater itself as the play, so I bought the cheapest seats – up in the nosebleed section.

The Wyly Theater.

The Wyly is a magnificent and unique piece of architecture. It is a theater of a revolutionary “Stacked” design – the the boxoffice and lounge, performance space, rehearsal and ancillary spaces are piled up on top of each other to give tremendous flexibility and endless possibilities for unique performances. I looks like a Borg Cube has landed in downtown Dallas and it operates like a theater “machine.”

I was excited to actually see the thing in action. Oh, and I love “The Tempest” too.

We rode the DART train downtown to the Pearl Station and walked over to the Wyly. You descend down a ramp to the main entrance which is beneath the building itself. Then you ride an elevator up to the seats. We were in the cheap seats – but they were still great. We were looking down onto the stage from a short distance away – I can’t say these were any worse than the premium seats (only a few dollars more, actually) below us.

Kids Splashing in front of the Wyly Theater. An HDR image I took on the opening day of the theater.

This was a pared-down version of The Tempest which let the skills of the actors shine through. Still, there was plenty of clever stagecraft – a terrifying plane crash in the beginning (with the rows of seats tumbling down through a hole in the floor) – a character emerging from beneath the earth through a crack in the chalky island soil, and a terrifying spirit descending from above to deliver the message of doom.

The production was gorgeous to look at.

One nice touch was that the lighting would subtly change whenever a character would deliver a soliloquy or aside. It was an effective way of signaling what was going on.

All modern Shakespeare productions, especially The Tempest, are modified to some extent. At first, I thought they had simplified the language, because I understood it so much better than I usually did. After a while, I realised that the text was the same, it was simply that the acoustics are so good in the Wyly that I could hear the actors like crystal. Greatness! Oh brave new world that has such people in’t.

In my opinion, a production of The Tempest rises or falls on Ariel. Can the Actor/Actress (I’ve seen both… about 50/50) make a believable sprite? Can they be light as a breeze when needed while as powerful and terrifying as a storm? This production had a local actor that has made it on Broadway, Hunter Ryan Herdlicka … and he did a great job. They were able to use his singing voice as a powerful tool to move the drama along – too often I’ve seen the songs in The Tempest be more of a distraction than an effective part of the play.

Reviews:

So, I went down there to see the theater, and I was not disappointed. And I came away impressed with the production, I really enjoyed it… and after all, the play’s the thing (oops, wrong Shakespeare play).

Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Aluminum Tube Skin on the Wyly Theater

Aluminum Tube Skin on the Wyly Theater