Trudging On.

I’ve been rewriting my musical, Jack — the one that turned out to be 4-1/2 hours long when we read it last May at LaMama — for months now. The task was straightforward at first, but then became less and less so as I got into the weeds. I’ve cycled through 4 or 5 schemes, controlling ideas, each of which worked and then didn’t, but then early this year the thing sort of took some shape in my mind. Paradoxically, as I began to relax and loosen up about what the piece could be, it started to cohere. The amount of sheer labor, cutting huge swaths of it and then pushing it back together, has been huge, and even up until last week I felt unable to solve some big, big problems. And on and off all day every day I despaired of even being capable of the job.

But I've kind of figured it out.

Starting before Xmas when I found a musical theater grant I hadn’t known about, I was working to a deadline, the application due mid-March, if for no other reason than to keep myself focused and motivated through the hard patches. The amount of work I needed to accomplish for the application was daunting but I was hacking through it and feeling better and better. I had two weeks till the deadline, and if I really buckled down I could get it done.

An hour or so ago, I went to the grant-giving foundation’s website to verify something about one of the application questions, and there in big red letters on the home page it said, “UPDATE* Due to overwhelming response, the Submission window is now CLOSED.”

Now that I think about it, this application deadline was mainly important because it gave me a sense that someone was interested in the work, was waiting for it. Someone was actually going to read 30 pages of my libretto and listen to 5 songs and form an opinion about the quality and potential of this brand new musical. After the twists and turns of my life and career in the last 30 years, I find myself now unconnected to a community of artist peers. The kind of theater I made in the late 80s and 90s, the period of LIZZIE’s inception, was always a room full of people making a show. And the Y’all years were a constant treadmill of writing and performing and performing and show after show after show.

I have nothing to complain about. I have the luxury now to sit in a room alone and write what I want to write, and I’m confident of my talent. But back in the day, when I wrote something, more often than not someone, maybe me, was going to sing it or say it on a stage in front of an audience within a few weeks. Now I’m a lonely writer in a room putting stuff on paper and tape, hoping I might have the opportunity to hand it to someone who is always more likely than not to be uninterested.

I’m surprised to say this, but I don’t feel defeated today. The last few days I’ve felt more confident about the work than I have in months. I’ve solved some big problems in the structure and the story, and that’s put some wind in my sails despite knowing that my neat solutions require a ton of work: a new character, a new scene, a new song, and then all the rippling revisions that those big changes necessitate throughout the rest of it. Last week this news would probably have been a body blow.