I mentioned the other week that I had revised I Am The Devil and was going to work on scenes to be added to the play.
I think I’m done with my additional scenes. One of them is a new ending!
I was always satisfied with how I Am The Devil ends, but in many ways what I wrote is too abrupt. This is partly by design—Alice pulled off the Band-Aid quickly and she’s going to leave Gabe and Karl feeling the sting. There’s no reason for her to explain herself, either, so I never thought it was appropriate to draw things out. But is it enough to send crowds out the door with that punched-in-the-gut feeling that wraps up in about five minutes, if that?
I decided to ask myself: what happens next? Even if there isn’t anything to resolve, does anything linger? How do Gabe, Alice, and Karl get through the next day?
The scene I wrote does very little to answer this, but it does “very little” in an entertaining way. Plus it gets us out of the office and the restaurant and gives The Man a lot more to do.
I’ll cut this new ending if it’s not necessary, but right now I think it does a lot to make the decisions of these characters stick.
We’ll see. In the meantime, please re-read the current ending of I Am The Devil. If it seems appropriately quick and dirty to you, let me know. Maybe I’ll leave well enough alone.
I saw Paul Weitz’s Trust at Second Stage this evening. It didn’t offend me as much as it could have, so that’s something. Still, did Bobby Cannavale have to play the stereotypical Bobby Cannavale character? Did Ari Graynor have to play the stereotypical Ari Graynor character? And is sound designer “M.L. Dogg” just a pseudonym for “Zach Braff’s iPod”?
Ah, well; Trust‘s jokes were sometimes funny, Sutton Foster looks cute as a button in dominatrix garb, and the indifferent writing, direction, and acting didn’t result in a train wreck. Compared to most of my playgoing, this is quite an endorsement.
Here are some random updates. Hey, look at me. I do stuff.
- I’m working on a rewrite of I Am The Devil. We’ll see what happens with it. I did a major revision of the entire play a few months ago. Lots of dialogue changes, very little change to the structure. Right now I have a few ideas for replacement scenes and one added scene. We’ll see if they work.
- I also finished a first draft of my Noël Coward play. It isn’t very good. It is a sex comedy that isn’t sexy, isn’t funny, and doesn’t juggle its different elements of kink as well as I want them to.
Also, the S&M in my Noël Coward play is nowhere nearly as well-researched as the S&M in Trust. Looks like I have some serious web searches to do!
If you need more Aladdin in your life, you might be interested in reading an early 19th Century dramatization of the story by Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger.
I found a copy of the play on Google Books and have been reading the PDF. Research I should have done before writing As You Wish, eh?
Here are some of the notable points I discovered while reading and skimming this play:
- The play as written is more than five hours long! It is split into Parts One and Two, so presumably audiences didn’t have to sit through the whole thing at once.
- Aladdin’s father is alive at the start of the play! He yells at Aladdin, yells at his wife, and dies after Aladdin gets him worked up.
- There is a staircase leading down to the lamp. This makes it easier to stage—you can have Aladdin and the Magician onstage at the same time.
- Part 1 of the play ends with Aladdin’s wedding, just like Act I of As You Wish. The Magician doesn’t take the lamp until Part Two.
- Part Two includes the entire second part of Aladdin, which is usually left out. In it, the Magician’s brother comes to town, eager for revenge. He spends most of the story in drag. In the story, Aladdin stabs this “woman” to death in cold blood. In Oehlenschläger’s play, Aladdin challenges him to a duel, but the Magician’s brother instead kills himself.
- The play ends with an announcement of the King’s death—Aladdin is the new king! He and the Princess go to pay their respects to her father and his mother (so I guess she dies at some point.)
- There are lots of fairies and spirits and stuff. I guess you have to give your chorus something to do.
I really was impressed by how this play was written—nothing seems impossible for the stage. It’s also quite faithful to the original story. Oehlenschläger adds scenes—Aladdin’s father’s death and a meeting between the Magician and his brother, for example—that really flesh things out. It’s interesting to see another playwright work with the same story I did with some of the same intentions—plus an added dose of cleverness.
A production of Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin might be too dense for my stunted, contemporary attention span, but I’m glad I got to see it on the page.
