Archive for the ‘Jack, Wanda, and Ben’ Category

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The Coma

Friday, December 30th, 2005

My parents recorded and played for me a recent Saturday Night Live sketch called “The Coma”, which strongly reminded them of my play Jack, Wanda, and Ben.

“The Coma” features a man who emerges from a one-day coma to find that his girlfriend has met, romanced, and married another man. The sketch is definitely playing with the same premise as Jack, Wanda, and Ben, but allows itself to be cruder and sillier. Both “The Coma” and JWB are punctuated by exasperated utterances of “It was forty-five minutes!”/“It was one freakin’ day!”

Although it lasts for only two lines, I liked the shared moment of tenderness between the coma victim and his girlfriend. (“You changed your hair….”) When rewriting my play, I wanted to downplay the gimicky ending and put some emotion into this new arrangement. It’s enchanting to see people try to make an unworkable situation work.

And I suppose the compliment Jack, Wanda, and Ben received from the Orange County Register—“worthy of the early days of Saturday Night Live”—now also applies to the show’s later days.

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I Service Society By Rocking

Tuesday, September 20th, 2005

George Hunka wants to talk about modern approaches to poetry and prose in playwriting. ZZZZZ! Let’s talk about what really matters: rock and roll!

Not quite poetry and nearly never prose, rock lyrics have been a part of my playwriting for a long time. And they’ve been a disaster. I personally think it’s hilarious to have characters speak with earnest dialogue that they’d otherwise sing in the shower. Observe the previously-linked Jack Black summarizing his teaching philosophy with Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All”.

But the joke gets lost in production. The lyrics are cut—or worse, they’re sung. The absurd sincerity of spoken word rock is smothered to death.

Yet I can’t resist. My recent Jack, Wanda, and Ben addition compounds my bad habits with two rock and roll references.

Wanda But Ben, you act as if you just don’t care.

This one’s easy. It’s “So Lonely” by The Police. I love the staccato rhythm of this phrase, and hope the clipped speech will prevent future Wandas from whining too much. Yet it’s likely that these actresses will instead pull out their Gordon Sumner impressions.

Wanda You think that abandoning me is OK just as long as you give a thought to me every now and then.

OK, this isn’t exactly a lyric; it’s from David Bowie’s speech in the extended “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid. Give a thought? This is Band Aid’s call to action? These three words stuck in my head as something so tasteless, so absurd, that they could never be spoken with any genuine kindness. Apparently Wanda feels the same way.

Please note I insert these lyrics with the best of intentions. In performance, though, I’ve only seen them cause more harm than good. Perhaps it’s time to stop rocking for a while, and see what playwriting alone can do.

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Hold It In Your Hands

Friday, September 9th, 2005

The Jack, Wanda, and Ben revision? Finished in March. But only now do you get to hold it in your hands.

Yes, the page for Jack, Wanda, and Ben has a new 2005 edition that more than doubles the length of the short play. Now Ben has the most lines, Jack goes even crazier, and Wanda starts making a little sense.

Just a little.

What if we want to read scripts like it’s 1999? Fear not, the original versions are still linked on the play page as First Editions. As always, both versions of the play are possible for performance. But I want to put the most solid version of the play in the forefront.

And what prompted this revised script? A production, what else! I hope to soon have more information on that to share.

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