Mike Mariano

I spent the month of January converting most of my plays into good old HTML—the way the web works! I now realize that I didn’t mark them up well enough, though, so I’m going back through and adding divs like crazy!

But it’s one thing to add markup to my scripts; it’s another to make them look nice. I need your help.

I’d like you to take a look at two versions of Urban Myth. The first is formatted like a manuscript—the same way I format my printed plays you see in PDF on the site. The second is formatted in a style closer to those of published plays like the ones on Playscripts.

Please play around with both files: increase the text size, print them out, draw dirty pictures on them. Then tell me what you think. Both versions use CSS-generated content to create parentheses and colons, and these won’t show up in the ancient Internet Explorer. Does this make it difficult to read?

Here are the files: Update: Now that the HTML plays have been uploaded I have removed these samples.

• Urban Myth manuscript style
• Urban Myth published style

Feedback is welcome. And if you have any suggestions or style tips of your own, please tell me!

I mentioned last month that Urban Myth was inspired by a college course. While browsing my archives housed at the Mariano estate this holiday, I came across my notebook for “Human Love in Philosophy and Literature” and decided to photograph the entry.

The entry appears mostly unchanged in the final play. Lucky for you I immediately added that bathroom humor.

Another unearthed gem: my outline for The Secret of Monkey Island: The Musical!

Urban Myth began in one of my honors classes; instead of writing notes, I wrote Prometheus’s answering machine message. “Hi, this is Prometheus, and I’m out right now,” is nothing if not naughty schoolboy humor. The full one-act grew out of that mini-monologue.

In production, I think it might be fun to continue the dormitory antics and have music play underneath Prometheus’s message. The song I’ve long had in mind is Erasure’s Chains of Love. Silly. Obvious. Perfect.

But lately I’ve been listening to Tears for Fears, and they have their own song of bondage: Woman in Chains. It’s deliciously inappropriate, just like Erasure, but does it fit? We have a Titan in chains, not a woman.

Woman in Chains begins so gently, so tenderly, that perhaps it would go best with a love scene. Maybe Urban Myth needs a new opening, in which the song plays as Amy and Prometheus embrace on the ground, sowing the seeds of love. The lights would fade, then jump to full as the Eagle wakes Prometheus, beginning the play as we know it.

One problem: this prevents the Eagle from setting the scene. His costuming and offhand comments establish the Greek myth; Tears for Fears doesn’t.

Would I really sacrifice script coherency for a cheap 80s music gag? No comment.