Mike Mariano

Five minutes into writing my Ibsen play and I’m having a crisis of faith.

So far it isn’t even slightly Norwegian. It isn’t yet sexy, which makes it a lousy companion to Menage a Sartre. Unless things pick up when the good Doctor S. makes his entrance, I may have to start over.

Therefore, my eye is wandering to other projects. On Saturday, Dean made a reference in casual conversation to a character from our long dormant Marley Show rewrite—a character we hadn’t even written. Further thoughts on Now Departing, as we’ve been calling the revised play, made me think of a different approach to the play. We were considering the play’s theme to be “death.” But it might be more interesting to tie everything together under the theme of “thievery.” As it stands now, Bill will loot corpses and steal girlfriends, and the revised Del will also be looking to take something of his own.

Last night I had my fifth or sixth idea for a Now Departing opening (It involves Bill doing inappropriate things with balloons.), so maybe now is the time to start writing it.

I also had another idea for a full-length which would combine the historical inaccuracy of this fairy tale with the real-life crimes at Guantánamo with my own Wish Fulfillment. If I can pull that together I think I’d really like the results.

Finding a red pen is harder than I thought.

I didn’t want a marker pen; I have one of those in my desk at work. I wanted a plain ballpoint pen filled with red ink. But although some use this stylus at work, we have none in stock.

I went to Wawa, but they had no red pens. They had no stationary whatsoever. Try writing anything down using the materials provided at Wawa: it’s a post-literate society. I could have approximated my desires using ketchup packets and coffee stirrers, but I felt I could do better than that.

My next stop was the Princeton “U-Store” which seems to be following Wawa’s lead. Unless you wanted pens in some variation of orange-and-black with “Princeton” written across each one, there were no pens, pencils, or paper at the U-Store. There were, however, a wide selection of thongs.

I returned to the office, defeated. Finding a red ballpoint would require a walk to Hinkson’s Stationary. The distance wasn’t a problem, but I had wasted enough time already.

Then officemate Jennifer A. came to my rescue. She had a capless red ballpoint Bic sitting unused in a cup on her desk. She offered it to me, and now I have it wrapped up in my pink transparent document envelope.

But why a red pen? I’ll show you why:

This is a page from the first completed draft of The Marley Show. Circa February 1997, Dean and I printed the play and attacked it with our red pens.

I am planning to do the same with a new short play.

This is the “Chanel Play” which I completed Thanksgiving afternoon. It will have four characters and be 45 minutes to an hour in duration. It will be funny, sick, and sexual.

But right now it’s only a first draft. It needs to be pierced with the red pen.

Somehow I don’t recall The Bill Show or I Am The Devil getting the red pen treatment. Especially after Jack, Wanda, and Ben I began writing and rewriting my work on the computer. Taking a look at my most recent work, Muggled was written as a text file, Unleash Your Inner Spader was written as a Microsoft Word document, and Wish Fulfillment was drafted entirely in a notebook, which I think is my current preferred method of writing.

The Chanel Play began as a text file, but two-thirds of the way through I switched to a notebook. Only now is the complete play in tactile form.

Thanks to the red pen I’m going back to my roots. I’m going to treat the Chanel Play like I treated The Marley Show. Let’s hope it’s for the best.

Wish Fulfillment is here.

You can now read a PDF and plain text version of my one-act play right here on the site. Enjoy it!

Some quick notes: all three of the new additions are not brand-new plays. Unleash Your Inner Spader and Wish Fulfillment were finished in May, while Muggled was finished in July. Muggled was spiffed up for production, but the other two plays are not too different from their first drafts. I’m unsure what my ultimate intentions are for them. I may use Wish Fulfillment as a jumping-off point for a new full-length play, but I don’t know yet if I have an idea big enough for a long play. Unleash Your Inner Spader would be right at home in a Couchophilia/Jack, Wanda, and Ben/Big Game evening of short plays, but is there another path for it to take?

And what do I do with the other plays that have at least a first draft underneath them, but you’ve never heard of?

The next thing you will probably see on the site is “the Chanel play” as previously whispered about. After that, I really want to get cracking on a full-length play. I just don’t know what.

Bonus Trivia: In Wish Fulfillment, the character Roger’s face is described as “ashen”, and he also complains of sunburn. But Roger is black! Is this an oversight on the part of your ethnocentric author? No; Roger’s skin is just lighter than you might think. To put this in terms you white college hipsters might understand, this was before Wesley Snipes. Get it? Good.