How I got that story

It's finally happening, as many of you know. Blood Rose Rising will be doing a workshop production on April 23, April 30 and May 6 in Harvard Square at Zero Church St. It's a fitting venue, since I spent almost every minute of every working day in that room from 1993 to 2003, while I was at the ART. It's going to be amazing. Come and see it.

I have been working on this show for 22 months now. The idea came to me while I was at the 2009 TCG conference in Baltimore. I'd just been given my walking papers by the ASP, and was trying to decide what crazy thing I would do next. The conference was supposed to be about "Roots, Renaissance and Revolution" but it was really just about the Revolution. It was dominated by the under 40 crowd, both in terms of the subject of discussion and in who was getting the floor. The big takeaway from that conference was that we need to allowing drinking and texting in the theater. That may sound flippant, but it's pretty true. The new theater has to recognize that people want both a more multi-faceted kind of entertainment experience, and a place where they can express themselves as they see fit.

So I started thinking about how to do that. Having a theater that was more like a club was the first piece. That was obvious. Make it a fun place to be. A place you want to go and hang out with your friends, just as much as a place to see "art". Then you want something that will make people want to keep coming back. My first thought on that was to start a one-act club, where you'd do a new one act every weekend. It's kind of a cool idea, but the work would be insane, and I'm not the one to do it, because I hate reading plays; and logistically, organizing, rehearsing, and marketing all those plays would be a killer. Somebody should definitely do it, but not me.

So then it hit me that it could the story that made people want to keep coming back for more. Episodic drama had redefined television over the last 10 years, maybe it was time for the theater to follow suit. I floated the idea to a couple of friends at the conference, and they really liked it.

I was driving home a few days later, listening to Pandora. A song called "Is there a Ghost?" by Band of Horses came on. It's a great freaking song. I'm listening to this song, and I'm suddenly reminded of a story I had written during my last desperate period, when I had been let go from ART and just before I founded ASP. I wrote 3 1/2 screenplays during that period, all of which were pretty bad, but the stories were good. They had similar themes: One was about a man who becomes enamored by a strange mermaid in lake in Canada; one was about a pair of lost young people who decide to live their lies as characters from a 30s screwball comedy and end up killing each other in a film processing lab; and one was the story that has now become Blood Rose Rising. They all deal with the fascination we feel for the unobtainable. Oh, and one was about 4 middle aged guys who decide to start a rock band.

So I hear this song streaming on my iPod, and I remember this story, which was pretty neat, and I think to myself - "that's it. That's the tale we should tell."

And almost two years later, here we are. Here's the song, though we're not using it for the show. We have something much better, by awesome local band Alchemilla. But by way of tribute for a good idea. Here's Band of Horses: