M&C's Handfasting by Cara Fenton. Some rights reserved.

Freshwater Theatre has a script submission call up for “Better or Worse”, their fall production about the shifting landscape of marriage. Several members of my playwrights’ group are writing pieces for this or have submitted already and are encouraging the rest of us to do likewise. I want to do this. I have Strong Opinions about marriage; it seems right up my alley.

And yet I am stymied by the vastness of the subject. Marriage! That’s a huge, huge playground. Even the additional information I’ve gleaned about the sorts of things Freshwater may be most interested in almost makes the playing field bigger, because it opens up the whole of history. It’s like trying to pick up a sand dune with my fingers: every time I grasp at it, it slips away.

Several ideas have floated through my mind, each one more bizarre than the next. One keeps coming back. It is not, ironically enough, about same-sex marriage, the matrimony-related issue on pretty much every Minnesotan’s minds these days. Still, maybe it’s the teacup that will let me hold at least a bit of the ocean.

I have a confession to make. Although, if you ask me about my writing, I’m likely to list “playwriting” first, I go through extended stretches where I don’t “do” theater much. I don’t just stop writing plays; I stop going to them. Sometimes lack of funds hinders my theater-going endeavors; sometimes my tendency toward hibernation keeps me in the house.

Then something happens–a new job, a new play-going buddy, a change in the weather–and I’m in the audience again and picking up my script-writing quill again. I remember: Oh, yeah. I love this. I’m always confused by how I could’ve let myself forget.

I’m in one of these theater renaissances right now. What has struck me this time is the vastness of the gaps in my foundational theater knowledge. I blame, somewhat, my alma mater. I majored in English, and at that college at that time, this meant English prose (or poetry, to a lesser extent). If I’d wanted to study drama–its history and styles, its guiding lights and greatest disasters–I would have fared better as a drama major. But I didn’t fall head over heels for drama ’til my junior year, when it was a little late to switch majors. Of course, having been out of college for ten years at this point, my continued ignorance is no one’s fault but my own.

But I’m catching up. Public libraries and Project Gutenberg are blessed things. And what a gift it is to be learning these things, to have these vistas opening for me. New paths unfold before me. Which one(s) shall I step onto?

I thrive on deadlines. If I’m honest, they’re the only way I really get things done.

I’m told I’ve been this way most of my life: my kindergarten teacher used to complain to my parents that, when she gave us an assignment that was due at X time, I would figure out how long it was going to take me (Y) and then keep doing my own thing until exactly (X-Y) time. Without that end-point looming, I can dither and dawdle like nobody’s business.

And there’s no deadline like an extreme deadline. Like, say…co-writing a ten-minute play in eight hours. This January I will participate in my seventh Theatre Unbound 24:00:00 Xtreme Theatre Smackdown. I love this event, but I sometimes have trouble explaining to people why I enjoy it so much.

Turns out, all I needed was - you guessed it - a deadline. In this case, the deadline of a preview article by Aisle Say Twin Cities’s Sophie Kerman. I think I finally managed to articulate what makes this event so great for me. Please do tell me what you think.