Monday, November 06, 2017

November 2017 Writing Challenge - #5 - An Office Power Horror Thriller

Lately there's been a lot going on in Chicago about an artistic person in power inappropriately (perhaps assuming consent in ignorance) with a much younger employee.


It's got me thinking.

Comedy is where something bad happens to a bad person- and justice is restored.

Tragedy is where something bad happens to a good person- and justice is regretted.

Horror is where someone is punished for something bad far beyond our sense of justice.

Thrillers live off of a creeping sense of the unwanted- either literally or spiritually or both.

Challenge: Write an Office Power Horror Thriller wherein someone in power wins (like the first challenge) by behaving punitively far beyond our sense of justice for some small infraction. Invoke thriller energies by having some literal physical or metaphorical sense of encroachment.

Alternate if that's not speaking to you- write a play about a bunch of bananas that form a family in Columbia and eventually are confronted with reality in Chicago.

********

Instead, I wrote this...


                          GREG
My dad forgot that I'm gay.

                          JOE
Deliberately.

                          GREG
No, he's in a nursing home.  I was calling to talk to him and my stepmother and in the course of things he jovially asked me if there were any special ladies in my life and if I was likely to get married any time soon.

                          JOE
Oh wow.

                          GREG
He's known I've been gay for almost thirty years.

                          JOE
Did you say anything?

                          GREG
If he's not about to hurt himself or somebody else, we're not supposed to correct him.

                          JOE
But don't you think he'd want to know?

                          GREG
Sure, but that's not a conversation over the phone.  All it's going to do is make him feel bad.  He has so few good days as it is.  If we're actually have a phone call where he's engaged and enjoying himself, what's the point in derailing it.

                          JOE
Thirty years.

                          GREG
Makes me wonder what else in that time frame he's forgotten.

                          JOE
And how much longer he's going to remember who you are.

                          GREG
Yup.

                          JOE
Well, at least you don't have a boyfriend or a husband who he's forgetting.

                          GREG
See that kind of makes it worse.  Anymore I'm only gay in theory.

                          JOE
That's not true.

                          GREG
I don't have any proof.  No one I can point to and say, see, this is who I love.  So of course he's going to forget.  He's got nothing to hang it on.  And he's trying to be sociable, and the majority of the population is straight, that's how he grew up, so it's just his default position.  You can hardly blame him.  He's not doing it maliciously.  We were worried that once he started forgetting things, and realized he was forgetting things, he'd be angry.  But he's taking it in stride.  The only thing that happens is he'll feel badly about it because he thinks he's hurting our feelings or we're somehow less important than we are to him

                          JOE
because he can't hang on to details.

                          GREG
Right.  And ultimately, he's just worried I'll be alone.  He's worried he's going to die and there's going to nobody at my side to help me through it.  Frankly, so am I.

                          JOE
You've got your friends.

                          GREG
Absolutely.

                          JOE
But it's not the same.

                          GREG
Nope.




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