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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