Woody & Me

With two days to go before rehearsal, I cut the following out of the play:

A Roman shipwreck

Uncle Bastard

The red map

Susie ‘bang-em’ Bingham

Albert Napper

Gold coins

Insurance

The shack

Tom’s will

A curse

Cable-ties

I also moved the play twelve foot vertically downwards into the cellar.

I read once that Woody Allen cut all the murders out when he was writing Manhattan – he realised he didn’t need them to tell the story.  (They later became Manhattan Murder Mystery).  I’ve ended up scything a lot of the big backstory out of the play to concentrate on the two brothers looking for money – and all the emotional consequences of the decisions they make along the way.

Losing all this underbrush brings the humanity out more.  Also I don’t have to spend stage time explaining how Roman gold’s been in the family for generations, and other big chunks of story that shone so brightly at me when I was brainstorming this back in February.  After wanting to write about brothers and family, I gathered up a whole lot more big glittering things into the bulging plot.  Now I’m cutting them out again, back to the spare story I began with.

It’s a lot to change.  It’s a lot better.