posted by Aditi Kapil, her project with the Lark Play Development Center is one of the selections for the Distinguished New Play Development Project category. Development steps also include Mixed Blood Theatre, InterAct Theatre, The Playwrights’ Center, and the Rhodopi International Theater Collective. The premiere will be at Mixed Blood Theatre, MN in 2010.
I’ve come to terms with something significant, ‘Agnes Under the Big Top’ is an ensemble piece, not a ‘one character’s journey through the underground’ kind of piece. It’s liberating, I can now stop trying to force feed the primary story arc to poor Agnes, who never wanted it in the first place, and consequently never did much of anything with it. As an ensemble player, however, she’s killer.
The other big realization from the 4 days of work last month at the Playwrights’ Center is that the fairy tale that suffused the story had become superfluous. This was a hard one to accept, I fought to make it work, the fairy tale was the epiphany that allowed me to write the first draft last summer, it’s in the title! But on the final day I was out of tricks, and the only thing left to try was to mercilessly cut it out and see what remained. That evening we introduced “Agnes Under the Big Top, a fairy tale” in a public reading, only there was no fairy tale. The bigger news is that it was better for it. No one missed it, not even me.
That’s not to say that its surgical excision didn’t leave a whole bunch of gaping holes behind, it did, but I’m figuring out what belongs there. It may even be that some other form of the fairy tale returns, but in its all-encompassing form it’s gone.
I enjoyed Kirk Lynn’s list of favorite cut lines, so I’m contributing a few of my own. (I also considered adopting some of Kirk’s discards in the karmic hope that mine too might find a new home in another play. I still might try that, fully attributing the source of course.)
Here’s my shortlist:
-A tiny drop of sap ran down her bark.
-What the hell kind of song is that to sing in the subway, are you trying to make people jump?
-That’s what they invented freezers for. By which I mean to suggest that you put the ice cream in the freezer.
-Agnes Was Here (scrawled on a dirty subway train)
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