Today begins our series of Dainty Cadaver playwright profiles on The Piperline. However, instead of simply doing a hackneyed standard-issue Q&A with our talent, I’ve decided to try something more in the spirit of the project itself: a Mad Libs-style series of sentences for which each playwright has been invited to fill in the blanks.
First off we have August “Gus” Schulenburg, founding member and artistic director of the estimable Flux Theater Ensemble. I first met Gus a few years ago, when he made the mistake of reaching out to introduce himself to me via email, at which point I pleaded to be included as a writer in the Imagination Compact, a series of short plays Flux was organizing based around individual characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (I drew Theseus.) The next year he asked me to be involved in Poetic Larceny, a daisy-chain of plays based around themes from Adam Szymkowicz’s Pretty Theft. (That time I wrote about a guy who married a shark.) These two projects were definite inspirations for the idea that has grown into the Dainty Cadaver, and I’m thrilled to reciprocate Gus’s faith in my writing by featuring his work via Piper McKenzie!
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If I could rewrite the ending to any play it would be Other Bodies because I think it will be my best play when I'm able to finish it right.
No one’s gonna stop me from getting insane in my membrane when the rain in Spain falls mostly on the plain.
When I first read the Dainty Cadaver scene that came before mine, my initial reaction was I don't think this is Mac's or Johnna's, because I'm not sobbing or unsettled. Then, I thought it's probably not Crystal's either, because the sentences don't have those little breaks in them where the characters' hearts slip through. Could be James, though, there's that witty banter and foreboding, and I feel like he'd describe that one character exactly that way. Finally, I realized it was like 5PM and I probably should start writing.
The song I listened to most/had in my head while writing my scene was Jolie Holland's December 1999. It has that lonely road and late night driving feel I mostly wanted.
As Abraham Lincoln said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget that time when it was in school, and too small to be one of the cool planets, and half in love with Venus and all the way in lust with Mars, but it was Moon, of all the heavenly bodies, Moon, that little nattering scrapbag, that stuck up for the world when Jupiter sent those comets like spitballs against her neck, and so it was Moon she chose to circle as they all went round the sun, and the sun warily circled that black hole in the center that was sopping up the Milky way with it's bread of darkness."
Before I had Piper McKenzie in my life, I was a hollow shell of a human being. Now I butter my toast on both sides.
The superpower I would least want to have would probably be the power to foresee great jokes before they happen.
Out, out, brief candle! / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That cuts her debts with hours of extras' wage / And then is shown the door. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of clowns and worry / Signifying you're on.
The first play I ever wrote was titled Untitled. After that I had to say over and over again, no, Untitled is the title, really.
If I were to finish this sentence it would be so irresistibly hot you would evaporate into quantum parts and cruise like bees through the interwebs to reassemble on my knees, and then, oh then, we would
Writing for the Dainty Cadaver in this manner worked in concord with my usual process by delighting me more than it probably should.
If I didn’t write plays or do things like Dainty Cadavers I’d probably be a physicist or classical pianist or drunk.
RNA and DNA and neurons; that’s what little girls are made of.
I think the Internet does affect the ways we make theater in that it um, foursquare innovation crowdsourcing, plus something Clay Shirkey said, and then demographics! More demographics! And to close, my blog brings all the boys to the yard. #hashtagswitheggsovereasy.
The jumble of random nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs I would use to describe my Dainty Cadaver experience includes the following: furious peanut butter, zounds the filthy wound stealthily flying, and pi is pie to magpies named Maggie.
When walking down the thing you walk down,, someone picked up a thing one picks up along the long stretch of somewhere. It said "name all these unnamed things, or I will name you", and so the someone holding it had to name it.
In the beginning God created the end.
I couldn’t live without life, but the part of it I could live without is death.
Have you ever noticed that declarative sentences are always like “thank God I'm in quotation marks,” while interrogative sentences are always like “why do I have to be in quotation marks all the damn time?” What’s the deal?
Snabfllp nibminimmbinmtt falalaboocheray toddlesmick drinkandbewholeagainbeyondconfucious abbib simblantfermay pobbadooblemirph.
The next project I'm involved in is Dog Act at Flux Theatre Ensemble. $12 tix for opening weekend with the discount code "SQUISH": http://www.fluxtheatre.org/
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