Past (Projects) Come Back to Haunt Us

I’m trying to clean up my desk and filing cabinet in the hopes of making enough space to bring more things from my storage unit and, if there are any files to keep, I will have a place for them.

In the meantime I’m finding a lot to recycle, but am also discovering some surprises along the way. One of these is a project list from so long ago, you can see the dot-matrix pattern on the yellowed paper.

As I look down the list, I think, “Of course! What a great idea!” and “Wow! I actually completed that!” along with occasional instances of, “I have no idea what that even is.”

The Algonquin Plays, or plays by members of the Algonquin Round Table, would be great; they did some very fun one-acts that would make a very entertaining evening. A documentary stringing together clips of Broadway theatre performances on the Ed Sullivan show would also be a wonderful historical document (if the challenge to get the rights for that were not insurmountable). And I still think I could do an amazing job adapting Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle for the stage. (It begins with the arrival of the Tralfamadorians on the frozen planet Earth, as they seek to find out what happened.)

I did a staged reading of 2020: The Year of Perfect Vision a couple of years ago—before the pandemic began. I hadn’t foreseen that in my play. (You can watch it in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) Gilbert the Goldfish is available on musofyr.com. And To Be Young Again may have morphed into Kid Again (here’s Episode #1 on the StoryZStudios YouTube channel) without me being aware of it. I did direct Black Snow. I also recently found Poetry and Truth, a performance piece consisting of scenes and songs created from Goethe’s works, and still want to bring that to a stage. And I want to film the so-called CPR script.

There are plays I wanted to direct: Heart of a Dog (based on Mikhail Bulgakhov’s brilliant novel) and Ibsen’s Master Builder. Currently neither is on my to-do list for StoryZ. And there are the scripts I wanted to write or create adaptations from: the Pirate Radio and Colony ideas (the former is written, and the latter started out as a computer game but didn’t advance beyond some notes) and the Gesta Romanorum and Night Chant (based on Navajo culture), which I recall thinking were both excellent source material for adaptation—but now I’d have to look them up to remember what they were.

I did recycle the notes for the Apocalypse Now book; I wanted to do an academic study of the film from a Jungian perspective, but never got around to it, and in the meantime other books appeared on the film, so I didn’t feel the need to add to that scholarship.

And then there are the things that I have no idea what they are/were. If Looks Could Kill, Immigrant, Shouts Without, Vampire Theatre Troupe—these titles are utterly meaningless to me. Maybe I’ll come across those notes at some point.

But that is a daunting and incredibly long list!