I haven’t posted a blog entry lately. Life has been busy with getting my fiancee ready for surgery (or I should say, helping her get the garden and house ready for her surgery), and I took on another project—more about that in a minute. Also, I tried so hard to keep my posting streak going, and I have no idea what happened, but suddenly one day my analytics said my streak was four days. I had been up to 200+! And if I missed one and broke that streak, well, , the need to post daily became less important.
As for the new project: On the Nextdoor app is a man named Glenn Plummer. He writes some funny stuff—though, truthfully, depending on who you talk to, he’s either the Dave Barry of Nextdoor or an annoying person who writes stupid and crazy stuff. I fall in the former category, and my fiancee and I went to visit him on a recent Saturday.
Most of the 3 hours there consisted of a monologue on his part. But in there somewhere came the words: “I have an idea for a one-man show.” He’d like to create a performance about Joe Hill, the labor organizer and songwriter who created a number of pro-union songs for the Industrial Workers of the World. (You can look these up thes topics in Wikipedia if interested, so I won’t expand on them here.)
I became intrigued by the topic. It intersects with storytelling, songwriting, history, unions, workers’ rights, immigration, and a host of other things. And as I always tell my playwrighting students, when you set a play in the past, you are still commenting on the present. Little seems to have changed in the over one hundred years since Joe Hill’s execution by firing squad for a murder he likely did not commit.
As for the one-man show aspect: well, I see it as a more fleshed out full-length musical. I immediately outlined a piece with Prologue, 12 scenes, and an Epilogue. It needs a couple of new songs (lyrics by me) added to the songs written by Glenn and of course those by Joe Hill.
So that’s percolating at the moment (as I approach audition for Love’s Labour’s Lost this weekend) and we’ll see how it develops.
MUSOFYR 