| Stick the Landing |
| Thursday, 21 May 2009 |
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“Fly.” The final sentence in Bryn Chancellor’s short story Any Sign of Light turns a sweet story into a three-tissue rain. That one word sucked the air right out of my lungs. It was my first lesson in writing: stick the landing – a step will cost you points. More often than I’d like, I experience less than satisfying endings where the heat is turned up to the point of being out of context and almost sketch-ish. The comedic beat is reduced to slapstick, intricate violence dissolves into random knife throwing, and hope is belittled into a Disney-like ride into the sunset. If you’ve got nowhere to go – turn it up. Deus ex machina, to be sure. The opposite extreme is of course of no use either; the equivalent of the limp handshake. My son said to me last week, “I hate the fade out. It’s like they couldn’t think of a good way to end the song, so they just turned it down. Lame.” Well said. Both comedy and drama can be exaggerated, or effectively faded out, in the subtlety of an isolated beat. My personal favorite is the good old-fashioned sound cue. Think Doll House: the door closes. Or ‘Night Mother: the gunshot. Too there is power in the simplicity of a single... hanging… line of dialogue, and certainly Pinter and Albee are the standard here. Or, the final action under the cover of silence that I saw last month at Space55. I attended a reading of The Bakers of Lakewood by Phil Schmiedl. During the performance I wondered about a few choices, here and there, maybe a spot or two that could use a chamois, but all was cast aside when the most amazing thing happened. I noticed myself leaning forward as we ran into the final scene. Our character was beautifully isolated, the final act committed, and the weight of the silence took us to black. I literally sat back, exhaled, and said, “Nice.” When I’m approaching those final beats, I feel a responsibility to my characters, and to the audience, to run into that dismount with a clear intent. The play does end. Even if this piece is but a chapter of a character’s life – 10 minutes or 75 minutes – there is a choice. Our girl chooses to either change, or not to change. The end. After the characters and the audience have worked hard to get there, I owe it to them to resolve the conflict with definitive measure. I believe an audience will follow me just about anywhere. They are willing to forgive the occassional transgression and perhaps overindulgent plot points as long as I can give them that pay-off. The scènes à faire; keep the promise I made to them in the first ten minutes. I need to earn every minute of time on that stage with purposeful attention in my writing. It’s my job to stick the landing; to punctuate the promise I made. When they leave the theater, I of course want the audience to take home memorable characters and an engaging story. But in the end, just before house lights, I want them to sit back in their chairs, exhale, and say, “Nice.” I want them to… Fly. |
