IP

LET US GET ABSURD

My Independent project: Ideas. Stories. Characters. But which ones?

I knew that I wanted to write my own piece for my Independent project right from the get go. I did not, however, have any clue how I was going to go about doing it. I decided that inspiration would come one way or another, so I just simply decided to wait it out. It took quite a while until anything hit me. Finally though, with my sisters wedding on the doorstep and plenty of people and buzzing around the house, my family and I decided that we needed to take a quick break and relieve some stress. The picture above is the result of hot, sweaty, tiring, frustrating, wedding preparation overseen by a stressed,  nervous, and delirious mother. I think it's pretty amusing. We were working tirelessly to set up our back yard, pitch a giant tent, gather chairs, so on and so forth, all the while dressed up in these extremely uncomfortable black tuxedos and being ordered by a very "on edge" mother of the bride. Absolutely ridiculous. People were fainting from heat exhaustion. 

It was during this pandemonium that I decided what my play was going to be about: A group of people who work, day in, day out, at a gallows. They would set up the stage,  book the guests, ready the ropes, and put on a show. Yes, a show. It would be a show that everyone in the city came to watch, where people would actually be hung, and killed. It would be absurd and comical and truly outrageous in almost every way. 

Now, this was the starting point, nothing more. After much writing of the gallows I found that it simply was not going to do, I needed story, and a much better one. I decided that I would keep the gallows idea, at least a diluted version, and add in a couple new elements. Other stories perhaps that could run beside the gallows, a story that would be intertwined. What those other stories were, however, I had no idea. And so, I went back to the waiting game. I listened to music. Lots of it. Form Verdi, to alternative Japanese Sludge Metal. I began to develop the characters who work at the gallows a little bit more. Ebert and Roeper, that would be their names. Ebert, like the famed critic, would be unable to speak. Roeper would be unable to hear. They would spend their entire lives together at the gallows and neither one would notice the others disability, until a new character entered into their lives. 

I wrote some new material for this idea, but once again I was unsatisfied with the result. I decided to scrap it and comeback to it later. I began to develop another idea that I had. 

THE JEZEBELS

Family dinner time is a sacred part of my family mechanism. Nothing puts a bigger smile on my mothers face then family dinners, especially when everyone is around. It really is a magical time. I have been to lots of family dinners, and I have also been to many of my friends family dinners. I find them extremely entertaining. There is something about a dinner table that can really give people a whole new sense of character and confidence. All of my most vivid memories of family disagreements occurred at the dinner table, all of fighting, mud-slinging, yelling, crying: that happened at the dinner table. And then, when you were done throwing a fit about something like not being allowed to go to friend X's party, or friend Y's hockey game, mom would clench her teeth and tell you to sit up straight and get your elbows off of the table. Very ridiculous. I knew that I wanted to explore this common scene in my independent project. And so I created a family. They were called the Jezebels, and they were extremely religious. But boy oh boy, were they amusing to watch. Kind of a mixture of "The sound of Music" and one of those really old mid century family magazine advertisements that you might analyze in an English class, plastered with rosy cheeks and charlatan smiles. 

I wanted them to be crazy, and I wanted them to be entertaining. That's kind of a theme that I had in mind. Entertainment. How peculiar it is, how addictive it is, how we expect it constantly. Entertainment  can come from some of the weirdest sources, just like the wedding day preparations. And maybe this desire to be constantly entertained isn't so bad, in fact maybe it's good. But I sometimes wonder if people are even aware of any difference. I mean even your work is supposed to be entertaining! Who ever thought that shovelling grain out of a bin everyday, forking manure, greasing an auger, was meant to be entertaining? Maybe it always was, I mean, I like doing it, but I never associated that kind of thing with entertainment. It seems as though it has leaked into every aspect of our lives, and I see it more at Pearson than anywhere else. 

Now, I'm not entirely sure what all of this means, but it has something to do with my play, and my play has something to do with it. 

I came to Pearson, and I wanted to be a doctor. End of story. Kaput. That's all folks. 

If I take another science or math course in the rest of my life, I will be thoroughly depressed. In fact I would go so far as to say my academic aspiration has changed direction entirely. Picturing myself in a lab coat with plastic gloves and a face mask makes me sick, I want to access people. I want to make them think. I want to address issues in a way that nowadays, seems to be the only way to go. I want to entertain, and I want people to get something out of it. Something positive. 

Firstly however, I want people to make a distinction between what is entertainment and what is not. I feel as though most of the "entertainment" we see now is lacking in almost every sense of the word. I want people to be conscious of the things that they watch, listen to, read. Because we are malleable. We are docile, and especially vulnerable when we are unaware that we are giving ourselves to these absurd things. 

In my opinion, life is quite an absurd thing. People expect far too much. And when somebody gives you something that you are expecting, you begin to trust them. And when they give you their next gift, you begin to think that you were expecting it. Our trust is stolen by formulaic, oxymoronic,  dream-forfieited "Artistic-Buisnessmen". 

One member of the family, however, named Kirk, is a bit of a black sheep. Kirk is unlike the other members of his family. He dresses in all black, wears make-up and is cruel to animals. Kirk sees through the charade of his family, and his family resents him. Now, this isn't to say that Kirk is the light at the end of the Jezebel tunnel. He isn't necessarily any better than the rest of his family and he has issues, no doubt. In fact he is perhaps just as fake as they are. I don't think it really matters though. Kirk is perhaps the emblem of rebellion. He represents all the people who don't associate themselves with the work of the "Artistic-Buisnessman". We see though, clearly, that by the end, even people like Kirk- who don't associate themselves with shit- still smell it. 

The Jezebel family represents all of the fake conversation that we find ourselves having. They represent the role that media and entertainment have in parenting. They represent the novelty that religion has become within my community. They represent the chaos that has been created by the Parenting 101 books you see people purchasing at gas stations. They represent the parents who think that they have succeeded, as well as those who think that they have failed. Most of all, however, they allow us to reflect on the absurdity that we experience every Sunday evening at the family dinner table in an exemplified and entertaining way. 

This has something to do with my play, and my play has something to do with this. 

The reason for the foul language in this scene goes back to the mysticism of the dinner table. I know parents and families where swearing is just an integral part of their day to day conversation. Luckily, I was raised in a household where swearing was prohibited in every instance, save for the right field of a baseball diamond as a mutter under your breath. If my mom ever heard me swear she wouldn't feed me for a week, not that it ever happened. I am the only kid in the community who has never heard his parents swear. My father once broke his finger in a door and yelled "Jeepers Creepers Dirty Rodder". I still don't even know what exactly a Dirty Rodder is, but the point is that my parents don't swear. Maybe they did when they were younger, I like to think so at least, or maybe when they are alone, I like to think less of this, but I honestly have never heard them use "potty language". Even the lords name is off limits.

Anyway, like I said earlier, my friends parents swear like crazy. At hockey games, at work, in the house watching T.V, while they are driving, when they talk about their farms and the weather (especially about their farms and the weather) and I even heard my friends dad drop an F-bomb at church one time when he got "Christ's-Welchers-Grape-Juice-Blood" all over his shirt during communion. It was quite a stain. 

Never, though,  have I ever heard my friends parents swear at the dinner table during supper time. It's true. There really is something funny about dinner tables. We argue at them, yes, but we do it without dipping into our arsenal of vulgar vocab. I find something like this quite funny, and so I wanted to play with the idea in my show. The Jezebels dinners are these formulaic meals with the standard useless conversation, but the extremely religious father explodes with swearing and screaming at his children whenever something goes wrong. I think this is a great way to shock people. Its more shocking, in my opinion, to hear swear words at a dinner table, then at church. And which, honestly, is more peculiar. The conversation that occurs with the Jezebel family isn't extraordinarily outrageous in my opinion (except for maybe Kirks spiel). I see parents yelling at their kids all the time, but its always at the rink, or in the truck, or when their son gets the tractor stuck in a marsh. Never at the dinner table though, and that is what makes the scene interesting. The "Juxtaposition" of discipline and dinner tables. 

I knew going into this, that there would be swearing. I knew that there would be uncomfortable conversation topics and as my mom would call it "trash". But the fact that I can assure the world that I will never let my mother read this play ensures you that I don't throw it into the mix carelessly. I do it because it is valuable to the story that I am trying to tell. Because, and maybe this is just me, but I know people who speak like this. In fact, when my parents aren't around, sometimes I dabble in it. It serves a purpose. Learning to swear is like learning an entirely knew language. When you are young, and you don't fully understand, it's magical to think of these words that carry with them so much power and clout. And over time, if you are fortunate, you outgrow this romance. Just like you outgrow Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, etc. It's an odd analogy to make, I understand and maybe you don't see the same link that I see, but the point is that lots of people don't outgrow this obsession with swearing.

And so was the birth of the Jezebel family.

The father, Mr. Jezebel, is a pretty typical man in context. He runs a business, finds peace in the lord, and makes most of his decisions based on sexual impulse. His vocation is not so twisted, as he is the owner of a television company. What is twisted, though, is the content displayed on these shows. The first one, which we touched on briefly, is the gallows. Goldwynn Gallows. Where, as we know, people are hung and crowds pile in to watch. The other show is a not-so-family friendly sitcom, which I will discuss later. Anyway, in a modest suburban community, presumably North American,  Mr. Jezebel and his loving wife, Mary-Ann raise their four children: Milles, Valentine, Rosalie, and Kirk.

The Jezebel family, essentially, is one of the "parallel stories" that will intertwine with the idea I had thought of earlier involving the Goldwynn Gallows.