Andrew Young as Arthur
in the Abilene
Shakespeare Festival's 2004
production of
Arthur: The Hunt
This question comes up. The past two weeks has seen a shift in my work habits, a new set of interior furniture, so to speak. Actually using a calendar to track my work, discovering that there's far too much of it. Having learned this past summer (Act One:Writing for Hollywood) that story is a far more demanding mistress than I thought, I am now beginning to see how the present difficulty of trying to break no less than three stories at once (and rehearsing a fourth) is madness...and penance for past mistakes.
Story characters are important people in your life: if you don't give them the attention they deserve, treating them with honesty and respect, they will punish you for it. Just now Arthur and Morgan (of Pendragon fame) are pounding on my computer monitor, saying, "See, I told you so." The second play of the Arthur Cycle is currently two stories-- that's right two plays--being told in two venues. Obviously, that will not do, and it has come to my attention with great force that these great characters need some crisis management attention, because they have a story to tell. A story of love, family, and the costs--both personal and national--of ambition and lies.
Kelly Haseltine as Morgan and
Andrew Young as Arthur
So major deadlines are converging: a film project proposal for my Act One mentors due in two weeks, a major rewrite of Arthur: The Hunt #1 (the version being presented by ACU at the American College Theatre Festival in November), a three-week run of Leaving Ruin (which I have taken back into rehearsal with Karen Lund of Taproot Theatre) in Canada (at Pacific Theatre and Gallery 7), as well as two new short scripts for Willow Creek due within the next ten days.
Back to the question: is it worth it?
What is the worth of a story? What is the worth of resisting the desire to toss off a quick idea of a story, even though you know it will sell because it punches all the right buttons? What is the worth of missing yet another family event because you have to pay the price to get the story right? What is the worth of fighting off the easy answers to get to the real ones, the real story, the story that isn't as interested in getting the answers right as it is getting the people true? It's the age-old question: is art about life as it is, or as it should be?
Is it worth fighting the fight to find the story that holds holds reality and possibility in tension, making that decidedly frustrating beauty we call music? Frustrating because it will not be reduced to language or axiom or formula or lesson. Beautiful because it speaks of creation's fullness, refusing to gloss either side of the equation (as if there were two): the dark (the hurricane's damage, the fury of disease, the shock and awe of infidelity), or the light (the magnificence of redemption, the HD sunrise day after day, the sheer wonder of agape).
Is it worth it?
What's not worth the sacrifices the people around me are making is the half telling. What's the point in the conversation that everyone around the table knows is a lie? Or, if not a lie, a shallow buffer against the storms outside, the life that demands our real attention? And yes, of course, at some point, missing the next family event to get the story right becomes an atrocity of it's own kind. But the sacrifice of the family event become the worse sin if the story told in that hour--the sacrifice given--is a partial measure, a holding back of truth, a cheat in the journey.
If that's the case, then no...it's not worth it.
But if, as Tolstoy intimates, the price is paid, the story uncovered, and the truth told, and as a result, people in future years and generations, be they one or many, can perhaps come to the well of that story and drink in nourishment, refreshment, and hope...then, yes, resoundingly, it's worth it.
The glory of God is a story, (and if in that, you read an implication of fiction and falsehood, you've missed the point of the word "story") and to live as an artist in it's light and it's truth...yes, it's worth it.
9:10:11 AM 
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