plays – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

Update August 7, 2022: Progress on Incommunicado-Second Draft Completed

Today, I finished the second draft of my full-length play “Incommunicado”. Hopefully, I will do only one more to tidy everything up and it will be ready to be submitted.

Phil Slattery, Arkansas Post National Memorial, 2019

This has been a great learning experience for me. The main challenge throughout this process has been to not only be diligent in progressing on it, but also to ensure that everything is tied up neatly and that the reader will know why anything happens.

The themes, if you can call them that, are honesty, personal courage, self-control, controlling one’s life, and probably several more. I am sure someone will see some that I do not.

I wanted to keep the cast at three characters, but I had to increase it to four so that there would be more action and tension by introducing a villain of sorts. Not a true antagonist who opposes the protagonist throughout the play, but a character that appears only briefly but nonetheless has a major impact on the storyline.

Anyway, I hope to have this completed before long and I will start submitting it around and maybe start looking for an agent. I am not certain what I will tackle next. I have two novels near completion, but I have the bug for writing plays at the moment, so I may resurrect my original full-length play called “Centaurs” that has been languishing in the background for a few years now. Having completed “Incommunicado” may give me some ideas on how to finish “Centaurs” which has a similar storyline.

That’s all for now.

Hasta luego.

Update April 26, 2022: Notes on Incommunicado and The Chamber

A quick update on what I am doing these days.

Watch for the next issue of The Chamber coming out May 6. Great dark stories and poetry as always. I haven’t finished selecting all the material yet, but so far here are the contributors: Alan Catlin, James Mulhern, Peter Michael Bush, Janelle Chambers, Patrick R. Wilson, Hareendran Kallinkeel, Cecilia Kennedy, Kate Bergquist, Damir Salkovic, Jessica McGlyn, and Prithvijeet Sinha.

I estimated the number of pages I have for my play “Incommunicado” a few days and discovered there are only 45, which makes a performance of about 45 minutes. I want to do a full-length play of 90 minutes, which means I will need about 45 more pages. So, I am only halfway done. The real trick will be to add 45 pages of quality material vs. filler/crap. I believe in leaner, muscular writing, keeping the text to as few words as possible while giving as much meaning to each word as possible. This gives impact to the writing and makes it powerful. There are only three characters: Quinn, Cassie, and Ruth, but most of the dialogue is between Quinn and Cassie. There is not a lot of action in the play, so I am banking on having deep, fascinating characters, but I don’t want this to be overly intellectual. I want the average Joe in the street to appreciate what is going on. That makes the play more marketable and will attract a broader audience.

Quinn, by the way, is Quinn Gallagher, who is the protagonist in two of my short stories: “The Scent” and “The Slightest of Indiscretions”. I would post a link to “The Slightest…” but the website is down right now. You can find it along with several of my other stories on https://fictionontheweb.co.uk. Both of these are included in my short collection of relationship-based stories in The Scent and Other Stories.

Update April 13, 2022: Incommunicado

I am close to finishing the first draft of Incommunicado. The writing has gone well over the last few days. Hopefully, I will have it done by the end of this week…

I am close to finishing the first draft of Incommunicado. The writing has gone well over the last few days. Hopefully, I will have it done by the end of this week.

I want the play to be around ninety minutes, as this seems to be the average length for a modern, full-length play. To lengthen it, I took some notes in which the protagonist, Quinn, is speaking and molded them into a monologue. Originally, I think I had intended them to be the basis for dialogue between Quinn and the other characters, but I am not certain. They might have been intended to be used as short monologues to be placed at various points. It has been a while since I wrote them.

In any case, last night I was working on a scene in the dead center of the play, in which I wanted to show what was going through Quinn’s mind. I decided the center of the play would be the appropriate place for one long monologue. Now, I will go back and keep paring the monologue down to about five or so minutes in length and keep it relatively fast moving so the audience’s attention doesn’t wane. I will also give Quinn a few things to do that will have some symbolic meaning and will keep the motion/action going on the stage. It’s important for the audience to know what is going on in Quinn’s mind at this point, as I have already revealed what is going on in the head of the other main character, Cassie. Knowing these two things will be important for impact during the final scene between Quinn and Cassie.

As regards the draft poster used as a graphic below, there are only three characters in the play: Quinn, Cassie, and Ruth, a friend of Cassie’s. The poster below shows Quinn and Cassie (theoretically–the photo is from Pixabay and is in the public domain; I have no idea who the models are). I think I will develop an alternate poster that shows Ruth as well. The relationship between Quinn and Cassie is the focus of the play, but Ruth plays an important role as she helps provide background to the story and provides a different perspective.

The play is a complete departure from my original concept, which was to have only one character, Quinn, who would be in a room in a bed-and-breakfast struggling with whether to take up drinking again after having given it up for a year. That inner struggle within Quinn is still present, but is only a part of his background and is no longer the focus of the play.

That’s all for now. Hasta luego.

Hypothetical poster used as graphic for posts

Poster for Incommunicado

As you know, over the last few days I have been working on a play titled “Incommunicado” that I haven’t worked on in over a year. Yesterday, I was toying with an idea for a possible poster, should the play ever be produced. My draft is above. Let me know what you think. Does this poster tell you enough about the play that it would make you want to see it?

I am finding that toying with possible book covers for my works helps keep the writing fun and gives me a moment to contemplate the essence of the work.

I found that one unexpected benefit of drafting this poster is that it made me think about what exactly would be a good tagline for the play. To do that, I have to boil the play down to its essence, which I had not contemplated previously. So now, I have a core idea to which I can adhere to maintain the play’s focus and unity.

Let me know what you think.

Hasta luego.

Update: April 11, 2022 Working on Incommunicado

Just a quick note. Today, I have been working on a play I started a couple of years ago and put away when it started getting complex and I started to run out of ideas. Yesterday, I thought I needed a break from working on Lycanthrope and also that I need to publish something. I haven’t published anything of my own in a while. So, I recalled a few unfinished works and I remembered this one (I call Incommunicado) being close to being finished. So, I started working on it and the ideas started to come. I won’t say much about it other than it is a sort of dark romance/drama set in the present-day Gila Mountains of New Mexico. I finally have it sketched out from beginning to end. So now, I have to cut out some dialogue and mold it into shape.

The one thing that confounded me when I last worked on this was that I couldn’t come up with a good ending. The one I had for it was too similar to the ending of another play that I am working on (called Centaurs), but I couldn’t come up with anything else.

I finally realized that one major problem I had was that their characters were too similar. Now, I have found a way to vary them and have the entire play basic conflict arise out of their inner natures. Now things are flowing. Hopefully, I will finish this soon and can start submitting it.

That’s all for now.

Hasta luego.