For those who haven't been following my intermittent blog, my current play project Live in 3, 2, 1... is set in 1939, when a team of famous (but comically dysfunctional) movie stars are brought to RCA's 30 Rockefeller Building in New York City to present the first-ever television broadcast of a dramatic episode (specifically an installment in the ongoing Western serial starring rugged cowboy hero Chance Adams.  And as you might imagine in a farce, everything goes wrong.

The fun of this production is that the audience sees everything the camera sees. In the second act of the play, we the audience watch the live broadcast of the episode from inside the studio, observing the crew filming the actors' performance. Though the onstage camera the TV crew uses will be "dolled up" to approximate the look of a 1939 television Iconoscope camera, inside it will house a modern electronic camera that is actually videoing the actors onstage in real time, and by using a rear projection screen, the audience will be able to watch everything the camera sees. Nothing during the broadcast will be pre-recorded; there is no safety net. And of course, everything goes wrong.

But in order to create something going hilariously off the rails, one must lay the track first. In other words, to write a sequence about one mishap after another plaguing the filming of the episode, I needed to know what the episode was supposed to look like if everything went right. Meaning, I had to write an entirely separate short script, Leave Everything to Chance, to serve as the material the cast and crew at RCA are supposedly working from. That's where the second laptop comes in, because writing that episode is not as simple as quickly hacking out a melodramatic Western screenplay and then getting back to the stage play. Not to get too "meta," but the episode's story, locations, prop needs, and even its dialogue exist to facilitate the highest possible gags-per-minute quotient in the play we will be watching. Therefore, the episode screenplay and the script of the play itself must be written simultaneously, each being allowed to modify the other for the greatest comic effect.

But wait, there's one more layer. Because you as an audience member are watching the filming of a live broadcast, you aren't only seeing the "on air" picture that's being projected on the screen, you're also seeing all the mayhem that's happening "behind the scenes" just outside the camera's frame. Much of this action is nonverbal, with a lot of physical comedy as the cast and crew manipulate set pieces and props, try to communicate without their voices being picked up by the microphone, miss their entrances, improvise lines, and even fight (sometimes physically) with each other, all the while continuing to film the episode. In order to write that "play outside a play" and to know who was available for each comic bit outside the camera's eye, I needed to know where all 9 cast and crew members were and what they are doing during each moment. Basically, I also needed to block the show; that is, to see the show through the director's eye and plan out the traffic patterns for all the people and set pieces on stage. That's where the paper markers next to the laptop become necessary.

The good news is, things are going well. The Leave Everything to Chance episode and the centerpiece broadcast sequence now fully exist in their first-draft form. Things will definitely grow and change in the coming months, but the "thing" has a shape, and now I can write the rest of the play to set everything up and support the broadcast sequence. Live in 3, 2, 1... is certainly the most complex (and dare I say, ambitious) play I've ever written. It's got so many moving parts (including fully recorded and edited movie sequence that will begin each act), and it will demand a lot from the real actors and tech people that sign on for this crazy ride...but when we pull this off, it will be amazing to watch!

Don't touch that dial.