Alice and Left-Overs

Lacking anything new to post, here are two one-act plays I wrote for the LCTI play writing contest. The rules state that all plays submitted "should center on a common theme, idea or concept." The theme for the first one was "reflections". The second one was "food".

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (or "The Heisenberg Principle and How it Applies to You") was written at 3:30am in a haze of allergy-induced fever and allergy medicine-induced perplexity. I didn't realize until the second draft that what I'd written was an indictment of organized religion.

I'd been reading a lot of Mamet around this time, as should be obvious from the dialog - which is probably a bit try-hard, I don't mind admitting. My friend Robin Reck was going to make a short film based on this, but I don't know what ever happened to that...

Left-Overs, was written after my first year of marriage. A bit absurdist, this one. Clearly influenced by David Ives. It's kind of a meditation on realizing you need to let go of whatever personal bullshit you brought into the relationship, and just move on from there. File that under "Water is Wet, Sky is Blue and Other Not-So-Shocking Revelations".

Both plays were performed on the LCT stage. I got to direct myself, my uncle Fred and my brother Mike in Alice, but I was living in Australia when Left-Overs was staged, so my friend Beth Lapp took the reigns on that one, directing my friends Jenny Loy and Jonathan Bjorkstedt.

I love writing shorts like these. You couldn't base a full-length play on either of these ideas, but they're too good (in my own ever-so-humble opinion) to just let go altogether.