is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.
Wednesday
Feb 08, 2006
Re:[3] Round Four: Rise and Vote, gentlemen and scoundrels posted by Martin
I wanted to post a few more notes about this short, but interesting, round. The way I see it, we had two very strong choices, and in the end we chose one over the other because it was much less daunting. We both agreed, I think, that Chimerica would have been dirt cool, but would have taken a level of cultural knowledge and sophistication that we either lack, or were daunted by the research.
I was thinking about that tonight, as I went to see a production of August Wilson’s Radio Golf. Wilson was a Seattle writer who wrote a 10 play cycle, each one about the African American experience during a decade of the 20th century. Radio Golf—the play set in the ’90s— deals with a good man, trying to do the right thing in the face of moral odds. He’s not caught by his own dirty pool, or caught trying to pull a fast one, but when circumstances he can’t control make lemons, he turns on the juice press. Well, at least until somebody tries to cut the electricity.
This, of course, an amazing play (although tonight’s performance was just off a notch—a great cast doing a great play on an okay night), that serendipitously speaks to exactly what we were facing. That is, writing racial identity authentically. August Wilson was a black man writing about black issues, but writing about histories he himself didn’t live. He didn’t live the black experience of the 1920s, but he wrote about them (ostensibly—I’m a bit shy to say that this is the first of his works I’ve seen) from a cultural understanding. Is it less authentic if he wrote about white characters? Is it less authentic if Shockah and I wrote about black characters?
Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay
