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"Strange Other People" (Working title) by Gary Henderson is copyright, and is made available to you under the terms of a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
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Downloading the script indicates that you accept the terms of this licence.
To enquire about permissions beyond the scope of this licence please contact agency@playmarket.org.nz.
"Strange Other People" (working title) was written in five days at a playwrights' retreat organised by Playmarket in July 2008.
Every two years Playmarket holds the Aotearoa Playwrights' Conference, and every one is different. The 2008 APC took the form of a catered retreat for just nine writers who could spend the week doing whatever they liked. The organisers hoped that writing would be high on the agenda.
I wanted to try a new way of writing. I tend to write slowly, constantly going back over what I've done and refining it. I wanted to try writing quickly, with no plan other than to produce quantity, never going back to change anything, and always honouring whatever I'd written. I came up with a few ideas before the retreat, which I discarded because I wanted to begin with no story in mind, no plan - just whatever came to me when I started. I aimed to produce twenty pages a day. In the end I averaged seventeen, so that's not too bad.
On the first morning I sat down to work at 8am. There was a little vase of flowers on the table I was working at, so the play begins, "There is a bunch of flowers on the table." A few pages in, the central character says "I've got a migraine." That's because I had one - a very mild one, no pain, but I suffered the same visual disturbance the character in the play describes. I saved the script with the filename "rainscript" because it was raining the first time I saved it. And so on ...
The result is pretty strange. Bizarre. Grotesque. I think I've worked out what it's about, and where I might take it in a second draft. If you download the script, I'd be interested in any reaction you might have to it. (I've already had "Is this boy sick?" to something I wrote some years ago, so don't worry about offending me!) Send your thoughts to the e-mail address on the Rocketman Home Page. Here's the script.
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