Five shows enter... three shows leave. So goes the creed of "Serial Killers" at Sacred Fools, in which five original short serials are performed every Saturday night. At the end of the show, the audience votes on which three they'd like to return the next week and which two they want to kill.
It's a pretty intense machine, and I was lucky enough to run for three episodes this past month with my dysfunctional family drama "Mom's Dead." I went into the process being pretty certain that we'd be a "one and done" piece. Writers of SK tend to stay on the flashier comedic side to ensure maximum votes, and my piece was about as dark as it gets, featuring a dysfunctional, selfish family who murdered its own mother. Characters screamed at each other and cried pitifully into their liquor. Even the jokes had a warped cruelty to them.
So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I got voted back not once, but twice! That first night of victory was filled with very flattering compliments, cheap drinks, and the inevitable dance party at 2am.
But then Sunday morning came and I had myself a problem. Time to write Episode Two! People the night before had been asking me what would happen next, and I'd somewhat smugly shrugged and said "I have no idea." It had been a funny joke the night before, but now I was staring at a blank Final Draft document and I still had no idea!
See, I'd had a "one and done" go up the year before in which I'd written out Episode Two ahead of time, and even had a general outline of where I wanted the story to go five or six glorious episodes down the road. So you can imagine how stupid I felt when it was viciously butchered on the first night. I decided to throw every good idea I had into the first round. Well... that worked. Now what?
The terror was invigorating though. I can't tell you how much fun it was walking up and down Vanowen street with all of Leo, Alice, John, and Arthur's problems rattling through my head. For me at least, this edge of my seat approach wound up being pretty effective. Everybody seems to have a different approach to writing these things.
But the writing phase was only part of the frenzy. I'd decided to direct as well, so it was off to the theater with me at 10 in the morning every Saturday to try to get all of my light/sound cues ready to go in thirty minutes! I built my first sound cue for this show. Because I guess I enjoy creating problems for myself, I also had to roll a giant hospital gurney to the theater for my third episode.
Then comes thirty minutes of stage time with the cast. (Pros, each and every one of them.) Then the run-through of the whole show, where you pretend like you aren't secretly sizing up the other four pieces to see if you have a shot at surviving another week. Then it's showtime, baby!
I think it's a testament to Sacred Fools's audience that something as dreary as "Mom's Dead" could flourish and develop there. It's nerve-wracking to do drama for me. You don't get laughs to let you know what parts people are enjoying. I once directed a production of Oleanna and sat in agony for an hour and a half on opening night, confusing the audience's silence with boredom. They wound up giving it a standing ovation. That's kind of what getting voted back felt like. "Wait, you LIKED it? Well... what parts did you like?!"
And even though I wound up getting beaten out by an incredibly fun piece featuring a crazy clown hellbent on destroying vegans, (seriously) what an awesome ride it was! Can't wait to do it again! And who knows? Maybe those awful drunks will be back for the playoffs this summer.
