Maybe not committing to being wheelchair bound a la My Left Foot Daniel Day-Lewis, but definitely going there in the mind.
By Kimberly Lew (Playwright/Blogger)
My latest play revolves around a protagonist in college, and the more I’ve been trying to suss out character, the more I’ve been finding myself reliving my days at NYU. Suddenly I’m slipping back into my college-y ways, staying up late manically working to finish a project, eating ramen and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and drinking more coffee than water. Okay, okay, so maybe that’s just how I normally operate. But while college might not be that far behind me, there are a lot of feelings that memories of dorm rooms and English lectures conjure up. Reading my journal, remembering deep conversations at midnight over cheap wine and crazed anxieties about the future, I find myself transported back to a self-contained world where everything was a learning opportunity and the future felt so far away.
It’s a bit scary, I must admit, to get so close to my characters. And especially considering that this one suffers from insomnia and has a bit of a mental breakdown, going on this bender, even if just in my imagination, is not necessarily something I’m looking forward to. It can consume you if you let it get too close, which can be a beautiful thing when the cogs really align and the play sets into motion all on its own. But sometimes everything feels too intimate, too immediate, and it becomes hard to separate fiction from reality.
This is not to say that I am assuming my characters full-time. But I have found that sometimes to properly inhabit them, I have to take on their obsessions. Reading tabloids and gossip blogs and talking celebrity news became a part of my daily routine as I worked on my latest play, Other People’s Children, about a movie star and his wife. I observed enough pick-up artist activity and read enough on the subject (even lurked on some very sketchy forums) for my ten-minute, Playing the Game. Life even imitated art when I wrote a scene for my web series, Shelf Life, and my sister and I had an interaction that practically mirrored what I had written a few months earlier. It’s not enough to research a character-- to have any authenticity, you have to be able to empathize with them, and I’ve found that sometimes you just have to live a part of them to get there.
So, I am wading in college waters for a little while. And while this may entail some restless nights, pondering what I want to be when I grow up, and possibly making some bad decisions, I take comfort knowing that it’s all in the name of playwriting. Though... if you catch me talking to myself about T.S. Eliot at 3 am... I might be in a little too deep.
KIMBERLY LEW is a playwright with two published one-act plays for high schools, as well as full-length Searching for Candi (co-written with Gabriella Miyares), which had its first production at Mt. Holyoke college in April 2011. She is currently working on her new play, Other People's Children, about an aspiring actress hired as a nanny for a movie star and his wife. She also created/manages the Emerging Musical Theatre blog. www.kimberlylew.com
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