Games & Gunshots
By Vincent Truman On September 2nd, 2010
In 2008, I wrote and produced a play entitled “The Tearful Assassin”, which was, at worst, a passable episode of “Law and Order”, according to one critic, and, at best, a gripping thriller, according to another. Either way, it was my first piece in which everyone gets to fail miserably. The parents of a kidnapped girl blot out the pain of their missing child by making her into the subject of a how-to-grieve tome. The police on the case are pulled off the case by said parents, who do not wish their new vocation interrupted. The kidnapper dies a gruesome death. Even the kidnapped girl, who escapes and makes it home, finds her transformation into a career for her parents more foreign than the basement in which she had been confined that she steals a few credit cards to fund the first leg of her new life in some undiscovered country (that’s Shakespearean code for “the future”, of course).
In what seems to me a mysterious burst, I have returned to this story to profile what this undiscovered country looks like to at least three of the characters in the first play. The set-up, which has been in my head since 2009, has been consistent: the kidnapped girl, Angela, uses her mother’s credit cards until they are suspended and lands in a small hick town, where she assumes a new name and identity. One of the police officers, John Fowler, has been suspended himself, having fought to stay on the kidnapped girl’s (now closed) case. Angela’s mother, noting the use of her credit cards for some time before cutting them off, is now wracked with guilt about misdirecting her own energies to build a career on her daughter’s back. The link: Angela’s guilt-ridden mother now hires the struggling John Fowler to track down the hiding Angela.
In David Mamet’s “Bambi v. Godzilla”, the author chides potential screenwriters and playwrights to eschew the exposition and get right into the action. Although I consider myself reasonably adept at inserting a good “hook” in the first few minutes of any of my plays, I have always left room for characters to explain who they are and, obliquely, what they want, for the audience’s benefit. For “The Tearful Assassin II” (which it will never be called), I chose for my opening scene, my opening moment, a backroom in a bar. John Fowler has his gun on Angela, who has her own gun trained on her husband, whom she holds in a headlock. The husband, we learn quickly, is unaware of Angela’s past – in fact, he keeps begging “Sandy” to lower her gun, when he’s not wondering aloud where she got one in the first place.
I find this a delicious concept, with each character working off at least a pair of conflicting emotions, thus empowering them with the ability to double-cross anyone at anytime, potentially making the miserable situation far, far worse. As exciting as I find the multi-layered concept, I am moderately troubled that I really have no clue on what each character really wants, nor where the play could possibly go. In freehand, I have written about 20 pages, which would translate as about 40 pages of script, and the tension and one-upmanship is thrilling to write – in fact, the natural flow of games and gunshots are coming in real time, forcing me to employ so many abbreviations that no one could probably read any of it. I am curious what will become of it.
In other playwrighting news, I have reached out to one of my favorite theaters to mount “The Observatory” in December 2010 (as my application for the Museum of Science and Industry was, sadly, rejected). If “The Observatory” gets a green light, this will be the first time in a decade I will go into a project without close creative colleagues standing with me (as my closest, Kyle and Melissa, are California-bound and my most consistent partner since 2002, Robert, is busy being happy not doing theater).


When not practicing my deepest and most sincere humility, I am wont to occasionally troll through the internet in search of ‘Vincent Truman.’