Game 1: The Card Game

I've now formalized the growing deck of idea cards with an easy to follow set of guidelines:

• At a lull, select a card.
  
• Group reads card aloud and has one minute to decide if we can work with it.
  
• If not, card goes back to the deck & we select another card.
  
• Group spend ten minutes working with the card.
  
• We decide if it should go back into the deck.
  
• Topics are not to be suggested at meetings but anyone from the group can email Bob with card topics
  

Milestone 1

Just got back from a vacation on Virginia Beach; a fertile but non-productive period, where I did a lot of planning for the impending start of the Genesis process. Have now arrived at a process point where I think I can actually be of use to the actors as we work.

The major effort I am making is to be a source of support, process and information but not an arbiter or judge of the material. As in a perfect brainstorming or improvisational process, I'm seeking a meritocracy of ideas. So my own ideas must take a backseat to those the group as whole can generate. And that's going to be one of the first things I shall announce once Matt turns the group over to me for the startup phase of our work together.

On the other hand, I have done a large amount of research for this play, and want that research to be of benefit to the play development process. The cards mentioned in the previous entry are a part of this. A guided improv process will be a second tool for generating scenes. A physically oriented brainstorming process will support the generation of themes. All in all, I'm really looking forward to this!

Talked to Matt Bray, AD of Praxis... he's amped about this blog; so it's all set... I'll report on the output of the process, sometimes in a rather raw state, other times more associatively.

I plan to bring in a set of big index cards to all the meetings, possibly starting with the first if the time is right; each card has no more than 25 or so words about the ideas that have come out of the research. A picture already on the background of each card represents Shared Idea. If things ever get static and need livening up, I'll pull out a card at random and if I've done a decent job on the first set, it should do some good. If there's a flop, we have to agree to put it BACK into the pile to be drawn later. So we only dispose of an idea card once we are done.

I plan to open the process of generating these cards to the whole group as soon as possible. People can email me ideas and I will put them on cards, the same as the first ones I generated, and we will draw them at random when we need.

Maybe also take a quick vote (we have to get good at quick votes) to determine when a card should be considered completed. But I think perhaps these cards will never be completed; if we get a card again, it's time to see what that card has to say to us again. If that idea doesn't pan out, we'll abandon it.

The cards:

• If someone were to say “MacBeth,” what would be kept from that, and what taken out?
• Do Banquo & Lady MacBeth represent the two sides of evil’s intimacy?
• True or False: A story published Sept 8, 2001 (NY Times website) with a CIA warning to overseas US interests did not mention the domestic US. The story is removed from the Times website on 9/12.
• True or false: The famous flag raising on Iwo Jima photo was staged.
• True or False: Video cameras watch you shop, drive, enter or leave an office building, train or bus station, or airport.
• Every word you say over any electronically transmissible medium is recorded & analyzed for key words like: terrorist. bomb. shoot. protest. congress. president.
• What if SS/Stasi/KGB/MI6/OSS/CIA operatives were really the Oracle of Delphi?
• A CIA operative’s life is 99% banal routine
• The Elizabethan worldview… through new eyes, but still influenced by the Middle Ages' spiritual aspiration and physical corruption.
• The Body Politick – the human body as the state and vice versa
• Ann Coulter/Camille Paglia; the sexually and politically active woman, liberal or - even more interesting - conservative.
• Eventually there will be an incident that will compel us to vote the Constitution out.
• The gradual erosion of meaning destroys our ability to care, and thus to oppose.
• Elements of what Greil Marcus calls “The Old, Weird America”
• Aerial slides of military sites, taken from satellite photos.
• The Quality in Education Act disembowels public school budgets. The Clean Air Act allows increased air pollution. The Patriot Act removes our freedom. Name two other possible Acts.