Annual Navel Gaze 2019

by Phil RickabyEnd of Year blather, Introvert, Keystone Theatre, Life, The Commandment, words, work, WritingPosted on No Comments

As I say every year, I don’t do New Years resolutions. Instead, I take a look back at the past year and take stock of the things that happened, the things I accomplished, and then look a head to the new year and see what I want to accomplish. Its a great way to take stock of the year that was, and to both put what i want for the new year into the universe, as well as create accountability by putting these goals out for public viewing.

This year’s accomplishments:

  • I was finally able to perform The Commandment at home, at the Toronto Fringe. It was a real joy to be able to share this play with the home audience. We won North (519) Best of Fringe, and performed the play three more times in Orangeville.
  • My theatre podcast Stageworthy crossed the 200 episode mark, and turns four years old in the new year!
  • The podcast for introvert’s (The Introvert’s Guide To…) that I co-host with Jess McAuley continues to grow, and crossed the 15,000 listens mark this month.
  • I got a bunch of writing done.
  • I got a tattoo!
  • I did a little travelling. The highlight was a trip to Quebec City, though I would have enjoyed that more without the fractured rib I got two days before!
  • I started a monthly pub night for creative people. This came from my noticing that I am more creative when I surround myself with creative people. So I launched a very informal monthly night of getting together and talking about whatever comes up. And while the numbers of people have fluctuated, the conversation has always been good!

Last year, I set myself some challenges like “be nicer to myself” and to lean into my introverted “stay home all the time” nature. I had limited success with those. I don’t think I was as good to myself as I could be, I think in the later months of the year, I made some strides. I did not do very well at getting out and not isolating. For example: after the Toronto Fringe, I spent almost two weeks at home not talking to anyone.

So, for the year ahead:

  • My 50th birthday is coming up in April. I want to do something to mark and celebrate it. So my plan is to go to London, England (I’ve never been and always wanted to go).
  • I want to continue to find performance opportunities for The Commandment.
  • Last year, I said that I was going to finish my Christmas play and perform it this year, which you may have noticed I did not do. I’m still working on the play, and it continues to evolve. But I am getting there. And while I’m impatient to be done, I have to remind myself that The Commandment took me a long time to write too.
  • Keep growing Stageworthy and The Introvert’s Guide To…
  • Keep writing, and do it more. While I have written relatively consistently, I haven’t done as much of it as I want. I’m a pretty good procrastinator, so I often find things to do that aren’t writing. I want to get better at not doing that.
  • I have had an idea for a new play for Keystone Theatre, and its high time I pitch that idea to the gang (and also, it would be great to get the band back together).
  • I have also had an idea for a musical for a while, so it’s time I started sketching that out. I don’t write music, but I want to have the idea straight when I find a composer/collaborator.
  • Be more social. Get out to some events now and then, even though I am more comfortable staying home. And not to talk myself out of going (like I often do).
  • I said this last year, but I’ll say it again: do more things with friends. Yes, being a homebody is nice, but you have to go out sometimes. It’s better to connect with people in person than digital.
  • Take more photographs.
  • Post on this blog more. I realized as I was writing this that the 2018 Navel Gaze is the last time I posted.

How was this year for you? What are you most proud of? What are you looking forward to next year?

Writing my new solo play: the mall Santa

by Phil Rickabywords, WritingPosted on One Comment

You can check out the first part of series on writing my new play here.

I’ve known from pretty early on that there was going to be a mall Santa in this play. It seemed like such a perfect way to quickly get to what the story is about. But I didn’t want to just write what I thought being a mall Santa would be like, so I did some research.

There are some articles you can find on being a mall Santa online. For example, The Ultimate Guide to Working as a Professional Santa Claus, How Do You Become Santa Claus, and We Talked to a Former Mall Santa About What It Takes to Be a Mall Santa; all three are really good articles.

But those articles, as good as they were, didn’t offer quite enough information. So, I found a documentary called “I am Santa Claus“, which features WWE wrestler, Mick Foley, who wants to learn to be a Santa. In addition to Mick, there are a bunch of other Santa’s that are profiled. Some of them are just delightful, and a couple are kind of unpleasant, but it definintely gives a sense of what the Santa gig requires.

So, given that this play involves Yule monsters like Krampus, Perchta, Grýla, and Belsnickel. So what does a mall Santa have to do with that? Consider that all of the Yule monsters (with the exception of maybe Grýla and the Yule cat) have been enslaved by Saint Nicholas and made lesser. So here’s a mall Santa, embodying the person of Saint Nicholas, and what if he accidentally sets them free of their servitude? What then? What would he do? And what could make him go so far? What would make him do something so terrible?

Well, it would take an extremely terrible child….

Writing my as yet untitled November solo play

by Phil Rickabywords, WritingPosted on 3 Comments

I had an idea. And the idea was really just that: the barest hint of an idea. But it was enough to start something, to start the wheels spinning in my head. I’ve talked about this before, about writing the poem that inspired me to dig deeper and research more. And I’ve talked about the process, and filling a notebook and then seeing what I’ve got. Now I’d like to talk about putting it together. Because I’d filled a notebook, and I transcribed what I had and learned about the themes I was looking at. I’d done some research and learned more about the Yule monsters and the companions of Saint Nicholas. I learned about more than just Krampus, but of Perchta with her knife and her thread, about Pere Froutard and Belsnickel, and about the Yule Lads, Gryla and the Yule Cat. And more.

So how to put all that into a play? Could that become a play? These were ideas, and they certainly interested me, but were they enough to make a play with? I wasn’t sure. I still needed a starting place. And I found it in what became my thesis, and this idea formed the backbone of everything else I wrote. The idea, went like this:

Christmas is a lie. The whole peace and joy, goodwill to men thing; Christmas Joy, Santa Claus, elves; these are things added to sanitize the season, a salve to soothe the fear, to cover the danger. But it is still there. You can hear it in the howl of the wind, the crunch of the snow, the bay of the wolf. And you can feel it in your heart. You know its there. We all do. Deep down, we feel it. That’s why we cling so desperately to the idea of Christmas joy, Santa, elves, and goodwill to men. Because without those, we’d have to give in to fear. Because the truth is, the season itself…it wants to eat us alive.

 Is that going to be how the play starts? I don’t know yet. I know its an important part, but whether I actually need to have those words in the script is still up in the air.

What else have I learned about the play from transcribing what I put in that notebook? Well, for one thing, I know there’s a mall Santa.

More on that next time.

So, how did you write your solo play?

by Phil RickabyWritingPosted on No Comments


So how did I write my solo play?

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me that very question. I had mentioned that I was working on a new one, and she asked how I do it. Now, there are lots of people who will tell you how to turn events from your own live into a one person play, and if that’s something you want to do, then I highly encourage you to look at them. But that’s not what I did with the Commandment, and that’s not what I’m doing with the new piece. I write characters and stories, so turning my life into a solo play wasn’t something I wanted to do.

I’m not an expert (I have only written one and a third of solo play so far), and I can only tell you about what has worked for me. And I’m going to be honest this method isn’t fast. It took me eight years to write the Commandment, and I have until September of this year to finish the new one. There’s a big difference between these two time frames too: for The Commandment, I spent 7 of those years with absolutely no deadline, which meant that there was nothing driving me to finish it. So I didn’t, until I had a deadline. Deadlines are a powerful motivator.

But to begin: I had an idea for the Commandment: An atheist finds out that he’s been chosen by God to deliver His new commandment. That was the beginning, and a constant from the start. The first line I wrote, also remained unchanged: “The first time God spoke to me, I was on the toilet.” Of course, I didn’t know at the time that those things would remain the same, but that’s how it turned out.

I had a concept, and a first line. And the next thing I did, was I got a notebook, and I started writing around my idea. I say “around my idea” because that’s more accurate than saying I wrote about it. Because I didn’t write in any linear fashion. I would think about the idea, and write a bit. As I wrote I learned a bit more about the my character and who he was, as well as what happened to him in the world. I also wrote different little stories on the topic. Sometimes I wrote as my character, Thomas, and sometimes, I wrote from another point of view.

And when I finished the note book I transcribed everything I wrote. I learn a lot about the themes of what I wrote when I transcribe. And I get my first inklings of what might be working and what might not. Stuff just didn’t work, I put aside. Once I’ve transcribed I started arranging the sections that made the cut into some semblance of a product that might be performed. And then…I get a new notebook. And I fill that too. Rinse. Repeat. And Repeat.

Once I got into Hamilton Fringe with the thing, I knew that if I was ever going to get it into performance shape, I needed some people to hear it. So I got some trusted people together and read it to them and got their feedback. Which I used to keep working and refining: writing new bits, making changes to existing ones. Once I brought my director Richard Beaune into the picture. Things got a lot more focused, and we refined and then refined some more.

And eventually the play was ready.

I find myself repeating this process with the piece I’m working on for performance in the fall. I have filled a notebook, I transcribed, I arranged, and now I have a new notebook.

But there’s a different kind of urgency this time. When I started The Commandment, I had no deadline. I could write as long as I needed to. This time, I booked some performance time at The Red Sandcastle for the end of November of this year, so there’s a finite period of time. There’s more pressure to write and to make it into something sooner. But now that I’m looking at it, even with a more compressed time, the method is essentially the same.

I booked the space before I had a play – bad idea or best idea?

by Phil RickabyTheatre, WritingPosted on 2 Comments

I had an idea for a new play, a new solo piece (because apparently, I caught “the bug” with The Commandment), and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t spend the next eight years writing it, like I did with the last solo piece, and so I knew that I needed to light a fire under my ass. Because I know that I need that. If I don’t have it, it will be a thing I want to write, but that I don’t really have to write, which means that I won’t.

But I’m getting off topic. I had an idea. First I wrote a poem about a Christmas monster, and then I started to think about all the other Christmas monsters, the ones who were once gods and the ones who were always just monstrous, and what they mean to the holiday we cut and pasted over Yule and Saturnalia. And so, I started to read about them and their origins. I started with this book, and then found more. And so I started to write. I spent some of the time over my Christmas break writing. And then I booked a space. I called up Rosemary at the Red Sandcastle Theatre, and rented the space for the end of November 2018.

And that lit a fire, let me tell you. Every time I look at a calendar, that adds some fuel to the fire. Because it sounds like a long way off, but it comes up quicker than I’d like.

So I’m writing, with a deadline, to make a thing to perform in November. And I don’t know what its going to be yet. And that’s exhilarating and frightening.