There’s nothing to beware really, that’s just the title.  I realized I had sat here for a full minute trying to come up with the title for a silly blog post.  I’ve been known to take even longer to come up with subject lines for emails.  And titles to plays or other creative writings?  Shit, that involves a walk through the desert to induce visions of flying lizards and gun-toting midget kings and whatever else before I can even begin to think about the title. 

ANYWAY.  My last post was getting a bit stale, especially since it was about I Am Alpha, which is now closed, so here’s a fresh one.  I saw The Jinn this weekend and most truly enjoyed it very much.  I was actually a bit surprised that I liked it as much as I did since I knew going in that it sorta kinda involved the old story about genies coming out of lamps who grant wishes and all that.  And while I suspected at the outset that Kirk Lynn would certainly put a new spin on it, it seems sometimes that even that device, the whole take an old myth/tale/fable/story and rewrite the rules around it to make it new and fresh, even that seems to be getting a bit overdone…but that’s probably just me.  But thankfully, this play did not have a tired or used-up feel about it at all.  It felt very much alive and sparkling and energetic the whole way through.  Yes, it involved a genie (who shortened his title to jinn) and yes this genie lived in a lamp (which somehow smoked on command), and yes he granted wishes to all who held him.  But, as with any story where human beings are granted their every base desire on command, the characters had to confront the fact that they didn’t really understand what it was that they really wanted, and that what they thought they wanted wasn’t really what they needed to be fulfilled and have a life worth living. 

I can honestly say that this sentiment spoke to me on a level that not much else has as of late.  I’m hardly an old man yet, nor do I feel that I have attained some level of wisdom that is beyond my years or anything, but I am standing at a new point in my life where it feels that new changes and realizations are taking place.  Call it a sort of emotional or spiritual taking-stock of sorts, but whatever it is, it definitely involves reviewing what it is that I really want out of life.  And it’s a good thing, a healthy thing.  I think I’m pretty familiar with what it is that I DON’T want.  I think I’m like a lot of people in this day and age in that I am more familiar with what I wish to reject rather than that which I wish to embrace.  But you can’t define yourself solely by that which you reject, by what you hate.  Life is not just about destruction.  It’s about building too.  You can tear down and rip away and expose all you want, then what are you going to build in its place?  I guess this is at the core of the questions I’m asking myself these days.  My last play provides a pretty good illustration of this.  Now let me be clear: I am extremely proud of I Am Alpha.  I put a lot of work and a lot of myself into it, I felt that I grew as a writer, and I love what came out of it.  But watching it night after night, I came to realize that what I had given voice to in that play was the side of me that sneers and rolls its eyes and makes smart-ass observations about all the things that I consider to be stupid and petty and wrong.  In other words, that which I reject.  Now this is not to say that I think I did something wrong here or that I am in any way, I don’t know, ashamed of it.  Not at all.  ‘Cuz that would be stupid.  Other people may have gotten something else out of it entirely, and that’s cool, hell that’s GREAT.  But this is my POV on it.  The point is that I know what I don’t like and what I don’t need and what I don’t want.  And I think I can express those things and that I have expressed them.  Most of my writing, including I Am Alpha, has some kind of tragic ending because doing otherwise has always felt somehow dishonest or forced.  I’m typically drawn towards writing around darker subject matter with barely a nod towards that which I feel is good and right and beautiful.  And in the future, I will probably still be drawn towards the dark side of things, but at the same time, I think I’ve sort of outgrown the whole “angry young man/everything is shit” way of seeing the world and expressing myself.  Part of me growing up is me growing as a writer.  I don’t know when I’ll write another play or what it’s going to be about, but I do know that next time out, whatever it is, I want to really create something beautiful.  Goddammit, would you look at how long this fucking post is already?  This started off as a mini-review of The Jinn (go see it, by the way) and ended up being a review of what’s going on in my head these days.  And I keep rambling because I’m trying to make myself clear and I can just imagine what any number of people might be thinking I mean by all this and dammit, no, you’re getting the wrong idea, no I didn’t mean that at all, I meant to say, okay wait, let me start over…no wait.  Just kidding.  No starting over.  I’m just gonna leave it as is. 

Whew.