Evelyn Long will be directing my upcoming fall production of ANIMAL which will be staged at the Alumnae Theatre in Toronto, November 21-25 as part of their Fireworks Festival.  ANIMAL has been years in the making with countless drafts over that time (and lots of breaks in-between each new draft).  This past summer, I completed yet another draft and in order to get a sense of what I felt about this current version of ANIMAL, I needed to hear it read aloud yet again.  So I gathered a group of readers, along with Evelyn, our Stage Manager, Victoria Stark  and current dramaturge Joan Burrows (who has helped shepherd me through this latest re-write) and we sat and listened to this new draft.

A big thank you to the readers below, who once again,  like all the readers before them, brought this play alive and helped crystallize for me where I needed to take the next edit.

Liz Best, Me, Robert Ouellette, Chris Irving, Breanna Dillon, Kieran Kennedy

When I’m writing, I’m constantly reading aloud my own dialogue, but when others read your dialogue, you hear the words in a fresh way – sometimes better, sometimes not.  It clarifies what works and what doesn’t.  Anytime I hear a new draft, no matter how many times I’ve heard it before, the story and characters always feel different to me.  In many ways, it’s like hearing it for the first time again.  And what did I hear this time around?

There was some discussion afterwards about the strength and weaknesses of the script.  But the biggest thing I got from this current reading was that it just felt, overall, too fatty, too long.  There was too much dialogue and/or exposition in the story that needed to be pared down.  Just sitting there listening, I was growing more anxious and I felt my sharp pencil coming out and cutting line after line, moving the scenes along.  And so, that’s exactly what I did.  I took my pencil and I started slashing the script apart and by the end, I removed 7 pages with reams of dialogue shaved on every page.  And I think there may be another page to go.  I want to be clear – this is NOT re-writing, it’s editing.  Big difference.  I did not change the structure, cut any characters or scenes of what I recently re-wrote.

The reading was a great help to me, because it made me feel scenes were too long and in many cases, what could be said in one sentence was said in three.  I couldn’t wait to cut it all down.

Auditions for ANIMAL are coming up the first week of September.  You can read all about the auditions HERE.  And after we are cast, I’ll be passing this baby onto Evelyn for her to take ANIMAL from the page to the stage.   But for right now, I have a little more editing to do.