Pruning the Play (Cory)

It's September.

Five months ago, I turned in the first draft of Farms and Fables.

Yesterday, I completed the "final draft" - as final as it gets before design process and rehearsals start.

It's an old writers' adage that you have to "kill your darlings" and what people mean by that is that you have to be willing to cut stuff, even stuff you're desperately in love with, if it isn't a meaningful part of the project as a whole.

You could think of it another way, to the tune of growing: You can't focus just on the individual parts of a plant - you have to understand the plant as a whole. For example, keeping a tomato plant trimmed down to one primary life-giving vine can do a great deal to strengthen the plant as a whole and improve its fruit. The leaflets and the suckers, the secondary and tertiary branches splitting off that vine may look lovely and leafy, and like they'd bear bountiful fruit. But having multiple main stems stresses the plant, leading to smaller tomatoes, more foliage, and greater pest problems.





However you want to think of it, being willing - as an artist and a grower - to say "This should stay, but this should go" is incredibly important to the health of what you produce. For no other project have I killed as many of my darlings as I have during the writing of Farms and Fables and, ultimately, I am so glad that I did. The play is the better for it. I'm a better playwright for having learned to do it. But boy, was it sometimes hard.

Since there are so many passages that have been composted between Draft 1 and Draft 3, I thought I would share a few that were more difficult than others to let go of. These are snippets - some stage directions, some bits of dialogue - that, for a variety of different reasons, were scrapped. The play is healthier without them, but that doesn't mean I don't still regard them with wistful affection.

1. A monologue of Teddy's (the character who became Mitch)
TEDDY: It isn’t the same farm. I tried to love it like it was. This whole year. I tried. Half the house is gone, all Grandma’s quilts in the pantry, the old tools you always made me save. The old wood fence is gone. Where we used to write notes, leave them for Dad in that hole in the fencepost. Our tree burned. That thing was older than the USA I bet. The barn’s gone. It’s always been hard but I used to have these things here to remind me what I’m doing it for. That barn. Days when it seemed too hard and nothing was going to work out I used to be able to walk into the barn and remember: how you and me used to sleep out there sometimes, summer nights, itchy in the hay, and we’d wake up when dawn was on its way and the kittens started chasing swallows. Someone, Mom or Uncle Dan, would be coming in for milking, and I knew that Grandma had done the milking there when they were kids, and I knew the name of all the smells I smelled, and I knew what had to be planted or weeded or harvested that day, and now the barn’s gone, everything’s gone, and I don’t know what it is. The land. That used to be a farm.

2. Sidney's visit to Plentiful Valley Farm
SIDNEY in front of a sign: “Plentiful Valley Farm.” She wanders past fields choked with weeds. A few plants reach their tendrils out towards her from within the weed-prison, gasping for air and for water. She passes through a tractor graveyard strewn with sad metal corpses, mourned by one half-dead John Deere crying oily tears. A bored and bony farm animal wanders past her, more skeleton than beast. She comes to a house, knocks on the door.

3. Lily realizes the barn is burning
TEDDY: The air was dry like a dead grasshopper. All day I was sweaty as a devil, but the wind was strong and dried the sweat right away. I knew it was a bad day.
WEEDER 1: We had spent the morning trying to save the lettuce, but because it was so hot it had all bolted and was not good for wholesale. And after lunch we weeded and weeded but the weeds seemed never to get any less. We were driving home in the truck when our cell phones began to ring.
LILY: Are you in your truck? Get back here.
WEEDER 2: Lily knows when our day is over, it is over.
LILY: Get back here. Get back here.
WEEDER 2: Unless it is something seriously wrong.
LILY: Get back here.
WEEDER 2: She couldn’t explain anything. Just saying “Get back here” again and again.
LILY: There’s a fire on the farm.
WEEDER 1: Where? I don’t see any fire.
WEEDER 2: We didn’t understand. We’d seen nothing, no smoke, nothing.
LILY: There’s a fire on the farm. A fire.
WEEDER 1: A fire on the farm, a fire on the farm.
WEEDER 2: She just kept saying it. Finally we realized. She meant her brother’s farm. Her old farm. Family farm.
LILY: We have to go.
WEEDER 2: But she was shaking too hard. So my cousin drove us.

4. The fantasy sale of the Martin (now, Dayfield) farm
A cow is led in, wearing a huge ear tag that reads “Martin’s”. The cow’s body is marked, divided into different cuts of meat. A group of soberly dressed BUSINESSPEOPLE approach the cow and lay claim to different parts of its body. They then beat it to death. The cow is dragged off. SIDNEY, dressed as she was when she was a waitress, enters with plates of hamburgers. She calls off the names of the companies that have bought Martin land. “Wal-Mart! Webber & Webber Development! L.L. Bean! A rich guy from Boston! The Republican Party! Terrorists!” One of the BUSINESSPEOPLE always answers – “That’s me!” or “Over here!” or the like – and SIDNEY brings him/her a hamburger. The BUSINESSPEOPLE find the hamburgers delicious.

5. The foil of "agricultural tourism"
TEDDY: Have you been to Baker Farm? That place is no farm. They sell tote bags! They sell blueberry pies they bought from the deep freeze at Hannaford! Bill Baker!
LILY: The Bakers have the most organic U-Pick berry acreage in Southern Maine.
TEDDY: And you’ll pay eight bucks a quart plus your unborn child and both pinky toes for it! And they still couldn’t pay high school kids to weed the stuff without they’re getting subsidized!
LILY: I know how you feel about it.
TEDDY: And for what? Hayrides and cornstalk mazes in October. It’s not a farm, it’s an agricultural amusement park. Bill Baker!

6. Multiple variations on the fable of "The Little Red Hen" - this being my favorite
CHILD: The Little Red Hen woke up one morning at the crack of dawn and saw it was the time of year for planting wheat.
She went out blinking into the early morning sun and began to plant.
Along came the Dog, out for a morning stroll.
“That looks like hard work!” said the Dog. “I’ll help you if you’ll teach me how!”
“Oh, I don’t need help!” said the Little Red Hen. “It’s much easier if I just do it.”
“Suit yourself,” said the Dog, and kept walking.

The sun rose higher in the sky and the Little Red Hen kept on planting. It was tiring work, and she was starting to sweat and feel just a little dizzy.
Along came the Cat, chasing a butterfly.
“Hey, Little Red Hen!” said the Cat. “Looks like you still have a lot left to do. You need a hand? I’m happy to help if you show me what to do.”
“No thank you,” panted the Little Red Hen. “I’m doing just fine!”
“If you say so,” purred the Cat, and went back to chasing the butterfly.

In the scorching afternoon sun the Little Red Hen planted on, ever more slowly, dragging herself forward along the plowed rows. Her feathers felt like they were wilting in the heat.
Along came the Rat, nibbling on a hunk of bread.
“Wow, you look worn out,” said the Rat. “I don’t know much about wheat, but I can help you plant if you want. Or at least bring you a glass of water.”
The Little Red Hen could barely make a sound through her dry, swollen throat, but she managed to croak out, “No thanks.”
The Rat shrugged and went about more Rat-business.

At the end of the day the Dog, the Cat, and the Rat went to see how the Little Red Hen was doing. They found the field fully planted, and the Little Red Hen lying at the end of the field with her empty sack of wheat. The heat and dehydration had been too much for her and now she was dying. With her final breath she gasped out, “Dear Dog and Cat and Rat, I have planted the wheat but I won’t be here to harvest the wheat or grind the wheat into flour or bake the flour into bread or eat the bread. You will have to do it all yourselves.” And then she died.
The Dog, the Cat, and the Rat stood looking at her in silence. Finally the Dog spoke up: “But who will teach us how to do all those things?”
The three animals looked at each other and shrugged.

Updates from German-Land

1. Spring is here!

I have a bike. There is sunshine. I joined a Berlin CSA-type dealie a few weeks ago and have been getting cases of vegetables; I have to figure out what to do with this week's fennel. (Any suggestions?)

2. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra just played a concert for a bunch of plants.

Weird -- but true. So very true. You can see video evidence below. The video host is a cheeseball, but I liked the idea. And you can download the music they played to the plants here, for free. In case you are looking for a springtime growth spurt.

3. I wrote a play.

Oh right, I finished the first draft of the OFAF play. So there's that. I am relieved and happy and nervous and all sorts of things. Responses from Jennie and Claire and my usual trusted posse of script-readers have been, so far, encouraging. I am working on having a First Draft, Version 1.2 (or should it be 1.1? I shouldn't use nerdy lingo that I don't understand) in time for our first public reading (!!!!!) at SPACE Gallery on April 14. If you live in Maine -- you should go. I'll hopefully be there via Skype. You'll have to attend the reading to see the whole script, but click here for a teaser.

The Trauma of Summer (Cory)

Reading Lew Dietz's Night Train at Wiscassett Station (subtitled, self-explanatorily, "An Unforgettable Portrait of Maine and Its People"), I come across a section on the seasons. Under "Summer":

For those who call Maine home, summer has become a season of alloyed pleasure, a time of waiting for its end ... As abrupt as a slamming door, Labor Day brings to a close this season of mixed blessings ... By the time of October's hunter's moon, the trauma of summer has been healed, health and sanity restored.

I can't imagine Jordan's or Broadturn without summer. Heat and horseflies, fickle summer rain, plants perked up in the still-cool mornings only to be wilting and sweating by July noon. High school and college students on summer vacation working the fields (let's not forget, as someone brought up in a recent story circle, that the frenzy of summer farm activity is the reason why American summer vacation is the four-month monster that it is). Summer defines the vegetable farm for me, and it is strange to think of it as an anomaly, a "trauma." Does Dietz's assessment of Mainer sentiment towards summer apply to Maine farmers?

Broadturn this week was a frenzy of growth and color. On Tuesday, from the orange shock of carrots...

...to the deep purple pleasure of these little onions...

...it was the most diverse and colorful CSA harvest day I'd seen to date.

We picked lemon cucumbers (they look like little golden apples) and more traditional cukes, three varieties of squash (zucchini, summer, and patty pan), cabbage, lettuce, basil, parsley, and kale. And flowers. Buckets and buckets of flowers.

And we dug for new potatoes -- I found a heart-shaped one.

There are all sorts of new faces on the farm since I was last there: the little turkeys and chicks that peck at Flora's worm fingers through their wire cage until she squeals with delight, the solemn gray geese weeding the strawberry field and escaping past the electrified fence for 5am goose joyrides; sunflowers now grown tall as athletes, tomato plants jungling up the hoop houses until they're practically clamoring out the door...It's like the farm is in a fever and this bounty is its delirious dreaming.

There's no question that it is thrilling and rewarding to see the farm exploding with the fruit of all we've helped to plant and nurture the past two months. But as the pace accelerates to what I've got to label breakneck, I can see how unsustainable that pace is, how impossible it would be to live a summer of this sort year-round. Carrot-induced excitement and pride is mixed with sweaty exhaustion on everyone's faces. The frequency with which we forego "tensies" on harvest days is sobering. This isn't ordinary; this is crunch time.

Looking over the coming month's calendar with the interns, Stacy reminds them they won't be working Saturdays anymore in August. And I am reminded of Trae's assertion that July is always crazy time at Jordan's. And I am privy to farmer daydreams of farmer shortcuts, born of quiet longing after slightly more leisurely days ("If I had a superpower, I'd be...Carboneto," says John. "Like Magneto, from X-Men, only I would be able to attract whatever weed or plant or like, carbon-based object I wanted to at the time"). And I think about what summer really is: the Earth in heat. The Earth in all her fertility and fecundity, a mammoth lover demanding satisfaction, building to her colorful July climax, her explosion of flavors and treasures that can't be postponed or denied.

We need summer to get through the winter. We need summer to produce fruits and vegetables to store up for times when fruits and vegetables won't grow. (I find myself feeling more and more aware of the meaning and purpose of food preparation. "We pickle things to make them taste good," a friend said to me last week. "No, we pickle things to preserve them," I retorted, taken aback by how strongly I felt.)

But summer is...overwhelming. A race to make the absolute most of the Earth's sweaty embrace before she retreats, satisfied, to a chillier season. Stacy and John speak wistfully of winter and I can sense, though I haven't lived it on a farm, the reasons for relief at summer's passing. Summer is something you prepare for and recover from, but, like an orgasm or a fever dream, while it's happening you have to just survive it.

The Group Psychology of Summer Squash (Cory)

"How long until these tomatoes are ripe?"

Hands still occupied by the hose attachment she's using to feed the green tomatoes, Penny tosses her long-cut bangs back on her short-cut hair, surveys the greenhouse, and considers. I've been shadowing Penny since 7am. It's now nearly 4pm, and this half hour of tomato feeding, just the two of us (and the plants) in the greenhouse, is the first moment I've seen of anything that I might ordinarily call "calm" in her busy day.

We can see the farm stand just down the hill -- Trae in her bright orange smock slinging vegetables from sink to sink with her headphones clamped over her ears, probably blasting Vivaldi; Joy washing summer squash, testing for rotten ends and funny shapes; The Guys unloading a truck bed of green beans and flat beans fresh from the field. For once, though, Penny's focus is away from the havoc of her hundred farm stand, wholesale, farm bus, harvesting, planting, watering, weeding, labeling, and emailing duties. She even rejects a phone call on her constantly ringing cell. For once, Penny is doing just one thing: feeding the tomatoes.

Well, two things. Feeding tomatoes and talking to me.

"You know, I really can't say," she answers. "Tomatoes are funny plants. One can go red, and you think they're all about to get ripe, but then the rest can stay green for a week. It's like summer squash and zucchini. You'll see a bunch of them that are this big, not quite big enough to harvest but almost there, and then they'll just sit like that. For weeks. You'll keep seeing more and more of them at that same size but the ones that got there first don't get any bigger. As if they're waiting for their little brothers and sisters to catch up. You know, Bib and I have this theory? That they know when we want their fruit. They'll sit at the same size forever, and then we'll finally pick the first one and all of a sudden pop, pop, pop, they're all ready."

We are just passing the midpoint of this summer's work exchange and nearing the home stretch. The end of the summer is on the OFAF team members' minds, and we ask ourselves and each other different iterations of the same questions at our meetings: Are we getting all of the information we need to write a play? Are our relationships with the farmers and farm workers in the right place at the moment? On August 20, will those relationships be where they need to be for this thing to work?

Ben and Joy chat with Jennie, me, and Keith at
Jordan's -- pizza is great relationship fertilizer.

Writing a play is not chemistry, where two milliliters of X and a half liter of Y gives you Z every time; writing a play is not mathematics, where the square root of 9 doesn't change based on the weather. Writing a play is biology. Writing a play is growing things. Writing a play is a leap of faith. Writing a play is farming.

Last growing season was a season of rainfall, of struggling to keep up. This season -- so far -- our farmers all seem to be on schedule...even ahead of schedule. Eddie and Ryan on Kay-Ben reiterated at last week's story circle how bizarre it feels to be so on time with everything this year. At Jordan's today and yesterday, I heard talk of everything being early so far. The produce in the farm stand's unusually plentiful and varied. I don't know nearly enough about ordinary growing seasons to judge for myself, of course, but one thing is for sure: every season is a different game. No plan is foolproof on a farm. No tomato is immune to late blight, no hay is safe from a freak thunderstorm, no cow is healthy her whole life, no field stays weeded, no rain is guaranteed to fall. There are always fires, broken fences, late or early frosts, and family emergencies. You plan for what you can, and you deal with the rest when it happens. And it happens, and it is never the same ballgame.

When I get ready to write a play, I do my best to make sure all my ducks are in a row. I do research and I talk to people and I spend time thinking and I journal and I consider possible characters and possible plot lines and all sorts of crazy ideas go through my head. And one of those ideas is the seed from which the play will grow. But every play grows differently from the last. Some seeds need more care than others, some fall victim to doubt or indecision or self-censorship, some pop up too early and are forgotten by the time the time's ripe, some get all tangled up in weeds of too-much-complexity and overly-ambitious-concepts, and some are beautiful but fragile and can't take root.

Some grow faster than in your wildest dreams. But that is as rare as a perfect growing season.

Last week we all took some time together to take stock of where we are. It gave me the opportunity to look back over the preceding seven weeks and recognize that, yes, we already have a lot of material and there are countless potential plays beginning to germinate in that playwright greenhouse. But there is still a lot of work to do before we can even narrow things down to one potential play -- which is what the rest of this summer's about; and then even more to do to help that play grow. And I'm looking forward to that feeling I get when all the research and all the prep work is done and there is really nothing to do other than wait for our ideas to start to ripen into a play...and hope that everything we've done to prepare for the harvest will be enough this time.

The ideas ripen bit by little bit, waiting for one another, stalling, waiting for that first one to finally swell up big and ready, and then pop, pop, pop -- there they all are.

New Farm Term:

Seconds. Not what you fill your plate with after you've already had one helping at dinner. This is the word for fruits and veggies that are "not perfect, but still tasty" (in the words of a Jordan's Farm Stand sign). Slightly overripe or misshapen summer squash, bumpy cucumbers, funny-looking apples -- whatever the a-bit-the-worse-for-wear produce, farm stands will often sell it at a discounted price.

It Ain't Easy Being Green (Cory)

Today I was reading an interview with the director of a play that Schauspielhaus Hannover, in Germany, is embarking on this year. The play, based on/inspired by Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, is a play that has -- wait for it -- no human actors. Instead, the drama is peopled by a bunch of plants. Not only that, the project's a five-year-long venture and audience members are expected to come back periodically to see different installments...because, after all, it takes plants a while to grow. (For you German speakers, here's that interview.)

As the playwright, I should probably alleviate any fears right here and now. The Of Farms and Fables play will NOT be performed by plants. Please do not worry. There will still be people and puppets and fun. However, I love the idea of recognizing the drama of a plant's life. It's not all fun and games for our photosynthetic friends, guys. There is danger and suspense and tragedy, too.

This was my first week working on Broadturn Farm. As we planted tomatillos next to some thriving potato plants, Sam and Courtney noticed some rogue potato beetle larvae munching the leaves to Swiss cheese. A group of homeschooled kids a few weeks ago had the task of scraping off beetle eggs, but they'd definitely missed a bunch. Pests are a big problem on organic farms, naturally, and with no pesticides, what do we do to get rid of those larvae? By hand.

The eggs are little yellow clusters you can just scrape off the bottoms of the leaves, but it gets messier with the juicy red larvae and the occasional full-grown, white-and-black striped beetle. We crushed those dudes between our fingers. The tiniest larvae weren't so bad, but the bigger the bug, the squelchier the squirt. After a half hour of squishing we decided to move on. Courtney: "How did your bug squishing go, Sam?" Samantha: "I got a particularly juicy one in the eye."

Man, did I regret forgetting my gloves in the car.

But with as much squishing as we did, I know we left a bunch of beetles behind and I'm worried for the potatoes. The ones that had been hosting larvae were looking downright holey. Who will win -- the beetles? The potatoes? Suspense. Conflict. Squishy death. The stuff drama is made of.

Fingers and homeschoolers aren't the only way to fight the enemy. Yesterday we planted a row of dummy squash (I don't think they actually called it that, but it's the term I use in my head) on the border of a full squash field to try and distract the bugs from the real crop.

Plants face plenty of other dangers. Like late blight. Sam shared a story she'd heard at a workshop Tuesday night, about last year's epidemic that decimated the tomato crop in the area. Apparently the speaker described it as a "perfect storm" situation: the weather was just right for late blight (cool and damp, thanks to last summer's endless rain), and stores like Wal-Mart, trying to capitalize on your Average Joe's increased interest in Growing Food Himself, sold a bunch of infected plants for cheap. When the infection was discovered there was campaigning to stop the stores from selling, but some of them just put the plants on a discount to flush them out faster. Lying! Dastardly deeds! Evil! Dramas do need villains...

Oh, and kittens. Kittens can also be villains. One of the Broadturn kitties, Butter, decided to use an ill-fated seedling as a back scratcher yesterday and rolled on it until it broke. I'm telling you, plants are never safe.

When you spend as much time as these folks do trying to help your plants survive from seed to harvest, how could you help getting invested in whether they live or die? How can you help being frustrated that two trays of bell flower seedlings have been sitting in the green house for months and are still unbelievably tiny and frail-looking? How can you avoid that sinking feeling in your stomach when a field of peas doesn't yield nearly as much as you hoped it would? And it really doesn't matter how awesome you are, farming-wise; plants are gonna do what they're gonna do. In fact, after three weeks of working on produce farms, there's a quote I really related to from that interview about the crazy plant play: "Pflanzen sind ganz schöne Diven, das weiß jeder Gärtner." (Every gardener knows that plants are quite the divas.) The director goes on to point out that you can't say to a plant, like you can to an actor, "Here's your money -- now you have to do it this way."

No matter the care you take, there are countless factors outside your control when you are raising plants and animals. And a lot of the farmers and farm workers we've talked to have said something along the lines of: that's part of the joy of it. It's like a big puzzle, trying to figure out how to make it all work, meeting the unexpected challenges as they show up -- and taking it one day at a time.

I am excited to see how things come together throughout the growing season on Jordan's and Broadturn. Which crops are big successes? Which ones succumb to pests, weather, kittens, or their own tragic flaws? I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the most famous lines in western drama includes plants. A rose by any other name... Or that Ophelia's mad speech has her doling out flowers and herbs.

Courtney, one of the interns, at Broadturn.

There are no Spanish speakers on this farm, but there is Flora, John and Stacy's four-year-old, who has a language all her own. I didn't learn any new Spanish but I did pick up these gems:

Flora-isms

• "I'm yes-and-no tired." (Presumably "kind of tired," or as Stacy suggested, "ambivalent.")
• Me: "What's that knife for, Flora?" Flora: "I think it's for slaughtering."

Favorite new farm term

Blatting. I actually heard this when we were at Kay-Ben last week for our workshop, but it's a real winner. I've come across it before in books but always thought of it as an obsolete word for the sound a cow makes. But it's apparently very much in use, and I guess it does sound a lot less silly than "mooing."