How the Coronavirus Rewrote My Passion Project: A Play

JOEL

It’s strange you know, like, not actually being in front of you, not being up on a literal stage. You see most plays, if not all of them, weren’t designed to play out inside the theatre of your mind. They were written so actors could act them in front of an audience. They were, um, I don’t know, were made so that clumps of physical bodies could watch them together.

But as we are told ad nauseam, we are living through strange times. And us playwrights will do what we do to survive. So, here we all are, we’re inside a theatre inside your mind. In an imaginary space where theatres can safely run at full capacity, and its staff aren’t stressed about COVID.

Yet, despite the fact that we’re now in this space, I’d still like to talk about the virus and stuff. Because it’s affecting more than the physical theatres and the companies that own them. It’s changing the pre-existing words that are living in our plays, and the new lines we’re creating. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I go on, I’d like to introduce everyone else who’s with me.

So everyone, this is Mark Rogers.

MARK

Hi.

JOEL

Mark is an Illawarra-based playwright that teaches theatre subjects, plus performance subjects, at the University of Wollongong. He’s also won Sydney Theatre Company’s Patrick White Playwrights Award and Griffin Theatre Company’s Griffin Award. In twenty-twenty, his play Superheroes was put on by Griffin in late September through to the end of October. But that all sounds correct yeah?

MARK

JOEL

Mark is also my playwriting mentor. I met him while I was a 2019 member of Merrigong Playwrights’ Program and working on a play called A Christmas Special. All of Mark’s following dialogue is taken verbatim from a phone interview that we did on the 18th of August. Well, verbatim enough, I did take out the “likes” and tightened the language.

And next to Mark is Katie!

KATIE

Hey.

JOEL

Katie is a character from the aforementioned A Christmas Special. She’s seventeen and lives in Port Benji. All of her dialogue will be direct quotes from my latest draft. And besides Katie is The Moose. This moose is the antagonist of A Christmas Special.

Okey-dokey then, well I just said A Christmas Special a whack of times in a row. But fortunately, that’s what we’re all here to discuss. Hi, I’m Joel Burrows, and I’m a playwright that’s been working on this script since 2018. I’m also kind of hosting this shindig, and I’d like to talk about how COVID has changed some of this play without me even touching it. So, um, uhhhh—

MOOSE

BrrGrrrr!!!

JOEL

Right. I should quickly outline the plot, you’re absolutely right. At the start of A Christmas Special, Katie here is having a rough-as-guts summer. Her mum has checked out, she’s working multiple jobs, and for some reason, her younger sister, Alice, claims that she’s a New York cop named John. Katie summarises her predicament on the second page when she says:

KATIE

It’s hard enough, hard enough, packing lunch for a six year old, let alone packing lunch for a John?

JOEL

Nevertheless, her life then gets even worse when one of her jobs – she’s a mall elf – orders in this real live moose. This is a terrible idea. And not just because the mall should have ordered a reindeer or a life-size cut-out instead. You see, this moose is no ordinary moose. The day of its debut, it kills almost everyone in the town, destroys the entire hospital, and traps Katie with three other people in the apocalyptic wasteland it’s created.

I know right? It just, really ramps up there in that last sentence, doesn’t it? But anyway, I’m really proud of this play. I think it’s funny, it has great characters, and it’s shaping up to be an engaging romp. However, since the coronavirus happened, I’ve noticed that some parts that I wrote ages ago well, they feel different. I’ve realised that what The Moose symbolises has maybe shifted.

But before we deep dive into all that, Mark, have you felt like your writing has changed, or the meaning of your play has changed, since COVID-19 became a thing? Has the coronavirus impacted how you’re writing up Superheroes?

MARK

Yeah, I think it kind of depends.

JOEL

Huh. So it has, yet it somehow hasn’t? What do ya mean?

MARK

Because I guess there’s a couple of different modes of writing, right? There is stuff which is more generative, where I’m in the imaginative space of the characters I guess, or the world of it. And I’m kind of just following my nose a little bit. And that might be generating new scenes, or I might have an instinct of like, “Okay, I’m going to write a scene.”

JOEL

Right.

MARK

Know what I mean? There’s those two different writing brains for me. The more analytical one and a generative one. And I think that the analytical one is where I could foresee, or imagine, being more affected by the external context of it all.

JOEL

Oh, okay. You’ve been so inside Superheroes, just writing scenes for it, that you haven’t analysed it through a COVID-19 lens. It hasn’t affected your play’s alterations so far, but that could change if you switched gears.

MARK

I’m kind of imagining the world of the characters. And I think because of that there’s kind of a resistance to checking myself against, “Is this going to chime with coronavirus?”

JOEL

Hmm, that’s really interesting. Because I’m in the analytical mode right now. Well, I’m for sure going to go back, generate some more scenes for this play, but I needed to take a step back before I do so.

MOOSE

BrrGrrrr!

JOEL

Right, you’re absolutely right, let’s talk symbolism.

When I started writing this play two years ago, The Moose wasn’t an alien or a supernatural being. And it still isn’t. It’s meant to be a force that symbolises life-changing disasters, in all of their forms. Katie is even asked, at the end of the play, how she survived this killer moose. So on page 69 she goes:

KATIE

Look Janet. If you’re looking for a magic bullet or a great quote you’re, you’re going to have to ask somebody else. My answer is like how people say the secret to their six pack is a good diet. My answer is routine. It’s just scheduling, plain and simple.

What? Eat your breakfast at the same time, Janet. It’ll amaze you. My grandmother, she survived the Blitz, did you know that? My grandfather, he survived a drought. They. Those things. I often wonder how different those things are from living with a moose.

JOEL

Thanks Katie.

JOEL

Well, now that I’m living in a pandemic, I’m not sure how true this thesis actually is, but that isn’t the point. The point is that The Moose is meant to represent the big, tragic events that can impact our day-to-day lives.

However, The Moose now has some very big COVID-19 energy. It goes through Port Benji like a disease and physically isolates everyone still there from the rest of the world, trapping them in the town. This animal even overwhelms the local hospital and destroys it. And when Katie asks her comrades on page 31:

KATIE

What do you both think our routine’s gonna be?

JOEL

It just feels a little bit different now. Yeah, if someone was to watch this play tomorrow, they may leave thinking it was in partly written in response to the crisis.

And, well, I’m just not sure if that’s something I want. I’m unsure if I should grow this play into a work that’s deliberate COVID commentary, or if I should prune these references back. Because at the moment, it just feels messy, like it’s out of control and— and— I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.

Now Mark, it may be a tad obvious that I’m at a bit of a loss here, so I was wondering if you could help me out a bit. I’m like— Yeah, I’m not expecting for you to solve this problem or tell me what to do with my story, but I’d be really grateful for some advice anyway, you know. Are there any questions I could ask myself, or things that I could reflect on? How can I come to a decision about whether or not The Moose should be a COVID-19 metaphor?

MARK

I think the questions that you should be asking yourself are, “What do I want to say with this work?” You know, or, “What is this work trying to do to its audience? What’s its argument?”

JOEL

Right.

MARK

“What’s its compass? What’s it heading towards?”

JOEL

Right.

MARK

In a way, this coronavirus moment maybe gives you an opportunity to think about what the compass of the work is.

JOEL

Yeah, I think— I think that the coronavirus actually kind of overwhelmed me here and made my compass go haywire. And I actually reckon I got disorientated on a bunch of different fronts – COVID put almost everything into disarray. I think like most people, the uncertainty, the isolation, and the scope of this problem really messed with my wellbeing. And it still does sometimes. So, when I started thinking about the work, amidst this chaos, I didn’t know where I wanted it to sit. It just felt so, big. It felt like it had to be all or nothing, a Rona play or a play that ignores it entirely.

But when you asked me those questions, I had this gut feeling? As I said earlier, The Moose is meant to represent all big, bad, life-changing events. I don’t want to change that. But that being said, the coronavirus is a big, bad, life-changing event so, to a certain degree, The Moose now has to symbolise the coronavirus. Alright, I just have to make it abundantly clear to the audience that, yes, The Moose is a COVID metaphor, but that’s not all it is. The Moose is a flood. The Moose is a car crash. The Moose is a global financial crisis.

MOOSE

BrrrGGrrr!

JOEL

And I think that I can sprinkle some metaphors throughout this work that communicate this point. Maybe, in one scene, The Moose smashes through the supermarket stealing all of the toilet paper. But a few scenes later, The Moose has eaten and destroyed most of the crops on the outskirts of town, making the soil go barren.

MARK

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting Joel. That sounds great.

JOEL

Yeah?

MARK

The game for you is to shift us around what we think The Moose is enough that we never really land on one: it gets to be all of them. Do you know what I mean?

JOEL

Mmm. Yeah.

MARK

Yeah.

JOEL

Well uh, thanks Mark. That was— I didn’t expect to like, actually leave this chat with a plan, so I’m kind of just reeling here, thanks. Um, I’d also like to thank Katie and The Moose for just everything. This event literally couldn’t have happened without them.

MOOSE

BrrGrr!!

JOEL

But yeah, unfortunately, we’ve just about ran out the clock here so yeah, so there’s no time for an audience Q&A.

But before we all go, thank you so much for coming to this theatre inside of your mind, I really appreciate it. It was just the best getting to talk you about how COVID has affected my play, and being able to untangle some stuff. And hopefully, I can one day meet you in a real, physical, full capacity, safe theatre. Yeah, hopefully that day can happen quite soon.