Desperately Seeking Samuel, the film, has now been posted to YouTube

I did not spend all of our three months in Cuba recently in idle relaxation on a sandy beach by a turquoise sea. I fiddled each morning – the musical kind, although some might question that label – and worked on multiple rewrites of my newest script, then spent hours learning lines, and more hours pondering how in heck I would ever be able to mount this production on stage or on screen! So now, despite challenges, I have spent the past eleven days since our return sequestered in the bathroom – filming this play, and then the more arduous task of editing it. Yes, it takes place in a closet, a broom closet … and a water closet.

This is not a flashy, fast action drama. That is not my style. Neither is it an amusing bedroom farce, nor a comedy of any kind. There may be some subtle humour here and there. However, like most monologues that I am aware of, it is a ponderous reflection in the mind of the character. It is a slow unfolding in the memory bank of an old man. It does not happen in any particular order. His memory may be flawed. But I think of it as a jigsaw puzzle being assembled with deliberation, with the careful study of the shapes and colours of the pieces of his life, and trial and error in putting them together.

Most Independent Film Festivals have no suitable category for “no budget” monologues. Indeed, neither do most of them think to include films made with no money backing them. Indeed, I have entered this in the “no budget” feature film category at the Cannes Independent Film Festival (not to be confused with the other Cannes Festival). But I had to laugh when I realized that that category is for films with a budget of under 25K Euros!!!! My budget was zero! What will be, will be.

My plan is to mount this as a stage production with a test run this summer while we are at our cabin in near-northern Ontario.

Here is the YouTube link to the trailer: https://youtu.be/OYWDrlCeBfc. If this peeks your interest, then here is the link to the film: https://youtu.be/PVK-kJ_mPl0.

It is 80 minutes long, so settle in for the viewing if you can.

Comments

One's Company Now a Film

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"Deadly Sea Weed" Now Available

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The Play is the Thing

I was cast as King Berenger in Ionesco's "Exit the King". When I first read this script through, I thought immediately that it was about the end of all things. The end of the world. My character was an everyman: the good, the bad and the ugly of humanity. And in a sense, I think, that is a correct assessment. But, even more, it is about our fear of death. And our unwillingness to accept its eventuality. Because we don’t come to terms with it, we often waste our lives. I think it was Mark Twain who wrote that “Youth is wasted on the young”. Sometimes I think life is wasted because we fail to recognize how short it will be. As my character says when informed early on in the play about his impending death, “But I know that. Of course I do. We all know it. Remind me when the time comes.” Yes. We do all know it somewhere in the recesses of our mind. But it stays there as our life unfolds. However later on, Berenger exclaims: “I fear that what is to end one day, is end...

One Actor - Another Show

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