Hollywood is a full-length play by Connor Coyne.

Rather, it is a play-in-progress. The rough draft has not been completed.

I am writing this play using Jeffrey Hatcher's fine book The Art and Craft of Playwriting. While I do not agree with all of Hatcher's broader claims about the primacy of character and an Aristotelian approach, he has an open mind about experimentation, embraces theatricality, and the course prescribed by his book is as rigorous and educational as any university playwriting course might be. These exercises include in-depth writing exercises, each focusing on a classical "aspect" of a play (I've written forty pages through such exercises so far) and reading a number of plays by artists ranging from William Shakespeare to Marsha Norman and Harold Pinter.

I've been working on Hollywood intensively all summer, and more broadly for over a year now. Even considering the Hatcher exercises, this ought to have been sufficient time to draft a play. Several complicating factors have intervened, however:

The background of the piece is a combination of my desire to create a theatrical manifestation of gothic funk as a suggestion of the possibilities of such an expressive mode. More significantly, however, the story is driven by my impressions of my own experience in 2004 and 2005. This was the happiest year of my life to date. In September 2004 I moved into a large two bedroom ghetto penthouse apartment in Edgewater Beach, Chicago, with a best friend, Sam. I'd recently become engaged to my girlfriend of a half-decade, Jessica, and my temp agency had placed me on assignment at a Lasik clinic where I liked my coworkers and enjoyed the work. This was a special year: Lisa had moved from London to Chicago, Sam managed to bring his friends Bill and Sam to Chicago from the UP, my trips to Michigan were frequent but my time in Chicago felt meaningful. If I'm ever sufficiently well-known or liked to warrant any sort of biography, I hope this year will receive some special attention. At any rate, I am preoccupied with it in Hollywood and a lot of my energy is expended in an effort to do this period of my life justice.

Hollywood itself is in transition. It involves Edgewater Beach for sure, I know that, and almost certainly takes place during the late 1970s. For a while the main character was a prodigal genius, Sean Starr, who ran away from his father in Decatur to Chicago in the hopes of launching a travelling career around the globe. Alas, this has not come to pass, and now his father has arrived to collect the twenty-odd year old Sean. His only hopes hinge on catching a rare but huge freshwater shark that has taken up residence in Chicago just off of the North Shore. This would supply the bling and prestige to fund his further adventures. But I'm also pretty sick of writing involving whiny artsy types, and I don't know that I want one at the center of this very important play. I may decide to have Sean killed off by some grisly means before the action of the play has begun.

At this stage of the game, I am open to suggestions. In case you were wondering.

So send me any suggestions.

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