Dan O’Neil, playwright

As a playwright and screenwriter, I have great interest in how a piece of text written on paper operates as a blueprint for a larger performance - in essence, the script invites collaboration from its reader. It asks them to imagine these people, speaking these words, in such and such a place. A performative text casts its reader as a future director, future actor, future (well-researched) audience member.

I am taking this submission opportunity to take the performativity of the written word on a page and enhance it, turn it into something that is simultaneously and recognizably a play (i.e., a narrative populated with characters with the suggestion of a beginning, middle, and end) as well as a frame-able image, something that could hang on a wall and perform itself to anyone who stops to read it.

I propose to provide a series of image plays - this is to say, a play written on top of and around an image, 8 inches by 11 inches, printed on fine paper and frame-ready. The plays will be very short, between 45 to 75 words long, and mostly will track two characters and their (perhaps implied) interaction with the image they are sharing their play world with. I will write five plays and provide the C.S.A. program with ten prints of each, making up 50 items in all. The plays will be personally numbered and signed on the back.

I believe this to be an excellent fit for the Community Supported Art program because it begins to break down the idea of what a play is - typically, a play cannot be packaged and sent in a box. Usually, one must buy a ticket and attend a physical theater in order to experience a play as it is intended to be seen. It seems inadequate to simply send people scripts in the mail - they would still be art, but perhaps not decodable for an audience unused to reading text on a page and imagining. The image play bridges the gap. It tells a story and performs it. It casts the viewer as both characters and exacts an emotional change from both characters at the end of the play. The play cannot be the play without the image, and the image cannot tell the story that the play tells alone.

Also, it will fit in the box.