What The Storyteller Did

category: full length one act
genre: fairy tale comedy
running time: 90 minutes
setting: America
period: 2022

characters:
STUART, a playwright
BENJAMIN, a trickster god
MOLLY, a girl in a Victorian nightgown
RACHEL, a college friend
PRINCE CHARLES, the
A BOY

story:
In the year following the height of the global COVID-19 Pandemic, playwright Stuart Bousel is commissioned by writer Benjamin Wachs to write a play about Benjamin that is simultaneously “full hedonist” and “full narcissist.” Emotionally devestated by two years of isolation during the pandemic only to ermerge into a theater scene that doesn’t want him and a city that is empty of the community he built there, Stuart struggles with finding an idea that suits, frequently becoming distracted by online conversations with his friend Molly, who has chronic fatigue syndrome, and phone tag with his friend Rachel, who used to live in San Francisco but now lives in Maine with her husband and children. Eventually, he resorts to going through every idea in his common place book before realizing that he is living “What The Storyteller Did When He Ran Out Of Stories”, an Irish fairy tale that he has loved since childhood. Re-enacting the tale with some help from a personification of his own innocence, and a displaced Prince Charles, he stumbles into being able to write again, and finishes his commission for Benjamin.

author’s comments: 
So, it’s hard to comment on a play, that is unto itself, a comment on one’s writing of plays in general, but let’s just say that if ADVENTURES IN TECH ever could have a follow up, then this play would be it. An actual commission from Benjamin Wachs, who should really share the byline as the play includes transcripts of multiple conversations we had (edited and tweaked of course) the play is also composed of real messages left by Rachel Nobel (who over the years has left some really incredible ramblers) and real chat dialogues between myself and Molly Freedenberg. Prince Charles’ lines are, thankfully, entirely of my composition, while the fairy tale is based largely on the Anthony Minghella version he adapted and directed for Jim Henson’s THE STORYTELLER, and somehow it all comes together, beautifully, in what I kind of consider to be my last play. It isn’t, of course, but it most certainly is the last of an era, and is thus a farewell note to the hyper-productive decades of my twenties and thirties, when I couldn’t seem to stop writing plays, always had something to say with them, and always believed the world had people in it who wanted, maybe even needed, to hear it. In the post-COVID ghost town that is San Francisco’s theater scene in the 2020s, putting on shows has often seemed progressively impossible- too expensive, too risky, and too likely to be subject to bad-faith criticism from what small, angry remnants of the community remain. I don’t believe it will be like this forever, but I think pretending its anything other than this now, won’t help us start to move towards whatever the next thing is. Which still might not be the next thing for me. But I guess we’ll see.