31 Plays in 31 Days, #5 - “All a Mess”

So Bernie and I struggled for quite some time to get a handle on the next phase of Mary’s journey in the story. For a long time, we were kind of defaulting to the idea that she might reject being a superhero all together for a while, out of a desire to separate herself from Mrs. Hawking and avoid anything that might make Mary become like her. But it always felt a bit off. Like, not that natural and with a fairly pat, obvious solution. Of course she would eventually come back to it, so like, that kind of struggle calls for her to decide she can be her own kind of superhero, different from the way Mrs. Hawking was— which is something she already figured out and has known for years now. It just felt like it was too easy and not a very meaningful next step.

Things started to work when we realized that a better challenge would be her having to figure out how she’d actually balance having all the things in her life that she wants. Marriage, motherhood, friendship, work, play, and superheroing— that’s a lot, each one eating up a lot of time and effort. Now that she has everything she wanted, does she actually have space for it all? It’s a natural and actually relatable next step, as a lot of people today find they don’t have the time and energy to do everything they want and have to do. One of the things that made Mrs. Hawking such a force is that she devotes everything she is to being great at it. If Mary wants to spend time on other things as well, what will she have to sacrifice of her ability to do that work? While I want Mary to be awesome and do incredible things, forcing her to deal with this kind of very real human limitation allows us to challenge her in a way that actually feels meaningful.

Structurally, there will be a scene between #2 - Lost Children and this one to show her fighting to keep all her balls in the air. I want to show her doing a good job, but going through real struggle to do so, and having to figure out the compromises that she can actually live with. So she has to go through dropping some balls to realize that it’s going to be necessary.

This scene is somewhat weirdly broken up, but I try to find shift points to create discrete scene pieces. It makes drafting (and posting them for this challenge) easier.


Photo by Jacob LaRocca

( Day #5 - All a Mess )