Tag: Script

OUT OF THIS WORLD

“But first… I want to talk about you. Somehow, each of you ended up here tonight. And I bet, if you thought about it, you could figure out exactly how it is you came to be here. Maybe a suggestion from a friend or family member pushed you to investigate. Or a strategically placed advertisement caught your eye. Whatever your route into that seat of yours, you’re most likely aware of how you made that decision.”

“What’s more interesting to me is when we make decisions with none of that obvious information. We tend to play this off as ‘random gut instinct,’ but I’m convinced there’s much more to it than randomness.”

EVAN takes out a deck of cards and sets up two wine glasses on a table.

You might know how you got here, but I’m fascinated by why you ended up here. I have a theory that it’s less random than it might appear. So let’s put it to the test.”

“I’m going to ask you to make a decision without any information to back it up. A… random choice, if you will.

Performer mixes the cards and shows the faces mixed up. He removes some single cards, then small packets of cards in time with the next lines and questions to the audience.

“If I asked you to guess if this were a red card or a black card, what would you say?”

Response.

“Exactly. What about this one?

Response.

“Absolutely incorrect. When we focus on where there’s no information, the result is a 50/50 split. Even odds. You couldn’t possibly know what the card is. “

“But sometimes we don’t have to understand the how if we understand the why. We are constantly absorbing information – more information than we could ever process consciously. So instead of focusing on the thing you don’t know, when I ask you what color the cards are, just focus on me.”

“Would these be red or black?”

“And these?”

EVAN continues until all the cards are split between the red and black glasses. The lines he says while pulling out packets of cards might be prompts of things we can’t possibly know. Or even better, illogical questions like “If you were making dinner for an old friend on a Thursday, what star sign would that make me?” This could be done as a way of distracting the conscious brain even further. Perhaps the questions get more illogical as we go.

“And this is exactly why you are all here. If you were truly a random group of people spouting off random guesses, then the result would be understandably random. But we find ourselves in a unique situation that proves you all must be connected and aware of something even more than you realize. A situation that proves we can accomplish something incredible without understanding the intricacies of how it’s possible.”

EVAN turns around the separated cards and the red cards are all in the red glass and the black cards are all in the black glass.

[I may want to bring up how it doesn’t matter if they know what the cards are, because I know what the cards are.]

“And if we trust that this particular group is meaningful. And here for some interesting reason; that begs the question ‘What am I doing here’?” [Segue to 10e: NO Poker]

RING, WATCH, WALLET

[Transition to fit inside the Intro section. Keep this Quick as an early piece within a narrative]

In fact, I remember the specific moment I became a magician. It was wildly anticlimactic. It’s the spring of 2011, I’m in my college graduation robes, walking across a small stage to receive a Bachelors degree in interdisciplinary Hispanic Literature and Culture.

As they’re reading through the handful of names, time slows down (take off watch). for the last 17 years of my life, I had been the same thing. A student. A student with a wide variety of interests, but a student.

And I thought back through the years about how that title had given me permission to learn things just for the hell of it. I love being a student and I love learning. But now I didn’t know how I would be spending my time.

My friends had received these incredible job offers from places all over the world. They knew where they’d be spending their time, and what they’d be doing to earn money, and all I had was a big question mark out in front of me. I was looking for some sort of guide from a job about who I was going to be moving into the future.

Throughout this, the performer takes out his watch, money, and license, puts them into an envelope.

As I took the diploma, my student career ended. Seventeen years of learning came to an abrupt halt and suddenly I was… I guess… a full time magician? It’s not quite as exciting receiving a job offer when your boss is you.

I finished crossing the stage and nothing felt any different. But the weight of the future became immediately apparent. There was no money coming my way. There were no guidelines or instructions for how to spend my time. And no sense of identity – however misplaced – coming from what I was doing with my life.

He drops the items into an envelope. Pause, and then rips it open, showing that they’ve all vanished.

And thus begins a lifetime of reprioritization. While it’s true I sort of fell backward into the decision, so I can’t take all the credit, I realized that rather than letting time and money define who I was, I would start with me.

I would spend my time figuring out who I already was, and then cross my fingers that some semblance of money would come my way if I was thoughtful about spending whatever time I already had.

He reveals that the license and money are back in his wallet. And on the final line, he reveals the watch back on his wrist (or in his pocket if using pocket watch).

INTRO

Performer puts the QH on display and addresses the audience. As he talk to them, the lights come up and he takes back the flashlights he handed out earlier.

“Thank you all for being here. My name is Evan and I’m a magician. Which is an incredibly strange way to introduce yourself to other people. But I’m not talking about the ‘magician’ part of that sentence. I came to terms with that a long time ago and now I like watching peoples’ brains hiccup while they try to comprehend what it means.”

“No, what I’m talking about is that we introduce ourselves with our jobs. We ask for a name – which we promptly forget – and follow up with this nameless person by saying: ‘And what do you do?'”

“I think the job someone happens to be doing at a given point is a wildly unreliable indicator of who they are and what they’re like. Don’t get me wrong, some people are a perfect match for their job. Case in point [gesture to self].”

“But people end up in jobs for all sorts of reasons. So I think a more interesting question to get to know someone is what they would do if they could do anything except the thing they’re doing now.”

[RING WATCH WALLET (next script: 10c) feels like it actually belongs here. Continue the discussion about how we equate how people spend their time, what they do for money, with their identity; as though it indicates anything about WHO they are. Maybe perform with money, watch, and either an ID/license or the ring could work as a representative stand-in]

“I believe in leading by example, so I’ll go first. I’ve only ever imagined having three jobs. For most of my childhood, I was sure I would be a librarian. I lived in the library down the street from my house and the idea of hanging out in a building filled with nothing but ideas and stories was – and is – very appealing.”

“And obviously, one of the other jobs that called to me is being a magician. I get to tell stories, and show people things they would never see otherwise.”

“But for a brief period of time, or more accurately, for intermittent splashes of time, I’ve considered a third job. It was most pronounced in the spring of 2010. I was studying in Spain, and a group of us had been stranded in Amsterdam by an erupting Icelandic volcano. We were slowly making our way back to Madrid but we got held up in Paris for a few days. So, naturally, we check out the Louvre.”

“Keep in mind, we were not the only ones who were stranded. Everyone who was travelling through Europe had their flights grounded; so the tourists who were in Paris had already done the things they were going to do. Which meant when the group of us walked into the museum to check it out, it was empty. I walked for rooms at a time only seeing one or two people – if anyone.”

“I was able to walk straight up to the Mona Lisa, look at the Venus de Milo completely alone, and absorb everything the Louvre had to offer. And throughout most of that leisurely stroll through the world’s most treasured antiquities, this little voice in my head kept chiming in, saying: ‘You could totally steal that right now.’ ” [Note: probably need to rephrase this line. There’s a delicate balance between crafting a funny line and respect for the subject matter. Maybe phrase it more in terms of curiosity: “I wonder if…”].

“The only other full time job I’ve ever considered: international art thief. If you think about it, I’m professionally qualified for very few things in this world of ours. But the set of skills I’ve developed over the years is shockingly, unsettlingly close to that of a thief.”

“So every now and then, when I’m strolling through a museum, I’ll play a fun little game of ‘How-Would-I-Steal-That.’ I consider it professional development. And when I hear about museum heists, I’m fascinated by why the thieves make the choices they do, and how they end up getting caught.”

[There’s definitely a joke about asking if there are any law enforcement in the room somewhere in all this!]

“And when I hear about a theft gone wrong, that same, cocky voice pops back in and says ‘You could do it better.’ “

“I figure that the average person has something like five or six career changes in their life, so maybe I should explore this one now in case the magic thing ever dries up. I’m convinced that a magician could pull of the perfect heist, and I thought I’d show you what that would look like here tonight.”

“But first…” [segue into Out Of This World: Script 10d]

Welcome to the first step in a marathon slog through fraught terrain. It’s the entertainer’s version of the Barkley Marathons (look it up if you’re unfamiliar… it’s zany and outrageous and wonderful).

SCRIPTING

I waffled a bit about how to include the scripting process (and what to include). But I landed on including as much as possible. If it’s not of interest, you can obviously skip right by it. But if seeing how Themes/Frames/Goals/Material/Setlist/Etc all come together into a terribly rough draft of a show interests you, here’s that transition. “Part 10” will be one entry for each routine (followed by a letter).

I’ll include my full first draft of the routine. No editing in a different word processor and dropping it here. Just unfiltered, unorganized ideas that I’m trying to assemble into a rough script. It will probably feel choppy because it’s inherently so, but it will feel choppier because I’m going to separate it out into different entries like this. I’ll be keeping my previous concept work for the show in mind (and occasionally up on the screen as a guide), but that’s it. At the end, we’ll have a script. A bad one… but a script nonetheless.

Please excuse the lack of formatting (I’ve got all my presets in Word) and WordPress doesn’t have the same sort of easy dialogue vs stage direction vs heading format choices, so I may find some ways to differentiate as I go or it may look like a lot of blocks of text.

Let’s begin where every script begins:

HOTEL 52

Int. – A semi-lit warehouse space.

Fade house lights to blackout. Silence for a few beats. Maybe some sound effects of gentle ambient music fill the space. Eventually, a door opens and the light of a flashlight explores the space and the audience. The person holding it flicks on a few small lights – just enough to illuminate a table with a single deck of cards out of the box and the performer himself.

“I want you to imagine you’re in a museum at night. It’s the strangest museum you’ve ever seen; there are only 52 pieces of art, and they’re all pictures you recognize. Spades, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds; they show all 52 playing cards. And you’re there… to steal them.”

“You’ve managed to get inside, but you can immediately tell something is wrong. You sniff the air… smoke… fire! You have to act quickly if you’re going to get any of the paintings before it’s too late.”

“The museum is divided into two wings. One houses all the red card, and the other, all the black cards (paintings?). You notice smoke start to pour out of the vents (to audience member), in your imagination, do you see the smoke in the red wing or the black wing?” [Response]

“Yes, that’s exactly right. As you get closer, you see the smoke pouring out of the vents in the red wing, starting to wisp towards the collection of red works. The fire is growing and now you’re seeing sparks. They burst and scatter off the walls. Do the sparks start to hit the hearts or the diamonds?” [Response]

“Yes, precisely. As the room fills with smoke, the sparks hit the diamonds. The old dry canvases catch fire and start to spread towards the hearts. The hearts are all displayed with the numbers, A, 2, 3, on one wall and the face cards, J, Q, K, on the other wall. Do the flames move towards the number cards or the picture cards?” [Response]

“Exactly right! The flames spread towards the face cards so you rush to stand in front of them: the Jack, Queen, and King. Which one do you stand in front of?” [Response]

“Yes, so you start with the Jack, pull it off the wall, then the Queen, then the King. You’re trying to manage all three of these paintings as you make your way up to the roof to escape. As you go, the three paintings are getting shuffled around as your try to hold them. You approach the top floor and the flames are right behind you. A charred wooden beam starts to fall from the ceiling. You look down and which painting is on top of the pile?” [Response]

“Exactly. The beam falls directly in front of you and smashes the Jack to pieces; leaving it smoldering and charred on the ground. You make your way to the roof where yours truly is waiting! Your partner in crime. Thick as thieves! I’m standing next to our getaway helicopter. You run over and pass off one of the paintings to me do you give me the Queen or the King?” [Response. Beat.]

“Yes. You hand me the Queen of Hearts. But the story doesn’t end there. Any good heist story always has a twist. You go to run to the helicopter, and you find yourself handcuffed to the railing. During the handoff, someone [shrug/wink] cuffed you to a metal railing, leaving you stranded for the police to find any minute”

“And with that, standing on top of the museum, yours truly takes the Queen of Hearts painting and climbs into the helicopter.” [Carefully turn over the top card of the deck, revealing the Queen of Hearts. Reaction.]

“Tragically, all the other priceless works of art in that imaginary art heist were lost to the imaginary fire. I’m so glad we ended up with the Queen of Hearts, and I’m even gladder all of this was just in our minds”

Performer goes to the rest of the deck on the table, deliberately picks it up, and crumbles it into a tiny ball – the cards transforming into nothing but a scrap of paper except for the QH. Applause Cue.