the stage manager will call back and bring don't know why nothing you can do stuff so you might as well have something to playwright the understudy is a short piece that is about futility i think more than anything brief synopsis would be about a detective who arrives on the scene of a murder mystery to discover the entire universe is a play the detective comes on stage can see the audience can see the lights is confused of course and learns that she the two suspects that she needs even the body are all just characters in a play and furthermore that the play will end if the mystery is solved so she has to decide will she catch a criminal do or job prevent more potential murders or will she somehow prevent the the end of the play and make sure that she and her i guess associates keep existing so we  have three real characters one living proper detective finian is the one who arrives on the scene and discovers that we're in a play we have stefan and we have diane they are brother and sister they both accuse each other of murdering their butler lane who is the living prop lane is actually in this production played by me lane has no dialogue does not move you know he's  not that whole there's the whole concept of the afterlife and there's the question of well what if there isn't anything at all i think is something that is truly terrifying and if we except that there's nothing and that we just become nothing lost like tears in the rain i think is the quote from blade runner you know how do we deal with that do we accept it i think we should do we fight against it is there a point to fighting against it that's something that i wanted to explore however briefly in my play i think it's more practical i wanted the opening of the play  sees diane and stefan are two suspects standing over the body of lane one of them is holding a knife and saying i didn't do it and i just thought that was a great way to just grab the audience immediately they're aware that something has happened there's a body on stage there's a knife you know and they know that foul play is afoot and right away i think they'll be interested to see what's going on so i wanted i wanted that scene and then i really felt that the body had to be a person rather than a dummy or just suggested with pantomime because it just i think it  grounds the play very well because it's about death it's about nonexistence and just having a body there really puts that in front of the audience and helps dramatize the effect it also gives the character something to  do you know they're messing with the body they're kicking it they're asking questions and that's something i think is really important again coming back to the drama station we can't have our characters just standing around talking to each other they need to interact with each other and with different props in order to make this worth watching and not just reading about the hardest character to write for i think is diane stefan has a dark sense of humor which is one that i share so he was very easy detective is the straight man character the one that the audience i think is going to empathize with the most because the detective like the audience is surprise that what's going on you know this world is new to both the detective and the audience  and that left diane she eventually decides to try and help the detective prevent the solution of the murder but starts off as kind of a selfish socialite and i wanted to make her as distinct as possible which is a challenge because the straight man is very just asking questions she's very relatable the darkly humorous one is one that i can just i can write five of those right now if you wanted me to but i needed diane to be something special and so i had to take extra care to make sure that that happened this is actually the first one that i've completed i've written a few other things here and there that i wasn't really happy with and that never really kind of came together but this is a great moment for me because it's the first play that i consider finished it's the first one that i'm going to get some more material out there honestly it's the hardest thing you have to finish that first draft what's really prevented me from doing anything is getting partially through the first draft and then looking back on it guessing second guessing it criticizing it or too early and saying this isn't very good and trying to revise it then but really you have to get it out on paper get it finished so to speak just you know beginning middle end of the play just on paper and then go back and edit it tear it apart and put it back together refine it whatever you know phrase you want to use but i think it's the hardest part is getting that first draft complete and it's also i think the most important part because after that you know you have something in front of you that you can tweak and refine and show to people but if it's not like a finished first draft and you're  ok you have no idea what is going on and your brothers like i know i know what dante does ok but i would also know my brother and i know he's not involved in any of that book he came over here to talk to