To Create Something Magical

Over the summer, I listened to the audiobook version of Neil Gaiman's "'M' is for 'Magic'". It's a collection of short stories of his, and I really enjoyed it. Some of the stories are strange, and some are funny, and some are a little in appropriate for kids. What actually stuck with me the most from the book was the introduction, read by Neil Gaiman himself (as was the rest of the book). I'll copy it in here, because I listened to it again last night, and it got me thinking in similar ways about "The Dining Room":
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When I was young - and it doesn't really seem that long ago - I loved books of short stories. Short stories could be read from start to finish in the kind of times I had available for reading; morning break, or after lunch nap, or on trains. They'd set up, they'd roll and they'd take you to a new world and deliver you safely back to school or back home in half an hour, or so.

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them, or what the story was called, or sometimes you might forget precisely what happened. But if a story touches you, it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Horror stays with you hardest. If it brings a real chill to the back of your neck, if once the story is done you find yourself closing the book slowly for fear of disturbing something, and creeping away, then it's there for the rest of time. There was a story I read when I was nine that ended with a room covered with snails (I think they were probably man-eating snails) and they were crawling slowly toward someone to eat him. I get the same creeps remembering it now that I did when I read it.

Fantasy gets into your bones. There's a curve in a road I sometimes pass; a view of a village on rolling green hills and behind it huger, craggier, grayer hills, and in the distance mountains and mist, that I cannot see without remembering reading "The Lord of the Rings". The book is somewhere inside me, and that view brings it to the surface.

And science fiction (although, there's only a little of that here, I'm afraid) takes you across the stars and into other times and minds. There's nothing like spending some time inside an alien head to remind us how little divides us, person from person.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They're journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner. I've been writing short stories for almost a quarter of a century now. In the beginning they were a great way to begin to learn my craft as a writer; the hardest thing to do as a young writer is to finish something, and that was what I was learning how to do.

These days, most of the things I write are long: long comics or long books or long films, and a short story, something that's finished and over in a weekend or a week, is pure fun. My favorite short story writers as a boy are, many of them, my favorite short story writers now: people like Saki, or Harlan Ellison; like John Collier, or Ray Bradbury. Close-up conjurers who, with just twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks could make you laugh and break your heart, all in a handful of pages. There's another good thing about a book of short stories: you don't have to like them all. If there's one you don't enjoy, well, there'll be another one along soon.

The stories in here will take you from a hard-boiled detective story about nursery rhyme characters to a group of people who like to eat things; from a poem about how to behave if you find yourself in a fairy tale, to a story about a boy who runs into a troll beneath a bridge, and the bargain they make. There's a story that will be part of my next children's book, "The Graveyard Book", about a boy who lives in a graveyard and is brought up by dead people. And there's a story that I wrote when I was a very young writer called, "How To Sell the Ponty Bridge", a fantasy story inspired by a man named Count Victor Lustig who really did sell the Eiffel Tower in much the same way, and who died in Alcatraz Prison some years later. There are a couple of slightly scary stories, and a couple of mostly funny ones, and a bunch of them that aren't quite one thing or another; but I hope you'll like them anyway.

When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like, and he published them as "'R' is for 'Rocket' and 'S' is for 'Space'". Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book, "'M' is for 'Magic'"; he didn't.

"M" is for "magic". All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises.
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I love Neil Gaiman's comments on how stories stay with us; I've often thought of human beings as sponges, absorbing ideas and experiences that may not always be on the forefront of our minds, but they are always with us, inside of us, shaping us into the slightly new person we are each day.

I began to think about "The Dining Room" as a collection of short stories. It's certainly an applicable parallel; the play as a whole is a collection of short scenes, with unconnected characters and no continuous plot. While I think every scene is amazing, I'm probably biased, and I'm sure the audience has favorites and least favorites. Short stories may be "pure fun" to an experienced writer like Gaiman, but I think they would be challenging. Getting the reader interested, creating a coherent plot and characters with some depth is a fair challenge to rise to when you're working with ten or twenty pages. At least, I think so.

I feel that "The Dining Room" is a similar challenge, one that I've enjoyed working with. Gurney is able to reveal some real bits of humanity in his characters in a matter of five or six minutes of dialogue. What I love about theatre is that it's a team effort: as talented as Gurney is, it's not just his words that create these characters, but it's a combination of his script, Julia's direction, and our performances and choices as actors. Within the framework of Gurney's writing and Julia's direction is where I as a performer have the space to create and to express myself.

The entire process of theatre really seems magical to me, a unique experience and creative outlet that I believe every person, at some point in their lives, should utilize. What I love about it is that letters and words are not the only tools for creating the magic of live theatre; human beings are tools themselves, the pallets on which and through which and by which that mysterious, wonderful thing called "art" can be created. Our minds and hearts move our bodies through space and time, interacting with each other and with the characters, and, hopefully, finding some humanity in them with which to empathize. I think that's how "acting" can become real, and genuine, and only then is the audience truly impacted. No one is impressed by a mask, but when someone takes the mask off and reveals their real, vulnerable self - in this case, through the medium of Gurney's characters - that is what leaves people laughing, crying, or absorbed in thought.