February 17, 2003

I have to admit right off the bat… I don’t quite know what I’m doing here. Mr. Chris Ryall - Editor-in-Chief of this extraordinary site - asked me to write about how I came up with my play, THE STAR WARS TRILOGY IN 30 MINUTES. I’m not entirely sure how the bizarre idea for this play came to fruition and how several years later it still keeps going. No matter what obstacles come at us, the play continues to do well and people seem to enjoy it. I don’t know why. I just know that we have a good time when we do it and so does the audience. It’s as though we’re all kids again and we don’t have to worry about bills, relationship problems, or anything else. We’re just concerned with large hairy creatures that have nothing to do with puberty and people shooting guns at us saying “choo”. This is the story of how we make saving the universe far more concise and a little more goofy.

The thing about playwriting is that you can actually make people say things that you want them to say in front of an audience who laughs if it works. So in 1995 after my first play did well, I wanted to do more of this writing thing and took a class called Experimentals, offered by the USC School of Theatre. In the class, you and your classmates would chose a few plays, rehearse throughout the semester, and then at the end of the semester you would perform them. The summer before, a comedy troupe I was part of did a performance of Mr. Tom Stoppard’s FIFTEEN MINUTE HAMLET. My mind percolating for something that I could write and perform in this class, I thought of what could be the HAMLET-equivalent for today’s generation. HAMLET’s all well and good, but let’s be honest… Stoppard took the easy way out. And yes, let’s give this Shakespeare his due. HAMLET is great with all the flowery language and swordfights, not to mention all the dysfunctional family business. But in the end did Shakespeare have Wookies, spaceships, and the ability to move things by thinking about it…did the bard ever have a bounty hunter with a jetpack? As a matter of fact, he did not. STAR WARS did. STAR WARS has swordfights just like HAMLET and family dysfunction that far surpasses HAMLET’s trivial indiscretions. With STAR WARS, you have a father that tortures his daughter, a son that tries to kill his father (and vice versa), and a brother and sister that kiss each other much more intently and inappropriately than they should. And let’s not forget that skimpy gold bikini.

So following Mr. Stoppard’s lead and mixing in my childhood glee of STAR WARS, I had the idea to shrink the STAR WARS TRILOGY down to thirty minutes. I sat down with the scripts from the films and began to figure out what was important to the tale and what wasn’t. I wanted the play to make sense even to people who had never seen the films and I wanted to incorporate as much of the great moments and lines from the films as possible. (Now, Stoppard had to reduce a play that runs over three hours and I was taking three films than ran over six hours. Of course, HAMLET has more language, but STAR WARS has more special effects, so again I say Stoppard is a hack and I am truly an inspired madman. Basically this is just my attempt to create a West Coast/Brit Coast rivalry between myself and Mr. Stoppard…of course, he has won many awards and I have nothing to claim but a red wifflesaber. Westside!) After a couple weeks, I had a first draft. A longish first draft, but a start though.

With ten people in the class, we gave roles fairly easily. The young blonde guy was Luke, the spunky dark-haired woman was Leia, and our Leia’s actual boyfriend would be our Han Solo, which helped as they had a feisty real-life relationship similar to their characters in the films. I was Yoda (and for awhile Han Solo until someone brought me a mirror), an extremely tall guy was both Darth Vader and Chewbacca, and I cast an attractive woman as Jabba the Hutt as that’s what I had left to choose from and I thought it might be funny. (It was an attempt at a joke along the lines of “Look, they have some one who’s attractive and with a large bosom playing the disgusting Jabba the Hutt! Now that’s funny. Ha ha ha.” Except it wasn’t anything close to funny, although it did create some disgustingly odd feelings of desire for Jabba the Hutt.) Our final piece of casting had to occur outside of the class. With THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, there’s a bold revelation midway through the films that amongst the aliens and copious amounts of white people, there happens to be a black man in the STAR WARS universe. For me, I had a good friend (some of my best friends are black people) who I asked point blank if he wanted to be our token black man. Thankfully, Mr. Howard D. William Yates agreed and became as brilliant a Lando Calrissian as anyone could imagine. Between him and A.J. Towne (who played C3PO), they did virtually all of the sound effects for the show in a way that would make Michael Winslow proud. (I apologize for the POLICE ACADEMY reference and want to state that there’s no truth to the rumours that we’re doing those films next.)

Moving from the peeps to the props, many of the jokes in the play were in there from the beginning, some even before the beginning. Our X-Wing battle on the Death Star came from a directing class before I even thought of doing this play. In a class one day, our professor told us to create a scene using three people and three chairs. Now while virtually everyone else had restaurant scenes, I thought of something else. I had the three actors flip the folding chairs over their heads so that they looked like spaceships and had myself a little goofy space battle. I like that sort of thing, trying to do things outside of convention, much like my comedic heroes have (allowing me to now give a shout out to MONTY PYTHON, KIDS IN THE HALL, SCTV, the first decade of SNL, Eddie Izzard, and Andy Kaufman). So I wanted to not just use the stage for the performance but the entire theatre. Thankfully, with all that goes on in STAR WAR,S it’s easy - we have “holograms” pop up in the aisle next to you, often you feel uncomfortable as to where an Ewok might spring from, and we give you the feeling of a Tie Fighter zooming by your head. (Of course, we’re always happy when that Tie Fighter doesn’t careen into the audience as well.)

Soon, we were a couple weeks before the show was to go up. At the time, I was performing in another play that I wrote plus I was directing a Harold Pinter play on top of being the writer/director/Yoda of this play. It was total madness, and in the weeks before performances, you’re amazed you’re able to function. After one of our final rehearsals before our tech week, I began to freak out. I didn’t know if we should do the play at all. There were a number of reasons: it was incredibly sloppy, we had been working on it so long that I wasn’t sure if it was funny or even made sense any more. I voiced this concern to the cast and suggested that maybe we should just do the first film in ten minutes and cut our losses. At that point, the glorious Maia Peters (our first and current Princess Leia who’s terrific right now in our run in Los Angeles) made a moving speech reasonably, rightfully, and passionately imploring us to move forward and do what we set out to do in performing the full trilogy in thirty minutes. Although I can’t recall anything she said in this speech, she stated so convincingly that the show would work that I wanted to bear her children. (Even if I had to have C-sections or pop the kids out my butt.)

With that speech, we continued forth and the show went incredibly well. Those who attended laughed heartily. In fact, one of those audience members at one of those first shows was our one true and future Jabba the Hutt - Michael Cornacchia. He cackled so much through the thing that he almost became a part of that performance, our own Salacious Crumb. Following the proof that the show was funny and had potential, we got permission to take the show on the road and perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of USC’s Festival Theatre USC-USA program.

Since then, we’ve been doing it in Edinburgh, Scotland to rave reviews and sold out audiences for the past several years. We were also invited to be an opening play of the French American Centre in Paris, where even the French (yes, the French) loved it. Last summer, we even performed it for George Lucas as guests at Skywalker Ranch, which is another story altogether. We’ve been running since October for our first year of doing it in the U.S. here in Los Angeles, much to the delight of ubergeeks, small children, WB stars, and a host of others from every demographic you can imagine.

All in all, it has been a tremendous ride. Getting to write a column for this site is just another example of the fraud I’ve perpetrated by creating this goofy play and cashing in on it. It’s a play that’s more like a comedic sketch, so much so that the LOS ANGELES TIMES said that we recall “the glory days of Second City, if not the earlier, funny episodes of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.” It’s this comment that pleases me most as when I selected and directed this cast, I felt truly honored working with as talented a group of actors you could ask for and I know in this cast we have many that will be the next Belushi, Ackroyd, Mike Myers, and so on. We are not your regular theatre experience and hopefully we never will be. If you like to laugh (and we have several belly laughs in the play) and you don’t have time to wait for salesmen to die and Russians to love their orchards, then give us a try. We’re insane and we have a damn good time making anyone laugh. We are the guerrillas of comedy and we want you to be our next target.

Patrick is the writer and director of THE STAR WARS TRILOGY IN 30 MINUTES, now appearing every Friday at 9 PM and 10:30 PM and each Saturday night at 10:30 PM at the Coronet Theatre (Upstairs) in Los Angeles through March 1. For more information, check out SW30.com or find tickets at Ticketmaster.com or contact TM at (213) 480-3232. The Coronet Theatre (home to PUPPETRY OF THE PENIS as well) is located at 366 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048, (310) 657-7377.

To get more information on writer/director/uncle Owen Patrick Gorman, check out his Web site. And for an earlier write-up of the show here at Movie Poop Shoot, click here.

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