zeekie: take two.

I went to see a play yesterday, and J. J. Abrams's latest movie today. There aren't many similarities between the two, but there is a striking one: both use rambling openings to motivate the rest of their respective stories.

The difference between the two openings, though, is that the one in The Sea Farer vastly overstays its welcome.

Practically the entire first of the two acts is given over to establishing the background of the characters. It's necessary to know that the two brothers in the play share an uneasy relationship. It's necessary to know that brother A's wife has left him for another man. There are many other things that are necessary to know. But the way The Sea Farer pushes out these bits of information is to have long talks between the characters, talks that have nothing to do with the central engine of the play, which is the arrival of a Satan figure that will bring these tensions to a boil.

It's obvious by now that I did not particularly like The Sea Farer. I thought it could have been done a lot more efficiently, especially since the exposition was so painfully long. Two-thirds into the first act I was already annoyed by the aimless repartee, which was at times clever but at no times 'angled' in any particular direction. The problem with something like that is that it could potentially go on forever: it stinks of the playwright needing to get this and that information out, and so the progression of the story feels inorganic; by the time the actual story starts what follows seems almost divorced from what came before.

It would be like if I info-dumped about the chronological history of a couple for 100 pages, and then started the next and last 100 pages with one of them dying, and the consequences of that death. Wouldn't it be more streamlined to locate the history within the aftermath of the death? That was the question I had the entire time I was watching The Sea Farer: wouldn't it be more polished if the Devil came in at the beginning? It would certainly have made the play more cohesive.

And then, of course, today I saw J. J. Abrams's Cloverfield, which had the exact same problem. Except in the movie it was excused by two reasons: whereas in The Sea Farer the arrival of the Devil was predicated on certain things that happened in the characters' pasts, the introduction of the monsters in Cloverfield was in no way connected to anything in the characters' pasts. This means that it's more formally appropriate to the story being told to have the monsters appear from nowhere - because they really do appear from nowhere.

The second and more important reason, however, is that the frigging opening is short.

I think these two comparisons have given me some useful tips:

1) When your opening has nothing to do with your main story, and is primarily a way to shove in some backstory, it's probably best to keep it short. Clever writing will only buy you so much time.

2) It's probably best not to use a disconnected opening to begin with. But then again this could be my personal preference; for a story to be a cohesive, inevitable whole.