Bound: the backstory

I have not been keeping y’all up-to-date on the progress of Bound, the play I’ve written. Our Story So Far is that Your Humble Blogger wrote a play, and that there is going to be a staged reading in a church. The church is in a town where I’ve done some acting, and it’s the home church of my Dear Director, and it’s a nice space, so that’s all good. And the play has a biblical theme, which makes it fit, too.

So. Let’s start with the play itself. It was inspired (essentially) by an Elie Wiesel lecture I attended more than ten years ago. That was the first time I heard the midrash that dealt with the Akedah. In Hebrew, the events of Genesis 22 are traditionally called the Akedah, the binding, rather than the sacrifice, since Isaac isn’t actually sacrificed, but is bound to the altar. Anyway, the Rabbis ask themselves a few questions, in the way they have: who are the two servants that are unnamed in the Scripture? How old is Isaac at the time of the Binding? How early in the morning does Abraham get up? OK, not all the questions are really interesting, but some of them are. Well, and the Rabbis reason that as the event that immediately follows the Akedah is Sarah’s death, that the Akedah takes place immediately before Sarah’s death, and since we know how old Sarah is when Isaac was born, and we know how old she was when she died, we can easily discover that at the time of the Akedah, Isaac was... thirty-seven. And the two servants? Well, one of them is Eliezar of Damascus, of course, as he is generally the one identified as the unnamed servant when there is one. The other one is identified as Ishmael.

Yes, Ishmael from Genesis 16 and 21:9-21, expelled from Abraham’s house along with his mother, and exposed to a horrible death in the wilderness before the Divine reveals a well. They don’t explain what Ishmael is doing back in Abraham’s house, twenty-odd years later, but there are a handful of midrashic conversations between an adult Ishmael and an adult Isaac, so, fine. He’s back. And those four people: Abraham, Isaac (adult and unmarried), Ishmael (adult, married, disowned but returned), and Eliezar (the trusted old family servant) all go out on three-day hike that ends up on Mount Moriah with an altar and a knife.

Wow, thought I to myself, what a great idea for a play! And I started noodling out some ideas for a play, and actually wrote out half of a scene here and a few lines there. I wanted to include Sarah, but I wasn’t sure how, and I wanted to include Satan—there’s a fascinating midrash that says that not only did Sarah’s death immediately follow the Akedah, but the Akedah caused Sarah’s death, because the Adversary visited Sarah to tell her that Abraham had sacrificed Isaac, and she died of grief. Or that when Abraham returned without Isaac (in the Scripture, Abraham clearly comes down the mountain alone), Sarah died of grief. Or when Isaac returned (magically and instantaneously transported at the moment of Divine Mercy), she was so overjoyed at the piety shown by her husband and her son that her heart burst. But I liked the idea of Satan sneaking back from Moriah to tattle on the boys.

And at the time, I was focused, at least somewhat, on the idea of Male Bonding that was very big in the late 80s and early 90s. There was a lot of talk about the importance of the Dad going camping with the Son, and how this masculine activity was necessary for the Son to grow up secure in his Manliness, blah blah blah. And it was easy to see the Akedah as a comment on that, with this image of Abraham and the boys going camping and leaving Sarah behind, and then she, you know, dies. The idea of Male Bonding passed out of our national conversation somewhat, after that, and I couldn’t really figure out how to make Sarah a character, or an interesting character, which would be harder. And I couldn’t figure out what to do with the characters on the way, and so on. So for more than ten years, I thought about it as this great idea for a play, but I hadn’t written it, and I had no idea how to write it.

Then, a couple of years ago I suppose it was, I came up with The Structure. Which goes like this: there are three Acts, each with three scenes, corresponding to the three days and the three daily prayer services. Each Act has scene one in the late afternoon and scene three in the morning, bracketing scene two, which is a nighttime visit to one of the characters from Satan. Act One, scene two is Satan visiting Ishmael; Act Two, scene two is Satan visiting Eliezar; and Act Three, scene two is Satan visiting Isaac. Satan’s purpose (as it is in stories from the midrash as well as the hadith, the Islamic not-really-anything-like-an-equivalent equivalent) is to prevent Abraham from sacrificing Isaac; I love this, because of course Abraham doesn’t sacrifice Isaac, so Satan wins, right? Only sort of. Anyway, the Structure. I added a brief Act Three, scene four so that Abraham could come down from the mountain. That takes away from my elegant triples, but I think it’s necessary—although that’s one of the things I’ll be trying to figure out in the reading next month.

Anyway, after coming up with the Structure, it didn’t take very long to write the play itself. A few weeks, during which I fortunately had the opportunity to spend long chunks of time uninterrupted in front of the computer, and then some intensive work with my personal dramaturge (OK, she’s other people’s volunteer dramaturge as well, but that’s not the point) and then I held on to it for a while, until my Dear Director was finished with the play she was Dearly Directing and could read it and give me an almost-objective opinion about it. And she recognized that the next step was for me to hear other people read it, and arranged for it to happen with an audience and everything.

And I think that brings us up nearly to the present. Sometime later this week, I’ll write about the casting and other things that have come up. It’s all fascinating, I promise. Well, I promise that I’ll be fascinated.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.