Wisdom's Kiss (60 page)

Deleted dragon scene
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Wisdom's Kiss

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Queen of All the Heavens

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Excerpts from
Princess Ben

Author Commentary: Queen of All the Heavens
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So: who's "Anonymous"? Who's the talentless hack who wrote this
Queen of All the Heavens
fluff? Do you know?

The biggest clue—a dead giveaway, really—can be found in Dizzy's last diary entry. Next is Dizzy's fourth diary entry, where she four times quotes the words "queen of all the heavens"; the phrase ends up—coincidentally enough!—the title of the play. Later, Dizzy concludes her sixth entry with "It is my love come to me at last!"—a line that Princess Wisdom in
Queen of the All the Heavens
repeats on the very next page. Dizzy's diary and
Queen
are the only two voices that use "O" for "Oh." It's also notable that Princess Wisdom is the only character who appears in every scene of
Queen of All the Heavens,
and
Queen of All the Heavens
includes intimate conversations between Roger and her, Ben and her, and Tips and her. I do love Dizzy's statement that someone writing a play "would need great skill with a pen." I'm not sure how much skill she ultimately displays, though in the intervening decades she at least learns how to punctuate.

As far as my writing of
Queen of All the Heavens
goes, I can say this: it began life as a meandering and anachronistic
screenplay
that clearly needed to be changed to
something
—what, I did not know, but the script definitely had to go. In converting it to a play, I was forced, so sadly, to delete all the descriptive passages, though I did manage to recycle Roger's outfit into Felis's
wedding-day attire
. The bigger problem, though, was that I'd never written a play and hadn't a clue how to go about it. So—aim high, right?—I dug out my college editions of Shakespeare's
Tempest
and
King Lear
and set to work studying the master.

I learned that Shakespeare himself did not write stage directions (you know, those italicized bits such as "Steve exits stage left" or "Mrs. Burrbottom collapses") but instead wove them into the dialogue. Hence lines such as "Approach, My Ariel, come"—a cue that the actor playing Ariel needs to walk onstage. Well! I decided to follow Shakespeare's lead and omit stage directions from my play, too. Unfortunately this proved impossible. But the italicized bits in
Queen of All the Heavens
remain minimal, and my Shakespearean efforts can be seen in such lines as Roger's "I fall to one knee to beg your hand in marriage"—a cue that the actor playing Roger needs to kneel.

The prose, too, I ornamented a la Shakespeare—not that it's in the same ballpark, or even the same time zone, but I was trying at least to evoke that mood. Plus it seemed to me that Dizzy, even though (or perhaps because) she was working anonymously, would imbue every line with histrionic passion. For all her faults, the girl certainly loves to feel, and I can easily picture her camping it up onstage. And not just Dizzy, either:
Queen of All the Heavens
is a blast to read aloud. You should try it.