Three's a Community

A few years ago I started working on a series of minimalist plays for three characters called "Trio Bagatelles." I'm still working on it. The title comes from an early prose series of mine, "Bagatelles," which I consider a breakthrough in my writing. "Bagatelles" was a minimalist prose series dealing with the dynamics and absurdities of communication in a relationship. About seven years later I wrote a piece called "Dirty Windows," in a similar mode, but in the third person instead of the first. Somehow when I added a third character, about twenty years later, I went from prose to play. If the first two pieces were about a relationship, I suppose "Trio Bagatelles" is about a micro-community, which is also a kind of relationship.

I hadn't actually been thinking about the community angle, but when Mark Givens told me recently that he was working on a "Community" issue of Mung Being it clicked.

Read Excerpts from "Trio Bagatelles" in Mung Being.