Introduction to “Wile Away Hogwash: A Short Play”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/09
Introduction by Scott Douglas Jacobsen
I found this piece while coming upon another trove of material to archive in the Jacobsen Bank. As it turns out, I have more work to do here. I wrote this in a Canadian secondary school, somewhere between Grade 9 and Grade 11, for a drama class. I ended up directing the play. It has some personal, emotive tones that incorporate my life story. The essential take, upon re-review as an adult, is a poetical meta-verse drama. There is a Young Woman writer inspired by an Old Man telling a tale—a tale of a Father and a Son in reconciliation after a mother’s suicide. The Frame is a bench that encloses the inner story, connecting the kitchen to the bench. A play within a play calling to resolutions and relations across timespans outside of its premise.
Scene 1 opens with a ‘tale to tell.’ Lights shift to Scene 2, with Scene 3 returning to steer the tone, while Scene 5 provides a resolution on the bench. The final scene hints that the Old Man is the Son grown up, while the Woman sends a “hello” to his father. The story pivots from a question of who to blame to a question of why for understanding. The themes of repentance, apology, and resolution sit within it. The Son’s misdirected anger and the Father’s apology for failing to console. A resolution to the writer’s block for the finished script, to “possess a success.” Is this the play itself, or a play on the meta-verse once more?
Symbols and motifs are simple: bench, book, briefcase, watch, and writing binder. The dramaturgical elements are a split stage with clean fading from an inner story to a breath and reset. The physicality represents the spectrum of caution and trust with an offer of a seat, a matched posture, and delayed eye contact. Everything means something here, signifiers. The bench is a reconciliation ground for empathic alignment. The book and briefcase represent a container of a story. The writing binder is a visible embodiment of creative healing, of our narratives to do so, in time. The watch is time, as it beats before reconciliation. He checks the watch, then waits–as we all do, at some time.
The beat design is a cough interrupting. It is an anaphora. It is a projected shock in ‘die.’ There are couplets and triplets for a lift, while a slant in rhymes to roughen the conflict, and then tighter rhymes signal sealing resolutions. When I wanted to drive more momentum, I incorporated denser alliteration. While the modulative score represents orientations in vocal dynamics to guide the story, they are part of various symmetries and asymmetries hidden in plain sight and sound of the audience. It is an inner story with elevated and archaic diction, with colloquial playful rhymes, even casual conversational rhythms. A domestic tragedy core built on Shakespearean closure with a pluralistic postmodern frame, and an absurdist bench minimalism to temper question opening and one answer closing.
Scenes 1, 3, and 5 are frames, and 2 and 4 are Inner with 3-2 as nested, i.e., framed upbeat and inner grave. The bench is both opening and reconciliation with mirrored sitting. The pre-reunion and the post-hug are two 5-second resets for a balanced act. The up, down, up, down, up, etc., arc ends positively, while the music bookends on a 37th-second entrance and a 52nd-second exit. Anger leads to inquiry, then joint truth-telling, followed by embrace and catharsis. Onstage represents the full-engulfing breaking of the fourth wall, with the onstage catharsis representing or modelling art’s power to process loss. While the metatheatrical wink comes with “here comes the twist, I do not exist” with a soft, gentle foregrounding of the fiction evaporating and leaving real feelings.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
August 14, 2025
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