It's Done!

 

               I am no longer a theatre director.   

     Honestly, I look at those words and still get a chill. Directing plays for a number of theatres in middle America has not only been my main source of income for years, but has also provided warm enjoyment in the form of both identity and tact authority. In only two weeks my emails have dropped from sixty a day to four.      

     Pretty drastic, that. I feel like I have purposely thrown myself off the edge of the earth. And perhaps I have.

     But I had to do it. I consider myself a writer, but the last play of mine to be produced was two years ago. And it was one I had written twenty years before …  

     “Are you going to go see it,” my agent asked.

     “I’ve seen it a gazillion times,” I replied.

     “There’s an extra couple of hundred in it for us if you attend on opening night.” Note the word US.

     “Okay, I’ll think about it,” I replied. In the back of my mind I hear, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends …”

     “Is it a long drive,” I ask.

     “It’s in Glasgow, Scotland.”

     “That’s a long drive,” I concede. I live in Ohio. I can’t even SEE Scotland from here.

     So. I am out of the directing business and back into writing. I have a play in progress that I think will be the best thing I have written. It has been sitting twenty pages from completion for over a year now.

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     And I have taken a perverse enjoyment in watching the piranha-like fight over the two plays from which I have walked away. I will miss you, my friends – miss you dearly. My consolation will be that I will be no longer directing what I should be writing.