ROUGH DRAFT closed today after a limited run. I surprise
myself by being more disappointed in that fact than I expected to be.
Certainly the fact of closing doesn’t bother me. I
have written many plays, they all have an opening night, a run, a close, and –
hopefully – someone somewhere will pick them up and the whole process starts
again. Hopefully.
And I wasn’t
expecting a great deal from the company that optioned ROUGH DRAFT. They are the
“Shots In The Dark Independent Theatre Company.” … uh-huh. A young group this,
figuratively and literally. To my jaded eyes they were children of the old
Mickey Rooney school – “Wow, gang, let’s get a barn and do a show!” (And, I
suspect, they picked my show to produce because it purposely is inexpensive to
stage.)
Further, I knew
from the one rehearsal I saw, they were largely inexperienced in the comedic
timing necessary to pace this thing correctly.
But – I give them
this – they had talent. On each performance night they learned something new,
and the show was improving measurably by the time the run ended.
So. Will this
work be done again? I suspect it will. Audiences liked it. But I would have
liked to have seen this group have a
handful of more shots at it, just to see how far they could have taken it.
j
