Five Plays

At the moment I am in the process of writing five plays simultaneously.

I never planned to do that - who would?

Two of the plays are on commission. Fortunately they are both short - twenty minutes each. One is about politics, the other is open to whatever I want (so it's about politics as well. The first company will get a choice.)

Play three is actually one my wife and I wrote together six years ago, and has spent its life sitting on a shelf. Her book, PAINTING THE RAIN, is a novelized version of the play. In short, people started asking about the play, so it is being dusted off and polished.

Play four is another co-author deal. I have a friend (another contest winning playwright), and we are writing a play together about elves. (Not Elvis - elves!) Since she lives in another state, we email dialogue back and forth in Dropbox. So far this has been quite enjoyable.

And play five is, I suppose, another political. A man is running for President, and bit by bit you discover he is in an asylum and mentally ... uh ... insecure. The point here being that anyone who runs for President (and has any clue at all in regard to what's going to happen to him) cannot possibly be entirely sane, Cute idea. I hope it works.

That's it for now. More later.

j

ROUGH DRAFT closes well

     

 

   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

 

 

 

 

Ta-d-a-a-a-a-a ,,,,