Rejecting and rejection

I caught an interesting bit of a piece Ken Ashford put up on his blog ("The Seventh Sense")recently that was notes from "rehearsing a musical" (in my opinion, those notes applied to more than just musicals!!). It basically states: A director is someone who should be 100% open to listening to comments from everyone and anyone -- and should be fully prepared to reject 80% of those comments afterwards.

It's my humble opinion that there should be a corollary to this law for playwrights. While many of the thoughts and comments I've received from individuals on my first two plays have been interesting, useful or at least have caused reflection and reconsideration, that is certainly not universally true. At the bottom line, creative works are the author's vision, and you have to try to a certain extent to continue to be truthful to that vision, but yet with as much objectivity as you can possibly muster.

This is a long lead-in to reporting that my hopes for "All About Faith" with a theater company in Washington, D.C. did not bear fruit. There were just too many differences between the reader's viewpoint on the play and my own conception, and belief, about the play, what it is about, where it is set and so on. So along with accepting that it did not entirely work for that individual, I still had to reject that particular set of commentaries and continue to believe in the play as it is written.

We'll see whether that holds up in practice! If I hear the same comments over and over again, I'll have to reconsider my stand.

Nevertheless, I have had many a year of rejection of articles, stories and novel-length works -- and in many cases, at least the articles and stories eventually found homes with someone who read the piece a different way. It's not the first, and probably far from the last, time for someone to say "no" to a work of mine.

So now the script is with two other theater companies, both in N.C., for a look, and I have some feelers out to other places. So far. It won't do any good sitting in a pile of scripts in my office or as a file on my computer. I have faith that "Faith" will come home to a stage somewhere, somehow, some time.

Meanwhile, the ticking clock on notification, one way or another, of the "Conversations in a Cafe" grant request is ... two and one half months. Tick tick tick.