Into the new year we go

Somehow when I wasn't looking, New Year's slipped by and the first month of 2012 is nearly half-gone. Busy is, I guess, better than sitting around with nothing to do. If only I had more to show for it ....

But the exciting moment for me for early this year is just around the corner -- a group of actor friends once again convening in our den to read the latest full-length script out loud. "Rehearsals" is going to be given the treatment this coming Sunday afternoon, and I can't wait. Not only do I think it will be fun, and good to see a lot of those folks again, but I think this may be the most commercial and marketable script I've written. We'll see, of course, but after the reading and revisions, I can put the script out there and see what happens.

And, though I've said this before, I have hopes of wrapping up the one-act "Patent" before the month is out. Hope so, anyway.

We haven't seen a lot of shows recently, but that's about to change, too. More reports, and soon, from area theater.

Meanwhile, I have been working on cleaning up the layout and promoting the print copies of my first published novel, A SIMPLE MURDER. It has chewed up a fair amount of work time outside of the playwriting realm, but all for the best, I believe. Getting known as a writer isn't easy, but it won't do itself.

Should be back soon with more comments and the aftermath of the reading!

And 2011 is (nearly) a wrap!

It has been 10 plays since I last updated the blog, so it is well past time to get caught up.

First, on the writing front, I last reported nearing completion of the first draft of "Rehearsals," a full-length comedy. That first draft did get done; two of my favorite first readers gave it a once-over; suggestions led to a fairly significant re-thinking of act two; and that work was completed not long ago. We are casting a hopefully fun "den reading" of the script for mid-January, and that's going well. So I'm printing out reading copies and looking forward to seeing how my actor friends and acquaintances react to the show. Let the fun (I hope) begin!

Meanwhile, I need to get focus moved on to a shorter play (one act, most likely) that I've been fiddling with on and off for a while now. Hopefully the year will not end without a full draft of "Patent" completed. I don't have a one-act in my repertoire, and this seems like the right length for this particular story.

My wife and I meanwhile continued a lively schedule of playgoing since the last report. We started with a trip west to Abingdon, Virginia - a favored destination of Barter Theatre there -- to see the second play they've done this year by the playwriting team of Duke Ernsberger and Virginia Cate. This one was "Dracula Bites," a comedy based around one of Duke's early acting experiences in community theater -- with the crazed director, actors coming and going, stagecraft issues and so on. There were moments that I was very glad I had put the finished first draft of "Rehearsals" in Kathy's hands literally the day before we went. There are, let's say, some similarities though the specifics are measurably different. A fun, and funny, experience, especially since we got to speak with Duke in person again, some time after our "Margaret Mitchell" experience in Kernersville.

We then saw a fine production of A Doll House at Triad Stage, and over at UNCG, a powerful "Self Defense, or The Death of Some Salesmen," based on the Aileen Wuornos story. Our friend Mike Shapiro from "Conversations" and the "All About Faith" reading was in it. A young woman playing the character based on Wuornos gave a brave and strong performance along with an excellent ensemble.

We also saw Clemmons Community Theatre's "Red Velvet Cake Wars," which I didn't find as strong a script as some of that writing team's other works; and took in readings of three new plays up in Asheville at the SART New Play gathering. We particularly liked one called "The Vanishing Point," about a family in Louisiana.

A week later, we saw a production of Lanford Wilson's "The Rimers of Eldritch" at Theatre Alliance. Awesome ensemble, and both interesting and challenging to watch. Which is what made it so good.

On November 15th, after a variety of "challenges," KLT put on a 5-minute skit to help kick off the Kernersville Chamber of Commerce's annual banquet. They had chosen a Back to the Future theme for the overall event, so I got to write the skit and Kathy chose to direct it. I couldn't be there, but despite all the challenges, the cast of five pulled it off quite well -- and to my great pleasure (we just got a copy of the video), the laugh lines all worked and people seemed to enjoy it. Kind of fun to be part of something like that.

After some time off theater for a fun family Thanksgiving, we started the month of December with Kernersville Little Theatre's Doris Baizley adaptation of "A Christmas Carol," very ably and creatively directed by Adam Sullivan -- who also ended up stepping into a lead role late in the process. We found it very enjoyable. As we did No Rules Theatre Company's production of the inventive musical, "The Last Five Years," just last night. A very pleasing production indeed.

And with that, believe it as you may, we have probably reached the end of our theater-going for 2011. I could be forgetting something, or something else could crop up, but I think we are over and out until January. I think I'll survive.

Time in the theater

The last post has proven to be quite accurate -- the last month has been very busy, and a lot of that time has been time in a theater. No complaints here, of course!

I wound up September by catching Greensboro-based playwright Tommy Trull's "Wake-Walking" at Greensboro College, which I found quite interesting and well-done for a college production. A planned staged reading of another play of his, however, was postponed, so I'll just have to wait and see when that one comes back to (workshopping) life.

Then Kathy and I went up to Korner's Folly for another Triad-based playwright's "The Service at Rocky Bluff," written by Scott Icenhower and done by Kernersville Little Theatre. It was a laugh-out-loud, family-friendly play with music, and the cast included Brad Phillis, who we first got to know through our own production of "Conversations in a Cafe." Truly a fun night in Cupid's Park.

We followed that in October with Scott and Katie Jo Icenhower's production of "The Piety Variety Gospel Show" at the Paramount in Burlington. While there were many good parts of the show and the cast was chiefly strong, with this one I could see a few areas for editing. Unlike "Rocky Bluff," where I felt you got to know each of the characters, this one gave some characters a fair amount of time and several, not very much. I'd have like to have known more about some of them.

We caught "The Mystery of Irma Vep" at the UpStage Cabaret at Triad Stage, and laughed a lot there, too. Multiple characters in a gothic mystery-styled show, all played by two men. A hoot, for sure.

Recently, because Kathy had a prior event one night, I went to Mount Tabor High to catch an evening of one-acts directed by Chad Edwards. To my delight, Cheryl Ann Roberts was there that evening, too, so we watched a one-act very much in the "Laramie Project" mode about a high school's reaction to the events of September 11th (the school was two blocks away from Ground Zero). And then - not exactly a one-act -- a truncated version of the play "Proof" (one of my favorites of recent years). For the state high school theater conference, presentations must be one hour or less. I thought not only did the four students do a nice job with the abbreviated version, but it was nicely edited and still held up decently despite the cuts. It was a reassuring evening that there is at least still SOME art in the schools even as budgets are decimated.

Finally for this go-round, we saw the hilarious and spirited Theatre Alliance production of "Evil Dead: The Musical." Hard to describe in a few words, but a lot of fun if you've ever seen horror movies and enjoy parodies.

As for my own playing with plays, I'm pleased to be within two or three pages of wrapping up a first draft of the comedy called "Rehearsals." I've had a lot of fun with it so far, and hope to yuk it up some more while reading and editing it. Then maybe some outside readers and a group reading early in the new year? It could happen. Progress!

Into the busy season

While there still hasn't been much writing time put into plays, I have been organizing myself on the marketing of Conversations in a Cafe and All About Faith -- so that perhaps I will know what HAS been done, and what has NOT. That organization is completed, so now I can move forward.

In the meantime, after the dregs of August, we've moved back into a time period when play productions are coming along hot and heavy. That's certainly not a complaint, because I almost always enjoy seeing something new or old favorites in the dark. But sometimes it's an embarrassment of riches that becomes a challenge to fit onto the calendar! We'll just have to do the best we can.

The first two stops in the busy season were made last week. We both very much enjoyed a show we had not seen before: Kander and Ebb's Kiss of the Spider Woman, done by Theatre Alliance with Gray Smith and Heather Hamby in the leads. It's not done a lot, apparently, and to some extent one can understand -- it's not a laugh fest and has a somber ending, not unlike Cabaret. But the production was very well done, and of course many dark-themed shows work just fine for me.

We also saw the Evening of Short Plays fall 2011 in Greensboro last Thursday night. Naturally (though it's true that I heard earlier read-throughs of three of them) they were new to us. Most of them were pretty good.

High points, low points

The "nice" thing about the writing biz is that it's a bell-curve kind of existence, or maybe roller-coaster is better, since there's more horror and nausea involved with roller coasters. The last couple of months have not only included some repeat paying business and a new project that went well. But also, I e-published a detective novel in June and a general novel just recently (on Kindle and Nook), and got to see a short script produced in Virginia, which was a writer's and audience member (natural) high for me. I even got the script for Reunions fine-tuned and shipped off to a couple of contests.

Right on the heels of that, I found out that other short scripts were NOT accepted for two different short-play contests and, as a continuing theme, I have found no theater company (yet) interested in producing any of my long scripts. So -- up one day, down the next. Which to be honest I feel is certainly the way with a number of playwright hopefuls, or at least there's ample evidence to suggest that's true.

Which makes it no easier to stomach when it happens.

Nevertheless, I've learned also that writing stuff and doing NOTHING with it absolutely assures nothing will happen with it -- so one keeps on plugging away. Some days turn out well; the others remain depressing.

Perhaps I'm also going through theater-going withdrawal -- August seems to be a very slow month for theater productions, while September and October go nuts. Starting Thursday night, we have quite a bit of theater to take in, just to try to keep up. In short, things could be worse ... and I keep trying to remember to un-cross my fingers every now and then. Something will happen sometime. And I hope that's not just wishful thinking.

A novel distraction

I mentioned in a recent post that we drove north to see my short script, At The Shrine, done in a 10-minute play fest in Purcellville, Va. On the return trip, my wife mentioned that one of her favorite pieces of writing by me was a novel I first created in (we figured) roughly 1983-1986. As I thought on it, I tended to agree.

So upon our return home, I sought out that novel, only to find that I had no digital version of the text -- but I did have a typewritten manuscript of 342 double-spaced pages.

This is all by way of saying I haven't written a word on any play project since that day, because I undertook to scan each of those 342 pages, convert them to a digital document (which took a learning curve, of course), then update, edit, fix and generally try to create a "clean" Word document that could be converted to my second eBook on Kindle and Nook.

To be polite, it took longer than originally anticipated.

However, I'm pleased that one of OUR favorite pieces of writing, a novel called Fictionography of a Mental Coward, is now e-published and back off my desk. Hopefully this means some kind of writing -- new writing -- looms somewhere in the future. It's about time.

Plugging along

The theatrical life has certainly been continuing in fits and spurts since the last post. We've seen quite a fair bit of it; and during a week-long vacation, the long play Reunions was essentially wrapped and readied for submission, while further progress was made on newer full-length work-in-progress Rehearsals. While I have been diverted lately by converting another older novel manuscript into a digital version, I feel reasonably good about play progress at the moment.

On the play-going front, we saw a very delightful The King and I done at the Weaver Academy in Greensboro, starring Carlos Nieto, Mara Norris and her daughter Skye. A very nice production throughout. Two days later, we saw The Sound of Music done in Winston-Salem at Stained Glass, with Cameron Williams and Mary Lea Williams. Overall, also very pleasing, though we wished that they could have found two young men for the "family" who could also sing.

We were unfortunately crunched for time when the National Black Theatre Festival got to town, as it does every other year. We only got to two productions, but Knock Me a Kiss was quite good. We also saw two shows paired, one about singer Lena Horne and the other about Harriet Tubman. The Lena Horne show was just so-so. But Spirit of Harriet Tubman was a knock-out. The one-woman show was deeply impressive and moving -- what an actress! It deserved wider exposure than it got.

I mentioned a couple of blogs back that my short script, "At The Shrine," was accepted for production as part of the first-time "The Top :10" at the Franklin Park Arts Center, up in Virginia. We drove up on August 5 and caught the opening of three performances on Friday night. What fun. I honestly believe I had the best director and the best cast and, well, by popular vote, nearly the best script. We came away thinking there were three contenders for the Best Script -- and one of them won. I fell short by two votes, apparently. Pretty good!

But more excitingly from my standpoint is that the short play won Best Overall Production and one of two Best Actor awards, for the woman who played Grandma Clemmons in the play. It would have been a travesty, IMHO, if she had NOT won. Our friend Lissa and son Andy were with us, so all in all, quite a wonderful theatrical excursion!

And the following night, my beloved wife and trusted first reader, Kathy, was given a Lifetime Honorary Member award from Kernersville Little Theatre. Delicious icing on our cake!