Sunday, April 19, 2009

When's your next play being produced?

Playwrights dread being asked when our next play is being produced--because, although most of the factors leading to an actual production of one of our plays are beyond our control, we feel like a failure if we admit the truth. On the other hand, lying isn't really an option--unless you're from the trying-to-pass-off-fiction-as memoir school of writing. So we usually mumble something along the lines of the following--"Oh, I'm working on several things at the moment and I've been sending them around, so you never know, heh, heh." Unfortunately, that kind of vagueness makes it sound like we're not really much of a writer--like maybe we've given it up--or maybe it's never been much more than a hobby anyway. Yet the truth is usually so much richer than people may realize--but they probably don't want to hear the details anyway.

So with that as an introductory apologia of sorts, here's what in fact I've been up to with my writing lately. At the moment I'm actively working on four plays and one story. I should first of all mention (which I haven't yet mentioned in this journal), that I was recently accepted into the Turtle Shell Productions Playwrights' Platform. This is a playwrights' group affiliated with a theater troupe. The main activity of the group is to have the playwrights' work read aloud by the actors and then critiqued by the other playwrights and the actors. We meet twice a month. So far, I've attended three meetings and have presented excerpts from my unproduced full-length play, All in the Faculty. The fourth of these excerpts will be presented at the next meeting, leaving just one more excerpt before the entire play will have been presented. (This play is a tale of academia, based very, very loosely on my experiences as a professor at a liberal arts college in upstate New York many years ago. The play is based on an unpublished novel I wrote in 2001 called, The Academy.) It turns out that participation in this group requires a tremendous amount of work, because in addition to having to round up actors for each session, you find yourself working furiously on revisions reflecting input you received from the previous session in time for the next meeting. And the very good news is that, so far, I've found this process to be a great boon to my writing. This play, which has been sitting ignored in my computer for some time (not counting the occasional rejection letter it generates--if it generates any response at all--when I send it someplace) is being transformed into a much better play right before my eyes. And I think this is the secret to playwriting. You can't just do it in isolation, like fiction writing. It HAS to be SEEN in some guise or other and reacted to. That's the only way you can know what works and what doesn't. Anyway, so that should be enough good news for anyone who wonders what I've been up to.

But wait, there's more. The other 3 plays I mentioned include Miss Peddy and Her Charge--a play in two scenes for one actor. I'm writing this for a friend who is looking for a one-woman play to perform. I've read most of it to my writers group--The River Writers of Manhattan--and their input has been very helpful. I don't know if my friend will end up using it or not, but at least I'll have a one-woman script ready to offer up if anyone ever asks me for one. I'm also working on Museum Piece--a 3-character play (in a somewhat experimental format)--about different people's experience visiting an art museum one afternoon. Finally, I'm also working on Table Manners, a full-length play I described in my last journal entry which was inspired by my recent trip to Buenos Aires. (The title is the same as that of one of my short plays--but I intend to incorporate that play into this new, longer one.)

But wait, there's still more. On the fiction front, I finished and have begun submitting a short story called, The Church. This was my third crack (with the help of the River Writers) at this tale of healthy agnosticism. I hope I got it right this time. And I've recently begun a story that is a short story, not a play, but experiments with a dialogue format similar to the one used by Manuel Puig in his novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman.

So the next time someone asks me what's being produced, I can either admit that there are no productions on the horizon at the moment, confess that nothing whatsoever has in fact been produced or even read publicly since last June (when Couple of the Century was presented at DUTF at the Cherry Lane), and then break down and cry. Or launch into the long answer I've presented above. Most likely, however, I'll simply mumble something like, "Well I'm working on several things and sending plays around, so you never know..."