Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Good News: Tightly Bound (and Great Short Plays Volume 1)

It's always nice to be able to report a little good news. After a fair amount of wrangling, Brooklyn Publishers has published Tightly Bound, which is a collection of eight of my short plays for women performers. The idea is that the group of plays works together to make an entire evening of theatre, with a flexible cast size of 4-18 women. It just went on sale last week, so we'll see how it goes. Some of the plays have done extremely well on their own (Insomnia, Stop Rain, Ship of Fools), and we'll just have to see if they can pick up even more productions as a group. (Fingers crossed.) It's a nice set, in that it works pretty well both for students and for theatre companies.

Also, Playscripts has decided to bundle my short play, Christmas Breaks, as part of Great Short Plays, Volume 1. It just went on sale this week (and sold at least one copy today). I'm in good company, with other plays by Stephen Belber, Brooke Berman, Judy GeBauer, Barry Hall, J. Holtham, David Riedy, D. Tucker Smith, John Walch, and Sheri Wilner. This is a good experiment, to see if this is a more productive way to sell short plays. I hope it is.

4 comments:

Erica Ridley said...

Brooklyn Publishers has published Tightly Bound and Playscripts has decided to bundle my short play, Christmas Breaks, as part of Great Short Plays, Volume 1

Wow! That's great news on both counts. Congratulations!

Erica <-- who is insanely impressed by the number of plays you've written!

Patrick Gabridge said...

Thanks, Erica. (I really like your blogs, by the way.) The plays came over a long period of time, and they do start to add up after a while. Novels are a whole different beast, though. Novel #2 is going faster than #1.

Erica Ridley said...

Novels are a whole different beast

One of my CPs read my story TATTF and said she thought it would make a good movie and that I should go ahead and write a screenplay for it.

I was like, uh, yeah. I'll whip one up. No problem.

Even though I like to joke that my first drafts look more like screenplays than novels due to all the dialogue, I cannot imagine writing an actual play, whether for the stage or the screen.

(I did write one in third grade and hold auditions at recess for the classmates who wanted to act in it, but I have not made another attempt since then. *g)

Patrick Gabridge said...

I've been writing plays and screenplays for long enough that the form comes pretty easily. I find writing a novel MUCH harder. The tricky part about stage and screenplays is figuring out how to do everything you want to within the confines of the form. You only have 120 pages (and not many words) to get it right.