Fresh Ink to take on Fire on Earth!

Very big news today: my full-length play, Fire on Earth, will be part of the Fresh Ink Theatre's 2012-2013 season, here in Boston  Sounds like we'll have some workshop time/readings, then a production in early 2013.  This new company is picking five playwrights to work with this season (three for production, including me, and two more for staged readings only).  The other writers are fellow Rhombus writer Ginger Lazarus, Emily Kaye Lazzaro, Kevin Mullins, and Noah Mease.

This is a young group, dedicated to new plays and New England playwrights.  They're one of several new companies that have sprung up lately in our area with an interest in developing new plays and local writers.

I've been working on this play for a long time, but I did a HUGE rewrite in 2010, while I was a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, followed by a reading from the Huntington Theatre Company.  All of which was enormously helpful.  Now I'll be able to make further changes and get to see the play finally staged.  I'm completely psyched.

Here's a short summary of the piece:

1524. John Tewkesbury is a savvy trader and smuggler, smart enough to know William Tyndale's illegal translation of the Bible will be a hot commodity. But, to sell the good book, he must elude the spies of Sir Thomas More and escape the fires of the Catholic bishops. In this true story about the struggle between dangerous information and powerful knowledge, one man journeys from merchant to martyr.

Confirmed Sighting in SLAM Boston, Jan 7-9, at BPT

My award-winning short comedy, Confirmed Sighting, about two women who see an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (previously thought extinct) will run January 7-9, at the Boston Playwrights Theatre, at 7:30pm, 949 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, as part of SLAM Boston.  The audience directly affects which plays win prizes, so please come and cheer on your favorite (I'm hoping that it's mine, so I can earn some pizza money).

Good News: one-act comedy, Couch Potato, published by Playscripts

My one-act comedy, Couch Potato, is now available from Playscripts. It's a fun play that's good for performance either by adults or students. Here's the description:

GENRE	Comedy
LENGTH	Short, 30-35 minutes
CAST	2 females, 3 males (5-6 actors possible: exactly 2 females, 3-4 males)
SET	Living room of a small New York City apartment, with two entrances/exits.
NOTES	Mild adult language
Eric is the ultimate slacker, but his goal of remaining motionless in front of the TV is in serious jeopardy. His sister and fiance move out and leave him behind in the apartment, and the two newlyweds moving in aren't keen to share their space with a complete stranger. Can Eric use his wits to stay rooted, or is he about to be yanked from his chosen resting place? A fast-paced comedy of inertia.

You can read a sample of it for free on the Playscripts site. This my third play now published by Playscripts. They also publish Pumpkin Patch and Christmas Breaks.

Lies, Lies, Lies and Counting Rita tonight in LA (Venice) at 8pm

Counting Rita and Lies, Lies, Lies, will be part of Theatre Unleashed's "Through a Caffeine Haze" tonight at:

The Talking Stick
1411c Lincoln Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
8pm.

They're doing a bunch of short plays set in coffee shops. Should be a fun evening. (If you see it, let me know how it goes.)

Good News: Lies, Lies, Lies and Counting Rita in Los Angeles

Looks like Theatre Unleashed in Los Angeles will produce my short plays Lies, Lies, Lies and Counting Rita in their upcoming Coffee Shop Series of play set in and produced in coffee shops.

Dates:
October 12 at The Talking Stick in Venice Beach
October 20 at the M Street Cafe (not sure where)
October 28 at the Sherry Theatre in North Hollywood

I'm a big fan of site-specific work, so I'm thrilled that these plays will be included. And Theatre Unleashed seem like a very energetic young company that's doing a bunch of really fun projects. I just wish that I could get out there to see it, but alas, can't swing it. (So if you're in LA, go see the show and let me know how it goes. Please.)

Back home with good news about Constant State of Panic

We just got back from almost two weeks of vacation to visit family and friends in Michigan, Illinois, and Colorado. This is the view I had from Spy Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, the destination of my 10-mile solo hike on a very early morning. At an elevation of 11,000 feet, the wind was howling.

While we were gone, I received two bits of good news about my newest full-length play, Constant State of Panic.

First, it was nominated for the Christopher Brian Wolk award given out by the Abingdon Theatre Company in New York. It's now one of nine finalists--the winner, to be announced in late September, will receive $1,000 and a staged reading.

Second, it looks like Constant State of Panic will have a workshop in October followed by a full production in January with a (smallish) theatre company in Washington, D.C. I'll provide more details once we've finalized everything, but I'm very excited to have a chance to work with these folks again. The script is a very good match with this particular company. And DC is the perfect city for the premiere of this political play about fear.

Though I've had a bunch of productions and publications of short plays, it's been a long time since I've had a full production of a full-length play. I'm actually embarrassed to say how long it's been (shhh. four years.). Part of that is because I was working on two novels during that time, thus it took a while to write this newest play. But the long dry spell chipped away at my confidence. I'm a little young to feel theatrically washed up, and I knew the market has been really, really tight. But still...

Now, who knows, maybe this will lead to a bunch of new open doors. Whether it does or not, I look forward to having a blast working on the play.

Lost Oasis at Another Country

Another Country productions, run by Lyralen Kaye, who also produce the SlamBoston play slams, is doing a fundraiser May 18 and 19, and they will include a production of my one-act play, Lost Oasis.

This is a play with an important history for me--it was one of the plays in Theatre in the Wild, which was the inaugural production for Chameleon Stage in 1993 (a theatre I helped start and which is still around today) in Evergeen, Colorado. It was my earliest foray into site specific work. (It's also my first and only play to be done in NYC's Central Park.)

In a fun twist (or sad commentary on how we never throw things away), I just delivered the tent that was used in the original production to my director tonight (Art Hennessey--very glad to have a chance to work with him), for use in the the May production.

It's especially gratifying to see a play produced after 16 years and feel that it still holds up.

Here are the details for the show:

What -    The Factory Theatre & Another Country Productions present…

Best of the Best, Playwrights of Another Country Productions

 When -   Monday May 18 & Tuesday May 19 @ 7:30pm

Where -  The Factory Theatre, 791 Tremont Street, the South End

 Tickets - $15

Box Office –617-933-8600: www. Theatermania.com.com, search: Factory Theatre

Stop Rain in Boston, Friday March 20

This Friday, March 20, my play Stop, Rain will be part of Life Lines, a set of five short plays presented by the Actors Refuge Repertory Theatre. The show is at 7:30 p.m., at the First Church of Boston, 66 Marlborough Street. Tickets are $10 general admission, $8 for students/seniors.

The plays are by some very talented writers (including another Boston writer, Janet Kenney). Here's the summary of Stop Rain:

Birthmother Rain desperately wants to see the son she placed for adoption, but adoptive mom Marla feels she needs to protect her son from Rain's screw-ups and chaotic life. Can the two mothers learn to understand each other?

I last saw this show at the Boston Theatre Marathon, where Debra Wise and Eliza Fitcher of the Underground Railway Theatre did an amazing job with it. I'm excited to see the play again.

Baltimore was a blast

The trip to Baltimore for the reading at Centerstage was over in a flash. My flight left Logan Airport at 6:30 a.m., which meant leaving the house at 5 a.m. I was in Baltimore by 9. After that I managed to cram a lot into one day. I found some local places to eat (great fried haddock at Milton's Grill) and stopped in at The Walter's Art Museum. The Museum was an unexpected treat--it's free (oh do I wish the MFA was free) and had an exhibit on the St. John's Bible, a modern illuminated bible, along with lots of other illuminated historical texts (it's pretty cool if you're into that stuff).

The folks at the theatre showed us great hospitality, and I got to hang out with Lee Blessing, Kia Corthron, and Caridad Svich (talk about a lot of theatrical experience and talent in one room). The UMBC students were energetic and inquisitive and thoughtful, in a way that only undergraduates can be. Young actresses Ellen Fine and Abigail Unger did a fine job reading my play, Confirmed Sighting, for an audience of about 100. All four plays fulfilled the In10 Festival's goal of creating new and exciting roles for women in very different ways. (If you're near Baltimore, definitely try to see the production at UMBC, March 4-8.) To have Blessing, Svich, and Corthron commissioned to write parts for you must feel pretty cool.

The afternoon and evening was full of more talk about theatre and everything else, plus pizza and Afghan food, and more theatre (we saw Lynn Nottage's Fabulation at Centerstage).

Not bad for a 24-hour trip.

reading of Confirmed Sighting in Baltimore on Saturday

I'll be in Baltimore tomorrow (Saturday) for a reading of Confirmed Sighting at Centerstage (700 N. Calvert Street) at 2pm. Plays by Caridad Svich, Lee Blessing, and Kia Corthron will also be read. And all the writers will be there. I'm excited to meet the other writers and have been reading various plays by them this week (just finished Corthron's Breath, Boom. Tough stuff. Wow. I'd be very interested to see it staged.). I'm hoping to glean whatever I can from them about theatre and the playwriting life.

Wish they were all like Playscripts

Okay, sure, sending me a check is a good way to get me on your good side. I have a couple plays published by Playscripts (Christmas Breaks and Pumpkin Patch), and I just got a royalty check for a couple hundred bucks, thanks to a production around Christmas time.

But there's more to it than just that--what's especially cool is that Playscripts pays not just once a year (like some other play publishers), but they pay royalties every month that you earn more than $100. And for June and December, the minimum threshold is only $20. So instead of keeping my money in their bank account for most of the year, they actually send it to me. What a concept.

It's all automated, and I can go online to their Playwrights Information Center anytime and check the status of my sales and productions--the web site will tell me how much I can expect in my next check, which theatres/schools still haven't paid yet, the total number of online views a script has had, total sales (both in units sold and dollars earned for each script).

It's really an ideal setup for the writers whose work they publish (and for a numbers guy like me, pure heaven). I know that some other play publishers have similar setups--I have experience with Brooklyn's old version, which gave totals, but they only paid once a year. I don't know the details of the others, though it seems like Heuer has something close.

What I really wish is that book publishers would/could adopt this same model. This is extremely unlikely for large publishers, because they sell through such a variety of outlets, though there must be some central system, somewhere in each publishing company that keeps track of all this, doesn't there? The other big stumbling block would be the practice of allowing bookstores to return unsold books--which is just plain dumb. If book publishers did away with returns, then, in theory, they could set up an automated royalty system like Playscripts that would pay authors every month, with very little hassle for the publisher (and make the lives of authors much more sane and earn lots of goodwill). Though of course they would lose the interest on all those piles of money they sit on all year. I think it'd be an interesting competitive advantage for a publisher, with regard to landing authors, if they could pull it off.

I won't hold my breath for big book publishers taking up the Playscripts model, but I wish that small publishers (and all other play publishers) would find a way.

Good News: Confirmed Sighting wins UMBC In10 Competition

Just found out some very good news: my newest ten-minute play, Confirmed Sighting, has won the UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore College) In10 International Playwriting Competition. It'll be produced in early March, and I'll make a point of going down and seeing it. The play is about two young women from very different backgrounds who see an ivory-billed woodpecker (once thought extinct).

This is a pretty well-regarded competition (I've heard very good things from past winners) and lots of people enter, so it feels particularly satisfying to win. Plus it comes with a $1,000 prize! Not bad at all (this a huge prize, in the world of playwriting competitions). I'm also particularly pleased that this newest play has found some traction--it's easy to lose confidence and wonder if my work will continue to have appeal (especially as I struggle my way through rewrites of my newest full-length play). This provides a nice surge of confidence.

Points Off The Board

On the down side, I heard last week from Smith & Kraus that they've selected too many plays for their Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009 anthology, in which I was supposed to have two plays included: Den of Iniquity and Measuring Matthew. They've decided to cut back, so Den will not be included. On the bright side, Measuring Matthew will be still be in there, but I hate to see productions or publications go away.

On the plus side, I got a very nice, unexpected note from the director of Christmas Breaks in Wisconsin. Receiving a nice appreciation out of the blue is definitely a good pick-me-up.

Blank Horizon (but not quite)

I was planning to write about the scary feeling that comes up whenever I don't have anything lined up in the way of productions or publications, since that's kind of where I'm at. (It can feel pretty bleak.) Christmas Breaks is opening in Wisconsin, but I don't really have anything to do with that one. I do have a reading of Tornado Siren scheduled for December 4th at Brookline Booksmith (6:30pm) as part of a holiday festival (just 15 minutes) here in Brookline. I also found out that a broadcast of my radio play Love & Lightning that was scheduled for this week by Shoestring Radio Theatre in San Francisco has been postponed to March, and they'll also broadcast Tundra Games. So, it's not exactly like nothing is happening with my work. (And I'm sure more will be scheduled soon.)

Most importantly, I can see some writing time coming my way in December and January (I think), which should let me get drafts finished of my new play and my new novel.

Off to New York: The Sky is Falling

Tomorrow, bright and early (not actually bright, since the sun won't be up yet--6:30am) I'll board a bus for NYC. I have freelance work meeting all afternoon, and then I'm off to see the 7pm show of The Sky is Falling, which is part of EATFest at the Roy Arias Theatre Center, Off-Broadway Theatre, 300 West 43rd St, 5th floor, November 4-16. EAT puts on a really terrific festival (I had a play in it last year, too)--The Sky is Falling is in Series A, running Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 pm, Saturday at 7:30 pm, Sunday at 4:30 pm.

The Sky is Falling is a funny and poignant play about two sisters who finally reunite, just as one of them is about to go off into space for the Rapture (or so she claims). It's really a fun show and I'm excited to see it. I go with especially high hopes because I've had such good interactions with my director.

For some people, a five-hour bus ride doesn't sound that appealing, but for me, it's good concentrated reading and writing time. Normally I don't bring my laptop, but I have a freelance assignment I can work on a little bit, while still having some good reading and napping time left over. The napping might be especially important since I plan on watching election returns until pretty late tonight.

Good News: Christmas Breaks in Wisconsin

I just found out some good news for the holiday season. Christmas Breaks will be part of Christmas with a Twist, produced by the Lake Geneva Theatre Company at the The Abbey Resort in Wisconsin, November 28 - December 21. I'm on the bill with David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries and Not a Creature was Stirring by Christopher Durang.

update: good/bad

I'm still making excellent progress on my novel revisions. I have a deadline--I need to get Part I, about 90 pages, to my fiction group by October 12th or so, so they can read it for our October 30th meeting. Nothing like a deadline to focus the mind.

Unfortunately, my play, Recognition, did not make it through to the final week of the T Plays. You should still go see it, if you haven't. The final set will make for a very fun evening. I had a great time making my play for the production. And after bringing it to my Rhombus playwrights group on Monday, I was able to make more changes and I feel like it's in excellent shape, and I'm sending it out now.

Speaking of sending out plays--we finished the Submission Binge #13 this week. Many, many hundreds of plays were submitted by the group (I myself sent 33 plays and 11 queries in the month) and lots of information was swapped, good news shared. I managed to get through the Binge (the challenge is to submit a play ever day for 30 days) without missing a single day, and I even kept on going for an extra two days. (Who knows, if I send something out tonight, that'll make 33 days in a row.) It's nice to have a chance for a breather, but I miss the constant positive chatter of the group (though it's still pretty active, even between Binges).

T Plays Open Tonight

I was at rehearsal for my T play, Recognition, on Sunday night (before heading home on my bicycle in a surprise downpour--3 miles from Beacon Hill to my house--like swimming home) and it went well. The whole process is compressed for this festival, but that's fine. I think the script turned out better than I'd hoped--you never know with the high pressure deadlines, but when they work, they really work.

Anyway, tonight is opening night. 8pm, Factory Theatre, 791 Tremont Street in Boston. www.mill6.org. I can't go tonight because I have to coach soccer (and am already missing an open house at Kira's school), but I'll be there tomorrow night. Can't wait.

The T Plays--made my deadline

So I managed to get my T play written this afternoon. Tracy had actually given me an idea when we were driving to Kira's soccer game this morning--telling me about something that had happened to her on the T a while ago. The idea really stuck with me--I just couldn't shake it.

I got to the T at noon and met up with the young reporter from BU, who promised to just sit and hang out and not talk to me while I was writing, which worked out great. Before she arrived, just while waiting on the platform, I was able sketch out a few possible notes.

The D Line outbound from Brookline was nearly empty, which was just what I needed. I was able to work on a stronger set out outlines and questions for a good half of the ride, and then actually started writing. Being on the T was very helpful to try to understand the physical way I wanted this script to play itself out. And with it empty, I could just stare at the seats and imagine my characters in place, as they shifted around from seat to seat. The train filled back up on our way back into the city (we were way out in the suburbs when we got to Riverside), but I was totally focused on getting the characters and their voices down on paper. I took a few details from the riders around me, but not a ton.

Back in town, the reporter had to jet off to another gig, but I was about halfway done with the draft. I hopped back on board the D line for another ride all the way to the end, and by 2 o'clock, I had a whole draft, about 9 pages, which should come in around 10 minutes (our target). I rode for another hour, making revisions, thinking more about how people ride the T. Then I went home and typed it up, let it sit a little, and I've just turned it in (an hour ahead of deadline).

In some ways, I wish that I'd grabbed an idea from this particular T ride, but I'm happy with the play that I got, and it was definitely an interesting and intense experience to write it on the train. We have a read through tonight at 9:15 after the show, and I'm curious to see how it turns out. I haven't met one of the actresses yet, so I'm hoping I've got their ages about right. If not, I'll have to make some modifications. I'll have a chance to make more changes before rehearsal tomorrow.

Right now I'm pretty exhausted, but glad that I managed to write a draft of a play that I like.

Good News: more radio time

Just got some good news that my radio play, Love and Lightning, will be rebroadcast this November in San Francisco, by the Shoestring Radio Theatre, on KUSF (90.3 FM). It's a dark, but fun, comedy about a man struck by lightning while out bicycle riding with a woman who was certain he was going to propose marriage to her (he wasn't). I'm glad it'll have a chance to reach an audience again.

Someday, when I have a little more time (okay, most of my fantasies in life involve magically finding more time), I want to try to get versions of my radio plays digitized and available as podcasts on my web site. (Right next to my short films.) They've all been broadcast at some point or other, but I know online they could potentially reach even more people. At some point (after my magic wands adds an extra third and fourth hour to the day, and the energy use them for more than sleeping), I'd like to re-record some of them with my favorite Boston actors.