Shifting the Goal Posts for my Writing (redefining success, or giving up?)

Daniel Berger Jones and Dale Place in Blood on the Snow

My first one-act play, The Elevator, was produced in 1987, when I was still in college. I wrote my first novel, Tornado Siren, while my daughter was a pre-schooler. She's in graduate school now. So I guess we can say that I've been at this for while. I've written about 20 full-length plays, another 60+ short plays and one-acts, plus screenplays, radio plays, and four novels.

And they have reached audiences. The plays have been performed for well over 120,000 people (more than 10,000 this year alone), in more than 14 countries, while the books have had a much smaller impact--slightly more than 1,500 readers.

I earn a very modest amount of money from my writing (mostly from plays). Prior to 2016, I'd never made more than $10,000 in a year. The past three years saw a jump to over $20K annually, but this year I'll just break $17K (that's all gross, not net). 

So in many ways, my writing career feels like a mix of success and failure. I've written some high quality work and engaged thousands of audience members with the characters and stories I've created. But I'm a 52-year-old man who's been writing for 30 years and am still struggling to have my writing contribute $1,000 a month to my family. I'm a long way from "making a living" as a writer, if making a living means financially helping feed and house my family.

In terms of major theatrical benchmarks, my career is seriously lacking. I've never had a play on Broadway or Off Broadway. (My work isn't well-suited to big Broadway spaces, so that's probably a stupid marker anyway). I've never had a play produced by a large regional theatre (LORT), despite having that on my target list for many years. I've had the good fortune to have my work developed by Boston's Huntington Theatre Company, which is certainly an impressive LORT company, but I haven't made it into their season yet. That's the closest I've gotten. 

Even at the mid-size Equity level in Boston and beyond, my work remains unproduced. Nearly all of my productions have come from small, scrappy theatres, across the U.S., and especially in Boston. But not at companies large enough to introduce me and my work to the higher levels of the theatrical ecosystem. There are other playwrights in Boston whose work has reached that level (and they're all friends of mine)--Kirsten Greenidge, Melinda Lopez, David Valdes, Lila Rose Kaplan, Ronan Noone--mine has not.

A few obvious questions arise:

• After trying to reach this level of success for 30 years, is it time to give up? 
• Have I failed to achieve a meaningful career as a playwright? (Certainly this is true of my career as a novelist.) 
• Am I not a good enough writer? 
• Is my work just not interesting to larger venues?
• Is the market not interested in my voice right now? Will it ever be?

Or...

Do I need to redefine what constitutes success for me and my writing?

(and if I do, is that just giving up and calling it by another name?)

Cerulean Blue at Mount Auburn Cemetery in 2019

Here's the thing: I think I've already been doing it.

In 2013, I was hired to write and help produce a site-specific play called Blood on the Snow for the Old State House Museum. After a few years of raising money, it was produced in 2016 to critical acclaim and a month of sold-out houses. We brought it back in 2017 for a sold-out 12-week run. It reached thousands of people, in a deep way. The museum still gets calls every week asking when the show will return.

This was my first full-length full Equity production, ever. And it was kind of self-produced. I was intensely embarrassed by never having had one before this. That lack of a full Equity production, after so many years, made me feel like a fraud.

I started writing site-specific plays in Denver in the '90s, and now that it was happening again, I rediscovered how much I LOVE writing this kind of work. Enough to start my own theatre company, Plays in Place, to make it easier for historic sites and museums to commission me to create the work.

This past year, I produced two more Equity productions at Mount Auburn Cemetery, The Nature Plays and The America Plays, as part of my two-year stint as artist-in-residence. Audiences were completely engaged and enthralled. I loved the entire experience of it. 

This was the first time I'd ever served as producer for a full-length Equity production. I did it twice this year. I'll keep on doing it.

Stephen Sampson and Marge Dunn in Cato & Dolly

Another commissioned Plays in Place production, Cato & Dolly, returned  this summer for a second run at Boston's Old State House, for an 8-week run (7 days a week, 3 shows a day) that reached more than 4,000 audience members over 160 performances.

What surprises me is how completely satisfying the experience has been. The writing challenge of each site and project is completely different. I'm working with top-notch actors, who have been enthusiastic partners in the process. I've formed a strong artistic relationship with director Courtney O'Connor, who has directed Blood on the Snow, Cato & Dolly, and the Mount Auburn Plays. I'm learning intense amounts about history, nature, and theatre. I'm getting paid. I'm creating theatrical experiences where we bring in all kinds of new audiences, not just traditional theatre-goers, and we're really getting to know them. I've developed writing and producing skills for this kind of work that feel meaningful. I'm providing paid employment for dozens of Boston-area theatre artists.

I want to do as much of this work as I possibly can. Blood on the Snow will return in 2020, and I have a new project coming for Mount Auburn Cemetery. I'm currently in talks with a dozen different museums and historic sites. 

It feels awfully good.

Mathew Ryan and Ken Baltin in Man of Vision at Mount Auburn Cemetery

Which, if you're a writer, you know also feels suspicious. Because so much of our existence is trying to reach these goalposts and never quite getting there, or else trying for the next marker. We are taught, through our culture, that feeling satisfaction is deadly--we need to be working ourselves to death, and we need to keep shooting for something higher up the theatrical food chain.

I'm not sure I care about that stuff anymore. Sure, I'd like my other plays to be produced at larger venues. And it'd be nice for my work to impact the national theatrical zeitgeist. I've spent a LOT of years chasing those things, and helping other people chase those goals, too--through my work publishing Market InSight for Playwrights and then creating and managing The Playwright Submission Binge (an online community of more than 1,000 playwrights that focuses on marketing and submitting scripts).

But instead of submitting scripts to more and more theatres week after week, I craft proposals to museums, trying to convince them to commission me for a new project. My theatre company is an odd entity that only works in partnership with other institutions--museums and historic sites, not other theatres. Instead of going to theatre confabs, I'm more likely to attend a museum conference.

This drifting away from goals I've set for so many years feels unsettling. I'm not even sure they ever made sense for me to have as goals, but they seemed like the highest, most important targets out there. And it felt like what playwrights were supposed to want.

I will keep sending scripts to calls for submissions, because stopping feels like I'd be abandoning those plays, and I do still believe in them. But I won't submit as often. I'm not sure I believe in the hamster wheel of submission/play development/sparse productions that I've been on for so long. Getting off makes me feel a little dizzy.

Perhaps reaching middle age has allowed me to take a step back and realize that satisfaction isn't as deadly as I feared. Creating strong plays that fully engage audiences, in collaboration with other talented artists might be what I've been after this whole time. Now that I'm here, I'd better pay attention and make the most out of the opportunity I've been given. And savor it.

That might not be giving up after all.

Amanda Collins and Robert Najarian in The America Plays

In The Thick Of It (and how I learned to stop worrying about climbing)

Images from the plays I've been working on in this 18-month stretch.

There's a certain inherent dissatisfaction that can be part of having an artistic career, and playwriting is no different. There's never much money, there aren't many production slots, and there's always a hope for the next "bigger" thing. Maybe this reading will lead to a production, maybe this production will catch the attention of someone in New York, maybe an off off Broadway show will move to Off Broadway, maybe Broadway will come calling. Maybe the next reading will lead to a production at an NNPN theatre, or a LORT theatre. Maybe the show will get a positive review, in someplace important, maybe someone will notice my work, will notice me.

I confess to having these thoughts. They're not particularly productive. They haven't caused any of these things to happen. Thoughts like these are good at adding to a general sense of unease and anxiety. And though they generate pressure to perform, I'm not convinced they lead to the creation of better work. They do lead to a general far-sightedness, that lifts the eyes up to the horizon and removes focus from the people and work sitting right in front of me.

As much as I have ambitions of "bigger" things for me and my work, I haven't spent much time thinking about such things lately. My attention has been completely absorbed by the work at hand, and I feel like I'm the luckiest writer in the world. I'm in the midst of an 18-month stretch of working on seven different full-length plays and musicals, with more than a dozen readings, workshops, and productions of those seven plays. (A few of the scripts were written a while ago, but they're getting readings and productions now.)  Sometimes it feels like creative whiplash, trying to unlock the mental bin for Lost in Lexicon and then switch the next week/day to Lab Rats and then back to Distant Neighbors.

I don't know that any of these productions or readings are designed or likely to lead to something "bigger." They might not be impressive to people higher up the theatrical food chain. But I don't care. I love the sensation of being completely immersed in the warm (and sometimes turbulent) waters of theatre and creation. I love getting to work with collaborative artists from so many different companies. With the exception of Clockwise Theatre in Illinois and Liminal Space in London, all the companies I'm working with are here in Boston, so I'm getting to work with people who part of the community where I live. I'm engaging with an audience of theatre goers who surround me every day.

More and more, I'm realizing that the place where I want to be is exactly where I am, and the thing I want to do is what I'm doing right now. I'm working, I'm creating, I'm part of a creative community that gives me an electric jolt every day. I'm not spending so much time looking ahead for what's next, I'm just trying to make the most of where I am right now, and enjoy every minute of it.

I've found the whirlwind I've been looking for, and I wanted to say that I'm here and I'm grateful.


(Special thanks for that whirlwind need to go to: In Good Company, Clockwise Theatre, Tumblehome Learning, Argos Productions, Liminal Space, Fresh Ink, Theatre on Fire, and the Bostonian Society.)

Creating a Diverse World--choices, opportunity, and trade offs for playwrights and theaters

There is no shortage of talk these days about racial diversity and gender parity in theater, film, and other media. In the theater-verse, the talk has been swirling around The Summit, a series of discussions with theater leaders in Washington, DC, including one meeting featuring artistic directors, where, in response to a question about lack of plays being produced by female writers, one artistic director said that there weren't enough plays by women in the "pipeline" from NYC and London, that feeds the regional theater scene.  (See Elissa Goetschius's excellent report on 2AMt for more details.)

One of the key things that Elissa points out is that despite the claims about lack of supply, the leaders at those theaters are making choices about what and who to produce. The claim of not enough material in the "pipeline" seems to be intended to let the companies off the hook--the implication is--"if there was enough material that was good enough and commercial enough, we would obviously produce it." The explosive response on Twitter was electric--posts and comments full of names of talented female writers built a huge list of active women playwrights that companies could potentially consider. But most of all, the anger was, I think, due to the apparent abrogation of responsibility by the people in charge of making choices.  Making choices is their job. And the results of those choices, which are public for us all to see, can not be pawned off on circumstance.

In the playwriting world, there are plenty of white, liberal playwrights expressing their anger against the people in charge of choosing seasons and the apparent exclusionary results.  And part of that anger, I'd suggest, comes from a frustration and powerlessness many writers feel about how plays are picked.

Which is fine.  However, I'd like to see (white) playwrights think about taking a close look at themselves when it comes to the subject of racial diversity. The cool part about being a playwright is that we each get to make our own worlds. We don't control the outside universe and what plays get produced, but we do completely control the plays we write and who is in them. As a result, we get to pick, to some extent, the racial make up of the people with whom we work on developing our plays.

But it's a choice. And I'm not sure a lot of white playwrights realize how much influence they have on the racial composition of our artform.  If you want to work in a racially diverse atmosphere, and you're a white writer, you're going to need to write plays with multi-racial casts.

For me, I'm a white father with two black kids, so race is a part of my everyday life. Working with a racially diverse group of actors is really important to me. It's important to my family--my son, who is 14, lights up when he sees a black actor on stage (or on film or reads a black character in a book)--he's always looking for a chance to see a reflection of himself. I don't always write plays about race, but I try hard not to have all-white casts. I write novels, too, and I always write books that are not exclusively populated by white people.


You might say, "Well, I don't specify race in my cast list, so that means the roles can be played by actors of any race."  That might happen.  In some of my historical plays, I've actually written a note as part of the cast list, saying something: "though these people were historically European, they can be played by actors of any racial background."  This can kind of work.

But you know what's really going to happen. The roles will very likely be cast white. The only way to guarantee that you have people of color acting in your plays is to be racially specific. (And to say No, when a producer asks if the role can be played by a white person.)

Which comes with trade offs. It means your play is less likely to be produced. I know this and accept this, because I have a compelling personal interest in a racially diverse theater. But it's still sometimes hard to accept that my latest script is going to have a much harder time getting on stage, and that I could make it a lot easier by making the characters all white.

Why does this happen? It has to do with how many theatre companies form. I submit a lot of scripts, and often burgeoning ensembles in New York and Chicago come to my attention. Time and time again, I check out their web sites, and see all these young faces, many fresh out of college, eager to work together and change the world of theater through innovative takes on classics and exciting new plays. And often, in the About Us section, they have photos and bios of all the company members. Time and after time, every member is white. I don't bother submitting my work to them.

We, in theater, need to understand that in our profession, the issues we face around racial diversity and gender parity are the results of choices. And those choices send messages.  It's not just small companies. Even though large institutional theaters might program work by diverse artists (in my recent survey of Boston theaters, the largest companies programmed much more racial diversity), they often make very different choices about whom they hire for their leadership and administrative staff. It's great to have a mission statement that talks about diversity, but if your staff is all white, that sends a message that's a thousand times louder than any carefully crafted prose.

And people notice. Some of us notice if we only see white people at your theater, some of us notice if we go to a conference and it is filled with white faces (who might be talking a lot about diversity). I'm a numbers guy and the father of black children--you can bet that I never enter a room and don't take a quick racial survey. Never.  And I'm a white man--I carry a big sack of privilege with me into that room (see Peggy McIntosh's famous essay, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack). The message is only incidentally being received by me, but it's being sent loud and clear to the people of color in that room--we do not take racial diversity as seriously as we say we do.

If you're a white playwright, this might not matter to you. If you're a white theater-maker, it might not matter to you. But if you say that it is important, understand that you have the power to do something about it. You don't get to blame the "pipeline."  Geena Davis has a great essay, Two Easy Steps to Make Hollywood Less Sexist.  The basic answer is that writers can add more women to the films that they write.

The same can work for racial diversity in theater. Ask yourself if your characters must be white. Right now, the vast majority of work being premiered on stage is written by white writers. If those white writers diversify their characters, they will diversify the acting pool, which will ultimately help diversify the leadership pool, all of which will diversify audiences.

I'm not saying that you need to write "about race."  I'm saying you might want to consider changing some characters from white to people of color and see what happens.  There are scary parts about this--you will get fewer productions, you might be challenged on how you choose to write those characters, you might find out things about yourself that are uncomfortable. You might change.

And you might change the world of theater in which we work. 

But no matter how you proceed, understand that you have made a choice. And the results of that choice are a lot more visible than you might realize.




(In case you're interested, I wrote another post a while back called, A White Guy Writing about Race, about my play Pieces of Whitey, about well-meaning white people. Which actually did have an all-white cast, but for very specific reasons.  Which did not entirely pan out.)

Balancing Act

Balance.  That's the trick in any writer's life--how do I balance the need and urge to write and attempt to have some sort of career, with the rest of life?  Now that I've begun farming, that balancing act has gotten a little trickier.  In some ways, adding farming to my life makes sense precisely because it provides a counterpoint to hours spent at a desk staring at a computer screen, or in a dark theatre at rehearsal.  Most of my farming time is spent outside, engaged in physical labor, all while solving some very specific physical puzzles--how do I grow the most vegetables possible, in a specific plot of land, in the amount of time afforded by daylight and my energy and budget.  And even more important, it helps me more fully experience the world and meet new people (so I have more to write about).

But in adding this new avocation to my life, the question arose--would it crowd out writing and theatre?  In my ideal life, I would love to spend half of my year on farming and half of it writing.  Theoretically, farming has the potential to work this way, as long as I decide not to extend my growing season with greenhouses and other techniques.  I can get crops in the ground in April and stop farming in October, and spend the rest of the time on art.

This arrangement is not likely to pay a living wage.  Of course, neither writing plays or farming full time is likely to make that happen.  Theoretically splitting my time between writing and farming will slow my writing career.  I might write less and get less of my work published and produced.  That's a tradeoff I'd have to consciously choose, much as I knew that becoming a father would make me write less, but also lead to a more fulfilling life (I'm glad I made the choice I did).

I'm a numbers guy, as many of you know.  For a while, I've been trying to track the time I spend writing and marketing my work.  This year, I tracked my time even more closely than ever, trying to understand how this writing/farming split might work.  As the end of the year nears, here's how I've spent my time:

Writing (actual writing and research):  386 hours  (my goal was 400.  Just missed it!)

Rehearsals, Meetings & Productions of my work:  274 hours

Marketing (including submissions, networking, admin, blogging):  231 hours


For an entire writing career time of about 891 hours.



And for farming (including field work, planning, marketing, classes, etc.):  734 hours

Driving to our farm (which is about 45-60 minutes from home):  191 hours


For writing I did not track commuting time (but perhaps I should), but I went to about 100 meetings, mostly in town, and that would still add up to another 100 hours, by bike, T, and car.


So if I were to include commuting and travel time, I spent about 1,000 hours on my writing stuff, and about 925 on farming.  (All of these are under-reported a bit, especially marketing, e-mail, and web time.)

Oddly enough, last year, when I tracked actual writing time and rehearsal time together, I spent about 600 hours on both, and an additional 217 hours on marketing.   That means that this year, even though I added farming to the mix, I actually ended up writing a little bit more than I did before.  Which gets back to the old addage of, "if you want something done, ask a busy person."  Sometimes, if you want to do more, you just need to do more.  Obviously, there are a limited number of hours in the day, so I did cut things out, and I had a lot of help and forbearance from my family. 

The good news is that looking at these numbers makes me feel like I actually have a chance at finding this writing farm/balance that I'm searching for.  In 2013, I'll be farming twice as much land, but am hoping not to spend much more time doing it (I'm getting faster at doing stuff as I gain skills).

Do any of you track your writing time?  If so, how many hours to you spend actually writing?  Do you have time goals for the week, month, year?  I hope you'll comment and share.

My Current Juggling Act

Juggling takes a lot of focus, whether it's clubs or writing projects.

Now that farming season has ended, my writing season has picked up full speed.  I've got a whole bunch of projects that I'm juggling at the moment, as well as upcoming productions.  Here is some of what I'm up to:

• My latest novel, Moving (A Life in Boxes), will be coming out as an ebook in about two weeks.  I've got make sure people know about it and finish getting it proofread and formatted.
• I'm about to do revisions on the book for a musical (a commissioned work) adaptation of Penny Noyce's novel, Lost In Lexicon.
• I just finished a first draft of a new full-length play, Distant Neighbors, and am working on it in Rhombus and in the New Voices @ New Rep program.
• We start rehearsals for Fire on Earth with Fresh Ink. on Monday, and I'll be making revisions fairly steadily until we open on February 1 at the Factory Theatre in Boston.
• I have a couple short plays in the One-Minute Play Festival coming to Boston Playwrights Theatre. Rehearsals start soon, but revisions are quick on short plays.
• I'm supposed to write a ten-minute play, set in a garden, for production this spring in London by a small company there.  (They performed Pumpkin Patch last year.)
• If I can clear the decks a little, I'm ready to finish the next draft of an historical novel about Civil War hero Robert Smalls.
• And I have two short plays in the upcoming New Works Festival at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport (but shouldn't have to do rewrites on them).

It's a good thing I'm not farming over the winter.  It seems like a lot of balls to have in the air, but I actually find myself more productive when I'm juggling a lot of projects at once.  It forces me to stay disciplined.  And one thing I've learned over my years writing is that I never know which project might suddenly catch fire and find the right people at the right time and have a chance to leap forward to find a larger audience.  Maybe it'll be one of these.  Maybe it'll be the next one.  Or the one after that.

And sometimes I miss a ball and they all come crashing down for a while.  But like in juggling, it's just a matter of picking them back up and starting over.

Yep, every juggler drops the balls sometimes. There's nothing to do but pick them up and start over.

Look What Came in the Mail

Yes, the Boston Theater Marathon XIII anthology is finally out, publishing the 50 ten-minute plays that were part of the Marathon in 2011, including my play, Escape to Wonderland.  As pretty much the whole world knows by now, I love the Boston Theater Marathon--I love its energy and vibrancy, and how it lets me see a big swath of Boston theatre all in a single day.

Since I like it so much, Kate actually asked me to write the foreword for this printed edition.  Yep, take a look.

I was honored to be asked (I've never written the foreword for a book before).  The anthology is published by Smith & Kraus, and you can buy a copy on Amazon, or order it from your local bookseller.

I'm a New Voices Fellow!

In some super good news, I recently found out that I've been selected to be a fellow in the New Voices @ New Rep program with the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, MA.  From now until June, the other fellows (Peter Floyd, Deirdre Girard, and Alexa Mavromatis) and I will meet with the staff of New Rep and various actors, directors, and designers as we work on new plays.  The program will culminate in public readings of four full-length plays by the fellows in May of 2013.

For me, this is a chance to get to know some writers who are new to me, as well as continue a long-time collaboration with fellow Rhombus playwright, Alexa Mavromatis.  And this is a huge opportunity to get to know the folks at New Rep.

Theatrical Thanksgiving

'Tis the season that leads to looking back at the year and expressing thanks.  I am always grateful to my family, especially my wife, Tracy, who continue to support me in my creative endeavors year after year.

My playwright and actor pals at Rhombus continue to ease my playwriting life forward, as we enter our 10th year working together in Boston.  Working with them is part of what makes playwriting fun and worthwhile.

On a broader scale, I want to say how grateful I am for the recent upwelling of support for new plays and new play development in the Boston area.  This year, I've personally benefited from the incredible generosity of the Huntington Theatre Company for the Summer Play Lab workshop of my play, Flight (with a big shout out to Lisa, Charles, and Bevin, who have been supporting my work for years), and from the reading, workshop and upcoming production of Fire on Earth from the young and energetic Fresh Ink Theatre, and most recently to New Rep for including me in their New Voices program to develop my play, Distant Neighbors.  And my thanks go to Kate Snodgrass and Boston Playwrights Theatre for continuing to produce the Boston Theatre Marathon (this was my ninth year in it).  And to Dominic D'Andrea for the One-Minute Play Festival which is coming back to Boston for its second year in January. 

There are reading and development programs popping up all over the place in Boston these days.  Boston playwrights can express their gratitude to Argos Production, Boston Actors Theater, CentaStage, Central Square Theater, Company One, Interim Writers, Mill 6 (I love the T plays!), Playwrights' Commons, Vagabond Theatre Group.  I'm missing some, I know (my apologies, in advance).  And now we've got the Center for the Theater Commons and HowlRound and David Dower and Polly Carl setting up shop in Boston.  And the constant presence of StageSource, helping pull the whole scene together.  And the Small Theatre Alliance of Boston linking together the fringe theatres.

We're living in the midst of an overflowing theatrical cornucopia here in Boston these days.  Thanks to everyone in our community who works so hard to make it happen.

Next Up: Fresh Ink workshop of Fire on Earth

After a few weeks with mostly farming filling up my time, it's time to head back into the rehearsal room.  I actually spent quite a bit of time last week making revisions to my play, Fire on Earth, based on the Fresh Ink reading back in June.  Now I'll get a chance to hear them and to play with the actors on some of the more physical scenes in the play.

Fresh Ink will be workshop Fire on Earth starting Sunday night--we'll spend three evenings at Boston Playwrights Theatre, reading through the play and up on our feet, playing with piles of paper and stacks of books and Bibles.  This is a chance for us to experiment and have fun with shaping this play while there is still plenty of time for me to make changes.  We won't head into rehearsal until December (for the production in February).  New play development is a long-term commitment, and I'm grateful that Fresh Ink is giving new plays the time and space they need to really grow before they get to production (and that they're giving new plays actual productions, not just workshops and readings).

Huntington Workshop of Flight was a big success

The past two weeks really flew by as I workshopped my play, Flight, with the Huntington Theatre Company.  Talk about intense.  I was in rehearsal pretty much every other day from 10-6, and then on my off days, I was either writing or at the farm all day.  To find the time to make changes in the script, I'd typically get up at 5 a.m. and work until 9 (with a break for getting Noah ready for camp) and e-mail the pages to the producer and stage manager, so they could distribute them to the actors at 10.  I'd typically bring in 20-30 pages with changes every day of rehearsal (many changes were small).

Patrick Curran, Philana Mia, Cassie Back, David Anzuelo

Our cast of Patrick Curran, Philana Mia, Cassie Beck, and David Anzuelo, were immensely talented and hard working.  Led by director Jessica Bauman, we picked our way through the play, scene-by-scene, beat-by-beat.  I wanted them to ask me hard questions about their characters and they did, with the result being a constantly improving script.

Jessica Bauman, Rachel Carpman, Bethany Ford

I'm very grateful to my director, Jessica Bauman, for all her insights and guidance, and to dramaturg Rachel Carpman, for always being ready for a new question (often it was just: "does that make sense to you?"), and to stage manager Bethany Ford for keeping the whole process running smoothly.

We had a final public reading of the script on Saturday afternoon, for an audience of about 50 people.  (Kudos to them, by the way, for being so responsive and attentive.)  I felt like the reading really kicked ass.  The actors were sharp and the audience seemed to really follow the play and the emotional roller coaster of it.  Most of all, it was gratifying to pack the script back up, after we had so thoroughly unpacked and disassembled it, and find out that not only did it still work, it actually worked a lot better than it did before.

I'm grateful to the entire staff of the Huntington for putting this Summer Workshop series together and giving four playwrights the chance to really get elbow deep into their plays, to try to find out how they work and how to improve them.  Thanks to Lisa Timmel, Charles Haugland, and Bevin O'Gara for getting the funding and making it happen, and to line producer Rebecca Bradshaw for running the workshop.

Now I need to keep making a few more changes to the script and find a way land a full production of it.  Some questions about a script can only be answered with a full production.

Fire on Earth reading tonight!

Tonight, the Fresh Ink Theatre will be presenting a reading of my play, Fire on Earth, at the Factory Theatre in Boston at 7:30 pm (791 Tremont Street).  It's free.  It's fun (well, "intense" might be a better way to describe the play than "fun", but it depends on what you call fun.  It's the kind of play that I find fun.).   It's got a terrific cast.  And I'm baking brownies.

This is the start of the development and production process with Fresh Ink, which will continue with a workshop in August and a full production in February.  I've been working on this play for a very, very, very long time, so it's extra sweet to finally see it work its way onstage.

Here's what the play's about in a nutshell.  If you're around, I hope you'll join us.

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.

The Juggler Interviews, #11: Laura Harrington

Laura Harrington is an award-winning writer of plays, musicals, operas, radio plays, and her first novel, the heartbreaking and lovely Alice Bliss, has been met with critical acclaim.  She's also the mother of a daughter who recently graduated from college.  I've been a big admirer of Laura's work for the stage, and now I'm a big fan of her novel, too.  She's off in London for the paperback release of Alice Bliss right now, but took some time to answer some questions for me.


You’ve had so much success writing for the stage, both plays, musicals, and operas. What made you decide to write a novel?

A few things conspired to open up this world to me. I was given this incredible award for my music theatre work that gave me two years of writing time. Which was an awe-inspiring moment – so much validation for my theatre career coupled with so much possibility. But I didn’t immediately think: Great! I can’t wait to write my next musical. Instead I thought: This is my chance to be a beginner again, to re-connect to the creative process by trying to do something I’ve never done before. I also wanted to pick up my pen without thinking about anything other than story. No worries about the size of the cast, the cost of production, etc.

Did you find yourself able to do things in prose that you hadn’t been able to do in script form?


Yes and yes and yes. It was so liberating to be able to spend time with a character’s interior voice. I also loved being able to tell a story that unfolded slowly. And it was just plain fun to be able to play with language in new ways.

from the TN Rep production of THE PERFECT 36: "A Woman's Voice"

Your writing for stage often deals with historical topics, and isn’t necessarily grounded in strict realism or traditional styles. For Alice Bliss, for which the writing is heartbreaking and lovely, you chose to write a contemporary story, grounded in realism. How do your approaches to tackling prose and drama differ?

As for all that history: I write about what obsesses me, the things I can’t stop thinking about. In some ways, my stories choose me. I’m also drawn to the voiceless and the displaced. And I’m deeply disturbed about war and wish that I could do something to make a difference.

Is my approach to writing prose and drama really different? I’m not sure. For me it’s all about voice. Once I have the voice and the rhythm of the book, the play, the character, then I just follow it through the first draft. I’m sure that sounds overly simplistic, but it’s as though the world of the play or the book has a voice, a style, a look, a feel and so does each character’s individual voice. I’m fascinated by layering voice/ image/ sound/ smell, etc. For me writing comes from a very, very physical place, from specific physical observations, from all the senses, no matter what genre I’m in.


Your daughter is a recent college graduate. In this interview series, I’ve talked a lot to writers who are in the thick of raising kids. You’ve succeeded!

Thank you! She’s a great kid.

And you’ve written so many plays and operas. How did you do it?
I am blessed with a lot of energy and focus. People are always commenting on how self disciplined I am, but it’s more that I love my work. And, to be honest, I’m pretty driven and ambitious.


What advice can you give those parents of small children (and teenagers) who are also trying to write?

Don’t think about the big picture. Keep it simple and small and write a page a day. I love the story of Andre Dubus III writing his first book. He had 4 kids, was working construction full time and spent 20 minutes a day writing while parked at the cemetery before going home.

In some ways playwriting is ideal for short bursts of time because you really can write a play one scene at a time. I could not have written a novel while my daughter was young. It’s no accident that my writing world expanded as my daughter headed off to college.


I find that when I’m working on a novel, I need a long stretch of predictable time to write, whereas a play is so much shorter, so I can get more done in bursts. What’s your writing schedule like? Does it vary a lot, depending on whether you’re working a play, opera, or novel?


The actual writing process, the day-to-day activity of writing is the same no matter what the form. You have to show up and give yourself to it. But the book took more time, lots more time. I found I had to make my life very, very quiet in order to create the mental space for a book.

One of the best things about writing a book is that the fun part – what I think of as the honeymoon phase when you’re living inside the work – lasts longer.


It seems like Alice Bliss has really struck a chord with many readers, of various ages. You’ve attended many productions of your work for stage. How does the response from readers of Alice Bliss compare to the response you’ve had from your plays and operas?

A reader lives in the world of the book for much longer than an audience member lives in the world of a play. I would say that the response of readers has been more intense, perhaps because of that longer, more personal and more private relationship with a book.

from Pilgrim Theatre production of N (Bonaparte) directed by Kim Mancuso

Marketing a book is very different from marketing a play. These days, the author of a book bears a lot more responsibility for getting the word out, even when you’re with a large publisher. Talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned about marketing a book. Do you think they’ll have any use for you in your work for stage?

Book marketing feels very different from marketing for the theatre because - if you’re lucky - it lasts such a long time. I was working intensely on the hardcover release of Alice Bliss for a solid 6 months. And now it’s time to work on the paperback release, which will be more extensive.

Lessons learned? Getting up to speed with social media, learning how to reach out to and engage with readers and fellow writers. Learning how open and friendly and supportive novelists can be. Meeting dozens of book bloggers – a world I did not even know existed. There is a very generous spirit at the moment and the world of books feels very open. I don’t know if this openness will last, or whether it is just the first flush of all of this social media potential.

The contact and connections with other writers has been amazing and really fun. I’ve found people who are friendly, open, and supportive; I’ve met and corresponded with writers in South Africa, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the US.


What are you working on now?

I’m about to begin work on a commission from Playwrights Horizons, to write Alice Bliss, the musical, with the composer Jenny Giering and lyricist Adam Gwon.

And I’m deep into my second book. My next novel begins with water, as Alice Bliss does. There’s a large Irish Catholic family with six kids. It’s 1966 and the Viet Nam war changes everything.


Thanks for taking the time for this, Laura!
Thank you, Pat. Always fun to talk with you. 

You can read more about Laura and her work at  www.lauraharringtonbooks.com and www.laura-harrington.com.

The next installment of the Juggler Interviews will feature a talk with Diana Renn.

Playwriting in 3D: Playwriting and Puppetry, May 29

Next Tuesday, May 29, I'll be moderating the fourth installment in StageSource's Playwriting in 3D series.  This time we'll be talking about Playwriting and Puppetry.  We'll have an in-depth discussion at the Brookline Puppet Showplace Theatre with Roxie Myhrum, Bonnie Duncan, Faye Dupras, and Brad Shur.  And show-and-tell, too.

The use of puppets dates backs to the very beginning of theatre, and now more and more new plays and theatre productions are using puppets as ways to help tell stories. Recent examples include Paula Vogel's Long Christmas Ride Home and the production of Wild Swans at American Repertory Theatre.   The very popular Avenue Q is running right now at Lyric Stage.

The panel will discuss different uses of puppets in narrative theatre, and how writing for puppets is both similar and different from writing for live actors. Whether you're interested in writing your own puppet show or want to integrate the use of puppets into your own script/production, this is a great chance to learn from the experts.

Panelists will show examples of their own work, and there will be plenty of time for audience questions and discussion.

The cost $20 for StageSource members, $30 for non-members.

To purchase a ticket visit http://www.stagesource.org/store/product/53/

Come check it out.  We've had great discussions at the other panels and this one promises to be more interesting and fun than ever. 


(You can also help spread the word, by inviting people to the event via Facebook at the Facebook event page.)

2012 Boston Theater Marathon Round Up

I had a great time at the Boston Theater Marathon yesterday.  My daughter, Kira, and fellow Rhombus playwrights, Alexa Mavromatis and Ginger Lazarus, were part of our theatre-absorbing team.  We saw them all.  Yep, 53 plays in 10 hours. 

My play, Second Look, ran in the 6-7pm hour, and I was delighted.  It's a serious piece, and the audience was clearly with us.  The house grew very, very quiet, which is just what we needed.  Actors Charles Van Eman and Bob DeLibero did a fantastic job, under Stephen Faria's direction, of capturing the awkwardness and silent pauses in the difficult encounter portrayed in Second Look.  Much thanks to the Firehouse Center for the Arts for choosing and producing the play.

Bob DeLibero, Stephen Faria, and Charles Van Eman at rehearsal.

I was was a little concerned about how the audience would react to our piece when I first sat down and saw the program, because our hour started with Designated Sitter, by George Sauer, featuring Hannah Husband, Nael Nacer, and Ed Hoopman--and this promised to have the audience laughing.  (And it did.)  And then right before Second Look was scheduled Walt McGough's piece, The Dinosaurs Have a Request, with a cast of a dozen actors.  I'm a huge fan of Walt's work, and this promised to keep the audience chuckling.  How would we get them to settle down for Second Look?

Turns out, Walt's piece was funny, sure, but it was also extremely thoughtful and thought-provoking, and highly theatrical.  A hard act to follow, but it fully engaged the audience.  This was just what we needed and Bob and Charlie kept a tight trip on them throughout our piece.

There were many good plays and performances over the course of the evening.  Far too many to list all of them here, but besides Walt and George's pieces, here are a few that stood out for me:

• Shrapnel by young playwright Yavni Bar-Yam. Intense play about potential high school shooters.
• Love, Billy Bunny by Peter Floyd.  I'm a big fan of plays about obsessives, and any play that features a gun being held to the head of a stuffed bunny has my vote.
• Kevin LaVelle completely grabbed our attention in William Donnelly's play, Animal Boat, as a former writer of children's songs turned corporate PR hack.  (This was one of Kira's favorite's, too.)
• Ronan Noone's I Glue You showed his dark, dark sense of humor and clear love and skill with language.
• Bob Mussett and Lynn R. Guerra shone in an intense encounter between two people who have trouble dealing with other people in Sheri Wilner's Arts and Sciences. 
• Grant MacDermott made a fine playwriting debut with the heartfelt King Richards, with strong performances from Dale Place and Bob Pemberton.
• C.J. Erlich, whom I met at the EstroGenius festival last year, gave us some great laughs with The Lilac Ticket, about an elderly married couple.  Kippy Goldfarb and Stephen Benson had terrific chemistry.
• I was delighted to see Audrey Claire Johnson, who is in the film version of Measuring Matthew, give a strong performance as a sleepless mother in Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich's play, 3 A.M.
• Hand Down the Chesterfield, by Tom Grady, was one of the more ambitious pieces of the day, with Michael Fordham Walker giving a fluid performance as a coat, in a play that had a complex view of time, place, and memory.
• I like a play with a good surprise, and John Shanahan's play, Hot Water, featuring Will Lyman, Bill Mootos, and Amanda Collins, certainly made me happy.
• Erin Striff's The As-If Sisters was a solid adoption play, and I happen to love writing and watching adoption plays.  As well as plays with Georgia Lyman in them.
• Deirdre Girard's play, Frickin' Woodpecker, got a great cast in Steven Barkhimer and Barlow Adamson, that got this script to land with just the right gentle touch.
• Esme Allen blew me away in The Accidents of Bread by William Orem.  I turned to Alexa and said, "who the hell was that?"  Having spent the last zillion years working on a play about the creation of the English Bible, I loved seeing someone flip out over the nature of transubstantiation.
• And Reproduction by Elizabeth Dupre, featured some great romantic geek humor.  I adore romantic geek humor, since I might actually be a romantic geek myself (you'll have to ask Tracy for confirmation).  Excellent performances in this one by Andrew Bernap and Rachel Dulude.

 The day ran, as always, seamlessly.  The BPT staff, designers, running crew, and stage managers are special kinds of magicians and deserve high prize for this most intense juggling act.

I dragged Kira to the party afterwards.  I promised that we'd only stay 15 minutes (she protested that she needed to go home and get to bed because she had school the next day.  Pshaw!)  but of course I kept us there for almost an hour.  My wife pointed out that the BTM is basically Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work Day for me.   [The following is apparently a secret.  Do not tell anyone:]  The BTM party is pretty much the ideal networking situation for playwrights.  There's plentiful, delicious food, cheap drinks, and LOTS of actors and directors who like working on new plays.  Is there a better place to catch up with old friends and make new contacts?  If you're a playwright working in Boston, you're a fool, a fool I say, not to go to the BTM and the party, even if you don't have a play selected.  You can scout dozens of actors, directors, and theatre companies.  What kind of new scripts interest these folks?  And then that very same night, you can hunt down the ones you like and introduce yourself, tell them how much you love their work, and give them business cards.  Seriously--you get all this for $25 (if you buy in advance).  It'd be worth that much just to go to the party alone, but no, you can watch 53 short plays, too.  It's pure insanity.   [Some playwrights are very shy and find parties painful.  The solution is to find an extroverted friend and go as a tag team.  It works.  Trust me.]


It was a great night.  I can't wait for next year!


(My apologies to playwright Erin Striff.  In the initial version of this post, I mistakenly gave writing credit for The As-If Sisters to Laura Crook, who was the director for the piece. Erin wrote the piece and North Shore Music Theatre produced.)

the Juggler Interviews, #9: Mark Dunn

This week I got to talk with Mark Dunn, whom I first met in the late '90s, when we were both having our plays produced in Denver, directed by the same director.  We stayed in touch and become friends over the years.  In terms of juggling writing for different media, Mark has always been an inspiration and role model for me, moving effortlessly from writing mostly plays to writing a variety of books (including one of my very favorite novels, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters ). 

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, you were getting a lot of productions, at small and mid-size theatres across the country. Belles and Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain were getting a lot of productions . You had a dozen full-length plays published by Samuel French, DPS and Dramatic Publishing. And then your first novel, Ella Minnow Pea, came out and was a big hit. Ella Minnow Pea has been followed by a whole string of books—what was the transition like, moving from writing plays to books (and moving, physically, from New York to Albuquerque)?

The transition was stranger than I expected.  I went from working exclusively in a very artistically collaborative medium to one in which the writer has to do most of the heavy lifting.  I often make the comparison when I'm teaching writing workshops between the playscript serving as a blueprint which then is taken by the director and the actors and from which the physical play is constructed -- contrasted with a novel which serves as the creative entity itself and lives or dies only on the basis of the text itself upon the page.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each: as a playwright I like working with people who bring their own forms of creativity and artistic insight into the mix.  Together we create this (hopefully) beautiful piece of theatre that takes its author's original story idea and shapes it into something that everyone has a stake in.  (And woe to the playwright who gets too proprietary about his work.)  But a novelist doesn't get to benefit from the overlay of other talents and perspectives, except in terms of editorial input.  And I've had editors who were very hands-off.  I've had the other kinds of editors, as well, resulting in (in one sad case) clashing visions that resulted in my publishing house siding with my editor and dropping the book altogether.  The physical move from New York to New Mexico paralleled my shift in large part from writing plays to books.  I drew a lot of creative energy as a playwright from living in a theatre town like New York.  But an author can pen his books anywhere, so my wife and I picked a place that was quieter and little more sedate than the Big Apple.  The irony is that I really did want to keep my hand in and perhaps write a new play every year or so and suddenly I had entered a community in which being in the theatre was considered more of an avocation than a vocation.  To put it bluntly, I moved to a town with an enormous number of community theatres, and very little opportunities for professional playwrights to develop new work.

Was Ella Minnow Pea the first novel that you wrote, or the first that was published?

Ella was my first published novel, but I had written Welcome to Higby several years before.  After Ella was published, my publisher asked what I'd be working on next, and I handed him Higby.  It worked out pretty well, although the books being so different from each other, spoke to different sets of readers (and some fans of my "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable Ella Minnow Pea" were looking for something similar and instead, I gave them a book about a small town in Mississippi).

How long did it take for you to find a publisher for Ella?

Quite a while.  I couldn't get an agent for an odd book like Ella and had a hard time landing this unagented novel with a publisher.  Most of the queries to both agents and publishers (for which I received responses) met with form-letter rejections.  Good luck was eventually on my side, though.  MacAdam/Cage had just opened its doors the year before and was still hungry for manuscripts, even to the point of accepting unsolicited manuscripts from unrepresented authors.  Even MacAdam/Cage doesn't do that today.  Interestingly, when the hardback did well and there was a bidding war among several of the large publishing houses for the paperback rights, I had a private laugh over the fact that each of these publishers participating in the auction for Ella's paperback rights, had rejected the book when I had first queried them about it.

It seemed like for a while you dived headfirst into writing books, but you’ve managed to keep your hand in theatre. What makes it so hard to leave playwriting?

Many of the things I noted above, but I should also say that as one who is basically a storyteller, and a storyteller who first learned to tell stories through dialogue, playwriting has always been a comfortable vehicle for me.  As a writer who enjoys challenges, I've always felt that the idea of holding an audience's interest for two hours through people simply talking to one another on a stage was a challenge that I especially loved.

Do you find it difficult, as a writer, to go back and forth, or is it actually helpful?

These days I make that transition fairly easily.  It's like an artist who spends part of his time painting in oil and part of his time painting in watercolor, which requires two very different techniques, but after a while you get used to the adjustments.  With plays I work small and work concise.  There's an economy of words that must be respected.  My canvas is much, much larger with my novels and I have the chance to explore the contours of my novels' characters, which I can't do with my play characters.  My latest book, though, offers an interesting challenge -- American Decameron is 100 short stories.  As I've worked through these stories, I've found that I've had to apply some of my playwriting rules of saying much with fewer words.  But in large part that's just a difference between long form writing and short form writing -- the same way that my one-act plays require a different approach than my full length plays.

Do you find that you have more freedom to challenge yourself and your audience when writing books? When I look at some of the work you’ve done, Ella Minnow Pea, Ibid , Under the Harrow , and your upcoming American Decameron, it seems like you’ve set up extremely difficult situations for yourself as a writer (for example, in Ella Minnow Pea, you are forced to progressively use fewer and fewer letters of the alphabet, Ibid is told entirely in footnotes), and the reader gets sucked in with seeing whether you can pull it off. It’s so cool that you’re able to write like this, yet at the same time, it seems like the publishing industry is becoming more risk-averse in terms of what they’ll publish. This would seem especially difficult for a writer like you, who is not writing in an established genre. What’s your take on the state of American publishing right now?

And that pretty much defines where I am right now.  I do really enjoy the constraints and the challenges and the chance to do things that few if any authors have done before.  I can safely say that no author has ever written a book about a disappearing alphabet in which the alphabet literally disappears from the book as it goes along.  Ella Minnow Pea has now become fodder for literary trivia -- a weird but fun honor.  But because I tend to do things that have few comparables, it puts me in an awkward and mostly unfortunate situation with regard to extremely risk-averse and conservative publishers (which pretty much defines all of the medium to large-size houses right now.)  American Decameron was rejected by one editor after another when my agent started sending it around because it was a big book, because it was comprised of short stories in a day in which very few short story collections are being published (not that A.D. is a "collection" in the traditional sense), because it can't be easily described by an editor to those of her superiors who will ultimately decide its fate.  And that's the problem with the industry right now.  Hard economics has made it much more difficult to take on a book that may have the potential to break out on its own and turn itself into a publishing phenomenon, but also could end up falling far short and lose the house money.  So what we have is fear and parochialism in the industry.  Something similar, I noticed, happened with my published plays over the last four years of this recession.  The community theatres that generally license my work from the play catalogs stopped scheduling plays in their seasons that weren't in what I call the "cobweb canon."  We saw a lot of productions around the country of old plays (often tired, old plays) with familiar titles.  Most of my plays don't have familiar titles and so my playwriting revenue went into a several-year slump.

You’ve written one book for kids, The Age Altertron (Calamitous Adventures of Rodney and Wayne, Cosmic Repairboys) . How did you approach writing for a younger audience?

I put myself as best I could into the head of the young pre-teen reader.  I kept the language simple but not patronizingly so.  What worked best for me is writing the kind of book that I would have enjoyed reading when I was twelve.  But it definitely required the shifting of a few gears.  Then again, I shift gears a lot.  Every book I write requires its own voice and its own storytelling tool box.

I love that you’ve been able to do some non-fiction work—you wrote ZOUNDS!: A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections and you and your wife, Mary, put together the comprehensive, United States Counties. Again, you seem able to make some big, fun leaps into other types of projects. How do you balance it all? Do you tend to have a lot of projects running all at once?

I actually do work on more than one project at a time -- unless I have a deadline that forces me to concentrate on one particular book or play until I'm finished.  I shuffle through them in such a way that I keep myself engaged and energized on each one.  Maybe that's why I'm allowed to tell people that I don't get writer's block.  If I find myself getting to a point where I'm going to have work myself through a tough spot, I move to something else and then come back.  Often my return involves backing up a few chapters or pages and then going at it with a running start.  I also have projects that I've set aside, that I like to come back to from time to time.  My maxim usually is that anything I write can be made better if I keep working on it.  It's only my published work that I'm not allowed to tinker with anymore.  On occasion I've taken work out that's ten, twelve years old and now with a more mature eye, I can reshape it in a way that makes it more satisfying for me.

What is your writing schedule like for a novel, a book of non-fiction, a play? Does it vary a lot?

The non-fiction can be a slog.  The county encyclopedia as the exception to all my usual rules was like working each day in a salt mine.  On the other hand I usually am having so much fun with my books and plays that it's hard to pull myself away when I'm "in the zone."  People wonder why I'm able to write such long books.  Under the Harrow, for example is 200,000 words, and American Decameron will be 250,000.  In large part it's because I really enjoy spending time with the characters I've created.  I'm also not averse to research and so many of my books have been pretty heavily researched.  I like discovering things in my research that will serve my story and characters and even sometimes shift things in an unexpected new direction.

How do you organize the research that you do? (I’m using Scrivener now and really like it.) I’d love to hear about the tools that you use. You worked for a long time at the New York Public Library. Did you learn any good tricks there?

I use no tools beyond the cerebral ones I've acquired through trial and error and intuition.  For the county encyclopedia Mary and I created a large WORD database divided into state folders and county files and using the same template into which to plug in information and text, so that at the end of the day, the county articles were nearly written from the assembly of information in each file.  But I'm an old fashioned researcher.  I've spent thousands of hours sitting in library reading rooms with either my laptop or pencils and spiral-bound notebooks, jotting down facts that I felt might be useful in my plays and fiction projects.  I'm an armchair cultural historian of the 20th century, so often I was building around information I already knew.  With respect to my last novel, Under the Harrow, it was necessary for me to sit with the Encyclopedia Britannica from the 1880s and browse through nearly every page to get a sense as to what it was that my characters would know, since they were quarantined neo-Victorians who had only this encyclopedia, a Bible, and the novels of Dickens from which to create the lions' share of their world-knowledge.  In the course of all that browsing, I discovered several things that furthered the plot of my novel such as the fact that the encyclopedia had quite a few translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics words and phrases (plot point!), or that there were little snippets of Victorian poetry throughout.  I was surprised to learn that as far back as the late 1880s most scientists had a strong feeling that the invention of lighter-than-aircraft was only a few years away.  How prescient was that!

What projects are you working on right now? (Weren’t you working on a board game at one point? Wasn’t there going to be a musical of Ella Minnow Pea?).

In between working on edits of American Decameron, I've been spending time with an old play from around 2000 that I didn't do much with back then, as well as a science fiction Young Adult novel I've been working on now and then for the last eight years.  Alas, I had to give up my quixotic dream of becoming a game designer since there is no more competitive industry on this planet and especially in this day in which Hasbro has cornered 90 percent of the board game market (and has its own in-house designers).  Not that I don't have at least five games either prototyped or living in my head.  The Ella Minnow Pea musical premiered about three years ago at the University of Michigan and its book writer/lyricist and composer have taken it through a few more rewrites before hooking up with a theatre company in New York where I believe it's slated for a workshop production next year.  I'm not too well looped into the project at this point.  They just keep paying their option every year and I try to make sure it doesn't get too expensive for them since they're very talented and I'd love to see them eventually get a good New York production.

Thanks, Mark!