Nice time to reflect a bit

first the play update . . . my new piece is through the first draft stage: I have a beginning and an end so that qualifies it. I think it's pretty interesting but no one else has seen or heard it yet so that might just be me. We'll see. Sort of came out quickly, which is a good sign . . . when that happens there is reason for optimism as far as my experience goes . . .doesn't happen every time that's for sure. 'Damage Control' came out in a fairly quick burst I think. Not too many drafts . . . though the initial impulse for that one was a solo piece as well . . . and that was a long time ago . . . then it became what it is, which has its fans . . . I have a sort of soft spot for it, and would like to see what it does to an audience some day . . . (sigh)

Now for the promised reflection . . . why now? Well tomorrow is the first day of my new job, ending a year of sabbatical which was productive in the extreme . . . culminating in the Woodstock Fringe performances. Wow. Not only that, but today is the seventeenth anniversary of our moving to Nyack! (which means that yesterday was the seventeenth anniversary of the closing of The Trip to Bountiful, still the closest I have come to B'way so far). Amazing what has happened since our move up here. I wasn't writing prior to the move . . . I had written . . . but wasn't actively doing it yet . . . but the wheels were turning . . . the monologue that I wrote about my grandfather (and which I ultimately used in Old Hickory, some of it anyway) was what got me cast in Bountiful . . . Bette said 'See what happens when you write?' So guess how I spent my time commuting?

At first it was screenplays, the first of which was an adaptation of a short story that I had written . . . a horror thing called Family Portrait . . . I've been thinking that would make a good solo piece . . . then my best screenplay, The Craftsman. Someone in a competition somewhere actually called me to tell me how much he liked it . . . said it was something the Coen brothers would do . . . nice shot in the arm that! Eventually, after a few more screenplays, I decided to dance with the one who brought me, so to speak, and I turned to writing plays. My thinking was since everybody and then some is writing screenplays these days, and my love of theater is what brought me to NYC, then . . . well, you know . . .

It became clear very soon that I had made the right decision. I got involved with the Pulse Theater Company, which had a writers group . . . and that lead to three of my one acts being produced there . . . one of these, Thirty Odd Years, was done at the Gallery Players first, but before that had been read at the Pulse . . . I'll never forget the reaction to that play the first time I heard it read! The Gallery is where I met Staci Swedeen, who is how I met the Hudson Valley Professional Playwrights Lab. Which is how I got involved with the Herbert Mark Newman Theater in Pleasantville (three of my full lenght plays were read there). Funny how connected things get isn't it?

Heck, my staged reading of Damage Control in Raleigh is because of meeting Jerry Davis in Bountiful! John Gulley, the director of Bountiful, gave me some of the best advice I've gotten in theater: never piss anybody off! You don't know where they're gonna crop up! (another good piece of theater advise: never carry anything you can drag: Jim Loeffler).

So it's all a journey. If I hadn't gone to Theater Artists Workshop in Norwalk, and met Norman Marshall there, and started Where the Rain Never Falls I never would have met the Woodstock Fringe folk. Norman and I read it for Wallace and some of the crew and Wallace invited me to join . . .then Norman got the radio reading done . . . So it's amazing . . . looking back over seventeen years, to see what's been happening . . . I can't wait for the next seventeen!