Post Reading Post

The reading of Writer's Block on Thursday went well. I waited until now to post something because I wanted to give it a little space to sort of matriculate before I did.

The turn out was good. Nice mix of members of the Fringe Playwrights Unit and other folks unrelated to that but who are good friends who keep coming out for stuff.

Thanks to Peter and Victor and James, the cast. They have pretty much been the only ones reading this piece over the last year or so that I've been taking it in to the Fringe. It was really valuable to hear it read. Though I have to say, it generally got better laughs in the workshop . . . it sort of makes me wonder if too much of the humor is theater-centric, but y'know what? That's ok because so am I!

I got great feedback . . . and confirmation for some things I kind of already felt about the piece. There were some clunky and problematic things about the script that I looked at very closely today and sort of think I solved most of them.

We'll see. I'm taking the new pages in on Tuesday so hopefully all will go well. There is a build to the end of the piece that felt a little abrupt before, but I worked to fix that today . . . and I think I did.

It had been a very long time since I had heard one of my full length plays read all the way through and it was refreshing to say the least. You can really get a better sense of the arc and how it works . . . I think this one does. But then I think all my plays do! Surprise!

So the next step is getting it out into the world. We'll see how it goes. It has been incredible fun to work on this piece and it's a real good example of how our lives intersect with our art. One of the key elements of the play, for example, is a play called The Conversation of Death. In the early days of working on this idea I read H is for Hawk . . . and one of the things she talked about in the book was the interaction between prey and hunter . . . well . . . that was too juicy to pass up so that influenced the play. There are other, smaller things as well . . .but it all goes into the baggy and gets mixed up until it comes out as this play . . . the title of which, by the by, I didn't put all that much thought into. Actually, when I was writing the program for Like a Sack of Potatoes, I wanted an announcement of this reading and I needed a title, which it did not have at the time . . . so I said what do I call it and the first words that bubbled up were Writer's Block . . . and it fit so beautifully . . . it kind of tells you that the piece is about the creative process without really rubbing your nose in it, so I think it's perfect for the piece . . .we'll see what kind of traction I get with it!

So . . . register with the Library of Congress and away we go . . . onto the next one!