Over the past month, I’ve been revising Tree of Blood a lot. (Ten or eleven times, to be exact.) After several revisions I realized that I’d written myself into several plot knots, primarily because I’d been adding in all sorts of backstory without stepping out to make sure it still made sense as a whole. And so I stopped myself. I wrote an outline for the whole play, then went back and rewrote it from scratch, and after a few tweaks here and there, it’s noticeably better. Still creepy, but without all the confusing holes in the plot. :) We’re in the middle of rehearsals at the moment and will be performing in a mere two weeks. Egads!

And I’m not assistant directing anymore, by the way. I’m directing. Yup, I don’t have all that much experience under my belt (assistant directing a single forty-five minute play and writing four of my own plays, plus watching lots of plays and movies over the course of my life :P), but I’m now the director of James Goldberg’s play Repeating History. It’s a good training-wheel play, since it’s only three pages long. But it’s got its own challenges, too — the bulk of the play is effectively a Powerpoint presentation, for example. There’s only one character (well, there’s sort of a second character, but she only has two lines and she’s not onstage). And the play has a lot of historical allusions that most people probably aren’t going to get, because we’ve all forgotten almost everything we learned in U.S. History.

In other news, I’ve got a few new projects lining up. First, I really want to get back into writing novels, so I’ve decided to aim at 1,000 words a day (which, as I learned from my NaNoWriMo experience, should be a piece of cake) and I’ve started outlining the one I’ll focus on for the next few months.

Second, almost every time I watch a movie I want to start writing screenplays, so I’ve decided to finally start doing it. I’ll probably start out with short films because, well, they’re shorter. :) And they’re similar to short plays, which I’ve got a decent amount of experience with.

Third, I’m writing some TV scripts for a demo for this new television channel that’ll be starting up soon. I don’t know how much I can talk about it yet — probably more than this, but I’ll play it safe for now — but it’ll be fun. And regardless of the fate of the channel, it’ll be a really good learning experience. Besides, who ever thought I’d be writing for TV? Not me. :)

And last but not least, I need to start blogging on here more often. Monthly isn’t going to cut it. I’m also itching to redesign the site, but that’ll have to wait for a bit. (I’m currently redesigning the New Play Project site. And have been for a while; hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend.)

Unbindery’s on hold for now.

[Cross-posted from Top of the Mountains.]

This morning I found out that Tree of Blood did indeed get accepted. :) It’ll be produced as part of New Play Project’s Long Ago and Far Away show (seven short plays) on July 25–26, 28, August 1–2, 4. Times will most likely be 7:30 pm with 2:30 pm matinees on the Saturdays, but I’ll have more solid details later. Auditions are tentatively scheduled for June 24–25 on BYU campus (and anyone can try out). More on that later as well.

Oh, and I’m going to be assistant directing again. I’d thought about passing on that, since it is a bit of a time commitment, but I need my theatre fix. :P And it’s a lot of fun to be more involved with the show — playwrights do participate, but not nearly as much as directors.

I’m going to try really hard to start writing plays for the next show (Fire and Rain, religious plays) in advance, so that I can submit six or seven. Why? Mainly the OCD. :P No, really, I have tons of ideas for plays — a flood of them — and the more I write, the better I’ll get. And deadlines make me write. It’s not the submitting that matters so much to me (though it feels good to send in a flurry of scripts), it’s the writing. And the getting better bit. :)

I submitted three plays to this next New Play Project set, Long Ago and Far Away. (The plays are Tree of Blood, Rhymetime, and Do Not Pass Go, in case you were wondering. Which you probably weren’t. :)) And I’ve also cast my lot in to assistant direct something again. Part of me is wondering why on earth I did that — do I really have time for it? — but I couldn’t help myself. I need my theatre fix. :)

I also need to start going to bed earlier. I meant to write seven plays way in advance for this set, but that didn’t happen. In fact, I really didn’t even get around to most of the work until today. (I rewrote Tree of Blood from scratch both this morning and this afternoon, got the idea for Rhymetime four hours ago and started writing it then, and revised Do Not Pass Go in about an hour. Barely made the deadline (sort of).)

We had our closing performance of the show — Lost and Found — tonight. The house was more full than it had been for any of the other five performances, and the audience was great — very receptive, they laughed a lot, and overall it was just an amazing way to end the show.

And we even had a lot of questions and comments about my play Safe and Sound during the talkback session. :) (Usually there aren’t that many.) And to my surprise, we won third place again! (It had been looking like one of the other plays was pretty solidly in third.) Not to mention that the play I assistant directed, Prodigal Son, won first place. It was a very good night. :)

Anyway, on my walk back home from the theater, I realized that I already miss it. And it had only been five minutes! (Well, plus cleaning up the building afterwards.) The cast and crew are great, the project is great, the audiences are great, and the plays are great. I love New Play Project so much. Seriously. It’s like my new extended family. And I already know that I’m going to be going through withdrawals within a few days. Time to write some more plays… :) (Yeah, I kind of haven’t done much of anything on my Script Frenzy piece.)

Oh, and thanks to all of you who came! I really appreciated it. And to the rest of you, well, there’ll be plenty more to come. :)

Earlier today Katherine posted “Toward a Mormon Renaissance” over at Mormon Renaissance (how fitting :)). It’s an essay by James Goldberg, one he read at the beginning of New Play Project’s “Thorns and Thistles” set of plays (which happened to be when my first play was performed, incidentally) (and I’m not just blogging about it because he mentions me in the essay, either :P). The essay — and the idea behind it — gives me goosebumps:

What I’m trying to say is that maybe it’s time for us to help change the world again. Look, I know it sounds arrogant to say that. I’m 24 years old, and the only times I can focus on theatre full-time are when I’ve saved up enough money to quit my day job for a few months. I mean, I don’t even have insurance — who am I to change the world? Who’s Katherine Gee or Ben Crowder? Who are any of the actors you’re going to see tonight? You know, most of them aren’t even trained actors. They’re just nice people who wanted to help us put on these plays.

Who are we? Well, we’re Latter-day Saints. We’re people who have wrestled with some of life’s big and little issues and have been lucky enough to have help. We’re people who think and act a little differently than most of the country does. We’re people who know a little about God and a little about life. And we’re people who believe that’s enough to say something big.

Are we going to make a difference? I hope so. And I take hope in history.

Beautiful. And let me just say again that I love New Play Project. It has the right feel to it (”right” being my own very subjective perspective, of course :)), and it’s just a really wonderful, beautiful, awesome thing. And it is changing the world. It’s not often that I find causes I really feel I can commit to and throw my lot in with full heart and soul, but New Play Project is one. I’m in it for the long haul. (Hopefully I’ll keep getting better as a playwright so that my plays keep getting accepted. ;) I’ve already got ideas for a couple more plays I’ll be submitting to the remaining festivals this year, actually, and tonight I started outlining one of them.)

I’ll wait a few more days before I give another update on rehearsals for Safe and Sound and Prodigal Son, by the way. (And purely for the historical record, with respect to that quote from James’ essay, Katherine Gee acted in my first play, and she and I are now directing Prodigal Son. Which James wrote. :) There’s connections all over the place, folks.)

Anyway, New Play Project has definitely found a warm spot in my heart, and I really feel that it’s a movement that is going to make a difference and change the world. And it’s unmistakably part of the Mormon renaissance.

Yesterday we held the first rehearsal for Prodigal Son (James Goldberg’s play that I’m assistant directing), and tonight’s the first Safe and Sound rehearsal. As a playwright, my role in rehearsals really is up to the director; some don’t care if I’m involved (with Snowstorm, for example, I didn’t go to a single rehearsal), others want close involvement. It is nice to be on hand to rewrite things if necessary, or to provide vision and explanation. (Though one would hope, of course, that all that would already be clear in the script. :))

Anyway, Prodigal Son is going to run about 45 minutes long — by far the longest play in the set — and so we’re rehearsing Monday through Friday for the next few weeks. It’s intense (not to mention that the actors need to be off-book by next Wednesday), and I still really have no idea what I’m doing as far as the directing goes, but I’m diving in headfirst and we’ll see how it turns out. :)

I’ll be assistant directing James Goldberg’s play Prodigal Son in our New Play Project Lost and Found festival next month. It’s my first time directing anything — which is why I’m assistant director :) — and in all honesty I have only the slightest idea what I’ll be doing, or how to do it well, but I’m very much looking forward to it. Theatre really speaks to me. For most of my life I’ve only been an observer (in the audience, though my sisters have acted in dozens of plays and I’ve gone to some of their rehearsals), but in the last six months that’s started changing. Playwriting, (assistant) directing…who knows, maybe I’ll even start acting one of these days. But for now I’m content to write. :) (And if the directing goes well, that, too.)