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. :)

Over the past few days I’ve been revising Safe and Sound, trying to gut out the flaws and replace them with new, living flesh. With every rewrite, though, it’s hard to tell if I’m actually making things any better. Sometimes I can tell that I am, but sometimes I have no idea, and I have to wait long enough for it to cool down so I can step back and look at it somewhat objectively. Or I get a third party to look at it. (Second party? I don’t know. :P)

Anyway, it’s been interesting to see how the play’s evolved so far. Originally it was about two guys, Dave and Martin. Dave’s dad had died. In the second draft, it was Martin’s dad who’d died. Then we had auditions, and not enough guys showed up, so we ended up casting a girl as Martin. That of course meant rewriting the script so it would work with a girl in that role. On Thursday we had a full company meeting and read through all the scripts, which was the first time I’d heard the new rewrite read aloud. I’d written the new draft pretty hastily, and the ending was fairly pathetic, so earlier today I rewrote the script once again, completely redoing the beginning and ending, and touching up the middle section as well. And now I’ve learned something new about Dave’s dad (I needed a reason Dave was close to Abbie’s dad — Abbie is Martin’s name now, though it was Gwendolyn in the last draft and it could very easily change in the next draft :)).

Writing really is a discovery process for me. I feel like I’m unearthing pre-existing characters and situations, not inventing them. It sounds weird, but that’s really how it is. And it’s awesome. :)

I’ve been reading Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life, and it’s chock-full of nuggets that inspire me to take up my pen and write, write, write. (The other part I love is that she’s unabashed about her Christianity and its influence on her writing.)

Here’s one bit I loved:

If you are an artist, regardless of your religion, everything you do is your witness. You cannot hide what you are. Emerson said, “What you are speaks so loudly over your head that I cannot hear what you say.”

And another:

The writer cannot write just when he feels like it or he won’t have anything to write with. Like the violin, he has to be constantly tuned and practiced on. This can sometimes be very hard on husband or family, but it’s absolutely essential. My family has with the utmost forbearance and patience put up with innumerable saucepans, the bottoms of which are permanently speckled from burned vegetables. Last year it was peas, and this year I seem to have switched to string beans. I not only burn dinner when I dash to the typewriter to set down just one more sentence, I’m also given to excitement and enthusiasm far beyond the dignity of my position of somebody who’s past the half-century mark.

Yesterday I wrote more of The Widow and the Wizard story (and learned to my surprise who the witch really was — not at all what I’d been thinking all along), and right now I’m revising my play Safe and Sound (auditions are today and tomorrow).

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.)

Two hours after the deadline, I got an e-mail from the New Play Project folks: Safe and Sound got accepted. :)

The funny thing is, I almost sort of knew it would (and that Alchemy wouldn’t) in advance. I’m not sure how, but I wasn’t surprised at all. I suppose part of it is that I’m a lot better at writing humor than I am at writing straight drama, and Safe and Sound has a lot of humor — it’s a comedic drama — whereas Alchemy has almost none. And it makes a difference.

I’m actually glad that Alchemy didn’t get accepted, now that I think about it. I do want to write “serious” stuff, sure, but for me it seems to work out best when I sprinkle on the humor. And I don’t really mind being a humorist; if I’m known for writing “funny plays,” that’s fine by me. :)

I’m interested to see, though, if any of this leaks over into my other writing. It’s looking like I tend towards humor and fantasy. Which is also fine by me. (But I do plan to sharpen my skills in other areas, because I don’t want to pigeonhole myself. And being better at serious drama and realistic fiction and whatnot will make my comedies and my fantasy work better.)

Today I took the afternoon off so I could finish writing these plays. I completely scratched my previous drafts of the play (heretofore known as both Into Eternity and Shadowpaint), rewrote it from the ground up, and dubbed it Alchemy, which fits in a lot better with the changes I’ve made. The idea behind the play — that God can take whatever bad things happen and turn them into good — is one I’m really fond of lately, but whether the play actually gets that across is yet to be seen. It would’ve been nice to have more time to revise. This is what happens when I wait until right before the deadline. :)

Speaking of right before the deadline, I wrote most of the second play, Safe and Sound, in the hour before midnight. (Backstory: I went to the library Saturday afternoon and checked out some Jorge Luis Borges. On my walk home, I decided I wanted to write about something verging on supernatural. While Safe and Sound doesn’t actually have any supernatural happenings, it’s about that.) Granted, I spent a couple hours over the past few days freewriting and thinking about the play, and then earlier this evening I spent an hour writing a quick draft of what was originally the first scene, so it wasn’t completely done in this last hour. But most of it was. It’s been a madcap dash to the finish line, and again, I wish I’d had some time to revise. Oh well. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

And I’m getting excited for Script Frenzy next month. :)

[Cross-posted from Top of the Mountains.]

Yet another Snowstorm post. :) (But it’s the last one.) We had the encore performance of “Eccentricities” tonight, and it went quite well, even though the place wasn’t completely sold out. At the end they tallied all the audience votes for the four performances, and to my surprise, Snowstorm took third place! (That’s a good surprise, not a bad one. :P) They presented me with a check for $15 which I’m going to frame as my first real writing prize.

It’s not about the money. It’s not even about winning, really. It’s about the joy of theatre, of words and acting and stories, of humanity. Even though I didn’t really participate in the production — I wrote the script, submitted it, and then sat back and let them do their thing — even though I was a clockmaker playwright, I still felt a wonderful sense of community with all the other playwrights and actors and directors and everyone else who helped out. I love theatre.

Which doesn’t mean it’s been a bed of roses. (And by the way, I’m not sure a bed of roses is all that great. I mean, the petals would get squished all over as soon as you got in, and the smell would be a bit overpowering, and doesn’t the pigment in flowers rub off on you, too? ;)) Saturday, for example, I kept seeing all the faults in my script (lines I wish I’d written differently), and I have to admit that it got me down. I almost vowed to stop writing plays entirely — with fiction and poetry, you don’t have to see it acted out in front of everyone, it stays safely on the page. Less embarrassing if it goes wrong. But then by Sunday I was itching at the bit again to finish this new play and submit it. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster, really — nothing like dating, but still a lot of ups and downs.

We have a talkback session after each performance, and usually all of the questions have been directed at other plays, because all but mine had a deeper meaning and thus provided more fodder for discussion. Tonight, though, something bizarrely switched, and almost all of the questions were about Snowstorm. Unexpected but fun. I’m realizing that even though I usually don’t like being up in front of large groups of people, I can do this. I even like it. Phew. :)

So anyway, the submission deadline for the next festival is tomorrow at midnight. (If you’d like to submit something — and you really ought to — you can check out the website.) I’ve got one play which is mostly done (and the title keeps changing so I’ll leave it anonymous :P), and then Saturday around noon I was walking down the hill south of campus and came up with another idea which I’m also going to try to write by tomorrow night. Lots of writing, but it’s worth it. Oh, it’s worth it. :)

[Cross-posted from Top of the Mountains.]

My play Snowstorm opened last night. With my last play I went to several of the rehearsals and runthroughs, so I had a fairly good idea walking into the premiere how the show would go. Not so this time.

I could’ve gone to both the rehearsals and the runthroughs, yes, but I wanted to see what it’s like to pull back all the way and let the director and the cast have full rein over the play. Cold turkey.

And all afternoon I felt precisely like a cold turkey. It was a month and a half ago that I submitted my script, and in all honesty I hadn’t looked at it since. I didn’t remember if the play was even any good. And the performance itself wouldn’t just be my script — it would be the script clothed in flesh and blood, brought to life. Words on a page are one thing; words on a stage, another. Anxiety rode piggyback in my gut all evening.

Having watched the whole show, though, I’m happy to report that it actually turned out really well. There are nine plays total (though three of them are pretty much the same play broken up into three parts), and mine’s the middle one, right after intermission. (Which meant I was almost too nervous during the whole first half to enjoy it properly. Luckily there are two more performances today. :))

The funny thing is that it’s been so long since I read the script that I kept thinking, “Oh, wow, they added that. And that. And that.” And I just went back and re-read the script and almost every line I thought they added was actually there in the script. Fancy that. :) (The cast and director really did do a great job with it, and they added some extra blocking that worked out wonderfully. I’m pleased.)

During the talkback session I realized that mine was the only play without some kind of deeper meaning. It’s pure fluff. Entertaining cotton candy. :) (Not that I think a little of that isn’t bad. My next play is about a girl who finds out she’s going blind, so I’m getting a nice mix of light and heavy in.)

Anyway, the nine plays run about an hour and a half, with an optional talkback session afterwards (which lasts around half an hour). If you’re in Provo and are free at 3:30 or 7:30 today, it’s at Provo Theatre Company (105 E. 100 N.) and is $5/person. And if you’re not free, that’s totally fine. :) (They’ll be recording the matinee today and I’m hoping I can get a copy and upload it so the rest of you can see it.)

In summary: it’s scary as heck to see your script acted out — I felt like a shaved poodle all afternoon and evening — but it’s so worth it. :)