Open Wardrobes

Over the past couple of months I've been sending out emails to community and children's theaters in Minnesota and neighboring states, searching for an initial production for The Princess and the Moon. I've had some nibbles and several companies interested in reading the script and others who weren't. And then, a couple days ago, finally, a bite. I had an email from the program manager at Shade Tree Players Children's Theatre in Bismark, ND saying that they wanted to do The Princess and the Moon as one of their productions this summer. Shade Tree does a number of shows over the summer and their focus is plays performed by kids and teens (similar to Lakeshore's Summer Youth Project). I'm planning to drive out there for a few days to catch the show. So, it's exciting to finally have someone interested in doing this play and I look forward to seeing it!

On Sunday morning, before I had to head off for my Sunday matinee of Doubt, Kelly and I decided to go sit at a coffee shop for a bit. We tried a new place here in Saint Paul, on Payne Avenue, called Polly's Coffee Cove. We soon realized this was the neighborhood spot - everyone else seemed to know everyone else. It was a nice spot. Kelly did some reading while I continued and finished the first draft of my commedia piece (still needs a good title, hmmmm...). I'm shooting for something around an hour and this looks so far to be more, so that gives me some room to trim (or perhaps shoot for a 75-minute piece?). I was surprised at how quickly the draft went (23 days), but it helped a great deal that I had a detailed outline drawn up before I sat down and started writing. I mentioned in an earlier post that I did this to try and more closely follow the style of the true commedia, where the actors would post a detailed scenario (showing the scenes and entrances and exits) and improv the show from there. I don't normally do an outline when starting a new play and so it made for a fun change of pace for me. And seeing how quickly the draft went once I had the outline, I see the benefit of it! The Playwright Purge (i.e. write something everyday for 30 days) I'm participating in finishes up next week, and so I've started chipping away again at an Adaptation I'm working on to round out the Purge, and then will start looking at revisions of the commedia piece once I've typed the rest of it up. On the Adaptation I'm in the middle of a bit with an interesting technical challenge - how do you portray giants on stage when they need to interact with normal-sized characters?

Yesterday afternoon, before heading off to my own performance, Kelly and I went to see The Mousetrap at Lyric Arts. I've seen the play a couple of times before (including the long-running production in London), but not for many years and Kelly hadn't see it at all. It's the first time I've seen Lyric's space. It's a great theater and the beautiful set fit in perfectly (I wasn't always sure where the set ended and the theater itself began). Overall this cast of 8 was strong. Rachel Weber was a highlight with her reserved and inscrutable Miss Casewell, as was Ron Tolliver with his genial Major Metcalf. Joe Hendren gave a solid performance as Sergeant Trotter as he tries to unravel the mystery despite the lack of cooperation among the guests. Mary Kay Fortier-Spalding was also a delight with her hard-to-please Miss Boyle. Allie Munson was nice, if busy, as Molly Ralston and she made a good pairing with Toby Rust as her husband Giles. I found Tim Gage's Christopher Wren a little over the top, and Keith Wynecoop's Paravicini was sadly lacking any sense of mystery.


While a long production (a good 2 1/2 hours or so, including intermission) it did not feel slow-paced and Christie's wonderful script keeps the audience engaged throughout. The show runs for one last weekend (January 28 - 31) with evening shows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and matinees on Saturday and Sunday. Definitely a good opportunity to catch a classic. 4 out of 5 stars.

With the first weekend of Doubt over, I've had several days off which has given me time to work on the commedia dell'arte piece. Kelly and I spent Monday afternoon (off from work for Martin Luther King Day) at the Tea Source, as usual one of our favorite writing hangouts (with some great baked goods from La Patisserie in addition to the wonderful tea). I spent several hours working on the commedia piece which is nearing its climax. Commedia scenarios were often very complex, and so I've been trying to work in as many different threads as I can. The challenge of course is to get them to all come together in the end. I went on for several pages with one false start on Monday before I found the right direction for the scene I'm working on. Sometimes seeing a few wrong ways for a scene to go helps me identify the right way. It's been interesting working on a piece like this where the characters, after a fashion, are pre-exisiting. I want to give them my own flavor, but the general outlines have been around for centuries, I'm just coloring them in a little as I'm sure the actors of the original commedia all did. It's a good example of how sometimes having set factors in a piece can help. Staying as true to commedia conventions as I can has actually helped spur this piece along. Having certain parameters to work within has freed me to focus on the story. I've been participating this month in the Playwrights' Purge, a companion to the Binge, where you write something, anything, every day for 30 days. This has been my project and having that extra impetus to be writing every day has been helpful. We're about halfway through the Purge right now and I have a rough draft nearly complete! At this point my only concern about the Purge is what to work on once the rough draft of the commedia is done. That's a good feeling.

The writing life is filled with them. At last night's wonderful opening for Doubt I was talking with our director Kevin T. Houle about the 10-minute play festival that Lakeshore does each spring and that I had a script entered. If it made it in, he wanted to direct it, sight unseen. That was incredibly flattering and made me want all the more for Circus of Fate to make it. Today they announced the semi-finalists: I was not one of them. Both of the other times I've submitted I at least made it that far. This script is better than either of them, and it didn't make it. Why? Who can say. The scripts are blind for this first round and so it had to stand on its own. Why they didn't like it, I don't know, but I find it incredibly disappointing. Maybe next year.

After a week of tech and dress rehearsals we opened Doubt last night to a full crowd. The performance went great and it was nice to at last perform for more than an empty theater. :-D The audience was very responsive and found much of the show much funnier than we expected, but those surprise reactions are always fun. Sister Aloysius was a bit hit (the audience clearly loved to hate to her!) and the Father O'Rourke speech went over really well too. It's just such a solid cast and they have all been a pleasure and joy to work with. I'm looking forward to the rest of the run! For all the details visit the Lakeshore Players website. I hope to see you at the show!

I am been very remiss in blogging about Doubt rehearsals (which you should of course come and see; details here). We started rehearsals nearly a month ago, which has flown by! We did have a week break in there for Christmas which gave us all a nice chunk of time to work on lines. It's a tough show, no doubt about it (no pun intended), but that's what makes it so satisfying as an actor. With just a cast of four the show will ultimately rise or fall on us. We have a fantastic director (Kevin T. Houle) who is helping us all dig deeper and deeper into this piece, not to mention one of the best stage managers I've worked with (Sue Kuta) who I know will keep things running extremely smoothly, but in the end we four actors have to sustain an hour and a half of thought-provoking drama on our own. It has been a daunting task, as least I've found it to be so, and a ton of work. When so many people have at least seen the movie version, how do you break people's preconceived notions of this play? How do you keep the characters interesting and dynamic above and beyond the concepts being wrestled with? If they are not, the show becomes merely pedantic and the characters two-dimensional mouthpieces.


This at least is a taste of what I've been wrestling with. As Kevin has pointed out many times, this plays is most definitely NOT about whether or not Father Flynn did it. One of my challenges has been to not make that question too easy, to give the audience doubt about what my character may or may not be capable of. We have just under two weeks to go and we are definitely getting there. We have a great cast and I've been enjoying working with them on this. I'm excited for performances and to see what the audiences have to say.


But a New Year would not be complete without a new writing project. November of course was spent in NaNoWriMo, and December brought with it the start of rehearsals and Christmas, but during my break I've finally found some traction on a new project. My friend Brian teaches middle school theater in Georgia and awhile back we had talked about the idea of me writing a short show that he could use as scenes in class. Brian has build a small stage in his classroom (beyond acting he is an accomplished designer) and a flexible set comprised of many doors. We talked about writing something in the commedia dell'arte style, as we both though it would work well with minimal set and the stock characters would give his students s starting place. At the time I was knee-deep in writing the Fringe show, and so while I loved the idea it had to sit on the back burner for awhile.


But over the past few weeks I finally started doing some research on the commedia characters and over the last week started writing a scenario. As the original commedia was all improvised, the actors would choose a scenario for a performance that detailed the entrances and exits and gave the general gist of the plot. From there the performers, who each specialized in one stock character, would create the show on the fly. Later on playwrights such as Goldoni wrote full plays using the commedia characters and style and this was my goal as well. I don't normally start plays with a detailed outline, but in this case I wanted to create such a scenario first in order to replicate the commedia process as much as possible. And so, now having such a scenario in hand I have now started in on the writing process and shall see where it goes.

Yesterday afternoon I went with Kelly and my family to see Stuart Little at Lakeshore Players. After doing the holiday show the last two years it was difficult to forgo auditions this year in order to audition for Doubt (which did work out well, to be fair), and so I was certainly not going to miss the show. Claudia directed for the third year in a row, and I knew a good number of the cast, nearly half, which included many of the Greenies from last year plus a few others that I've worked with before. My two little nieces (5 and 3) came, it was the younger's first play, and they loved it! It is a cute, sweet story (though more episodic than I expected having only seen the movie) and the young actor playing Stuart did a fine job. It was a large cast, over 20, of mostly young performers and it is always fun to see kids on stage for the first time. Anne Westcott, one of the handful of adults, was a highlight as the devious cat Snowbell out to get both Stuart the mouse and the bird Margalo. Justin Baker, one of the kids in the cast, also had nice moments as the dog that Stuart keeps having to run from, and his older sister Jenna Baker was perfect as Margalo. The pacing of the play suffered a little from the episodic nature of the script, but on the whole it kept the attention of the mostly young audience (and from what I heard was loved by the school groups who came last week). Stuart Little closes this afternoon (the holiday show always has a short run) but Lakeshore always picks fun, family-friendly shows for this slot and so I recommend hitting the holiday show this time next year (rumor is it will be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which should be fun). And of course Doubt is coming up next at Lakeshore which will be a show not to be missed (shameless plug). 3 1/2 out of 5 stars.

In the past week, with NaNoWriMo over, I've been in the midst of my own personal submission binge. Last Monday I finally sent off my submission to the STAGE Script Competition for plays about science and/or technology, which was an achievement in and of itself due to all the additional materials required. I also sent off a few submissions by email to various competitions and festivals. But mostly I have been engaged in a new wave of queries and submissions for The Princess and the Moon. Last fall I sent out a wave of submissions to theaters and contests. I took second place in East Valley Children's Theatre's Aspiring Playwrights contest so it was not without its success, but on the production front I received not a nibble. And it has been my goal to find a first production before really hitting the publishers.


And so a week or so ago I had an idea. Why not look up all the community and smaller children's theaters in Minnesota I could find and send them an email? No script, just a "letter" and synopsis, and offer to send the full script in they're interested. So I started scouring the web to find appropriate theaters, ones which put on family-friendly shows, and started sending emails. When I exhausted Minnesota, as best I could tell, I moved on to Wisconsin. The result? In the past week I have sent out around 80 emails plus about a dozen letters (for those with no email address). And already I have had a number of theaters respond. Several said that the show wouldn't work for them, based on the length or cast size they normally look for in a children's theater production, but a handful of others wanted to see the whole script. One theater even mentioned they would be looking at the one-acts on my website as well to see if any of those might work for their annual evening of one-acts.


So while it's too early to tell if any full-fledged productions come out of this (I'd be happy even with a staged reading!) so far the approach seems to be working. And it feels good to get more submissions out there. I try to participate in the submission binges in March and September through the Playwrights Binge mailing list, though often due to other things going on in life I've only reached the 30 submissions in 30 days a couple of times. But now, in less than a week and a half, I'm pushing 100 submissions! In the end a lot of it comes down to statistics: send out enough submissions and you will eventually find that one person who falls in love with your script and wants to put it on stage.

After taking a bit of a break on the novel following the official finish of NaNoWriMo on Monday. I've been working this week on putting together my application for the STAGE Script Competition which I'm submitting my one-man show to. I finished putting all that together today, so I decided to chip away a bit at the story of Red Foxx. After about 1100 words I wrapped it up, so here is the final chapter of Red Foxx and the Heart of Destiny:




"You are a fool!" she exclaimed.
"I could not take your life," Lemuel breathed, "and so for our oaths to be fulfilled you must then take mine." Lemuel tried to laugh but found it too painful. "I only swore death to the name of Foxx to avenge your death, Amarantha."
"Perhaps that was my name once," Red said, "but no longer. I am a pirate."
"I know," Lemuel answered and closed his eyes. After a moment he added, "Grant me one last boon, Captain Foxx."
"What is it?"
"Now that you have the Heart, now that your oath upon me is fulfilled, grant my people peace."
Red nodded. "It shall be done."
Lemuel smiled. "I may not have served my people as long as my father, but at least I have accomplished one thing the old Admiral could not."
"Go in peace, Captain Drake," Red said to him. "You have been a worthy adversary."
And so Lemuel Drake, captain of the Ruined Fleet, died by the hand of Captain Red Foxx.
The fight continued with the Sorcerer's men, though once the Ruined folk saw their captain's fall they lost heart. It was Red Foxx who rallied them to now fight the Sorcerer and so be pardoned by the Island Kingdom.
"It is he who with his 'magic' is enemy to us both," she proclaimed to them and they took up the fight on the side of the pirates, if only for this short time.
When most of the Sorcerer's minions had been dispatched the rest threw themselves upon the pirate king's mercy. Red Foxx was not much inclined to give it, but gave orders that they be taken prisoner. She wanted the Sorcerer himself. She led a small contingent of her crew back towards the ships and each took in their hands their opal. Before long they were nothing but a wind passing through the trees, unseen by all.
Along with Jat and the others, Red Foxx reached the beach to see all of their landing craft wrecked upon the shores. The Sorcerer had been spiteful on his exit as he returned to his ship. Several booms echoed across the water and Red Foxx could see the ships of the scarlet and silver trying to make their escape. The pirates had them mostly surrounded and did their best to close the net, but the Sorcerer's vessel (surely it could be only he on the run while he left the rest of his vessels at the mercy of the pirates) made good time towards a stretch of open water.
"Captain!"
Red turned to look and saw Bluefoot Bill, her helmsman, with a few others in a small boat. After the Sorcerer had wrecked the others boats Bluefoot had brought another so as to be ready for the Captain's return. Red and her crew climbed on board and they made for the Black Arrow, though Red feared the fight would be over by the time she could reach it. Indeed, by that time the Sorcerer's ship was ahead of the pirates who still gave chase. The Arrow had lagged behind to pick up its captain, but not they went ahead at full sail to see the Sorcerer captured or dead. Many a cannon was exchanged between the pirates and the Sorcerer's ships, but after an hour's hard sail the Sorcerer's ship had increased the distance between them ten-fold. It was indeed built first for speed. Red cursed her luck and brought her fleet back to the island to pick up the remainder of the pirates.
They were met by those same sailors on the beach who brought with them many a prisoner from the Sorcerer. Red Foxx did not expect he would simply return to cower his tower. No, he would be out for revenge and for the Heart again as well. But she in her turn would see that much was learned from her prisoners of war.
The Ruined folk had brought Lemuel Drake's body with them out of the forest and Tom Flint requested the pirate king's permission to see him safely back to ship. Red agreed and parted with Flint in honor. She passed along to him Drake's last request and promised it would be done.
The pirates now set their course back for the Sacred Isle. It seemed an age since Red Foxx had there been crowned and began this journey. But she had fulfilled all she had promised her father, even if in the doing she had learned things not much to her liking.
When they reached the Sacred Isle Red Foxx met again with all of the pirate captains who renewed to her their pledges of loyalty. It had been a double blow to learned first of Red's true nature and then her parentage, but she had in the finding of the Heart of Destiny proved herself to many. Tradition kept many others silent, even if they found these things strange and unsettling, and the rest bowed to the will of their brothers. Red Foxx herself placed the Heart of Destiny back in its sacred place where it had been laid so many years ago, in the hands of the first Captain Foxx's effigy. It blazed for a moment in joy of this reunion and then grew still. Red Foxx left it for now safe in those hands. She had seen enough in its depths for the time being.
With the Heart of Destiny restored, the pirates built the Sacred Isle up again once more and many guards sailed around it in its protection at all times, for Red Foxx guessed that the Sorcerer now knew of its location. What plans he had for them Red Foxx vowed to uncover and prevent. The pirates remained on the Sacred Isle for a time to celebrate their victory and Red Foxx gave orders that the Ruined folk were to be pursued and harried no longer.
"The wrongs they have done to us have been righted," Red told her people, "and the line of the old Admiral has ended. Let them live in peace now so long as they trouble us no more."
This was agreed to, for while the pirates shall wreak their vengeance terribly when wronged, they will let a matter rest once the score has been settled. When all that needed to be done on the Sacred Isle was done, Red Foxx left behind many a pirate behind but she and her crew boarded the Black Arrow and unfurled their sails, letting the wind catch them. Red stood at the prow of the ship with Jat at her side.
"A fine day to be takin' to the sea, Captain," Jat observed.
"So it is indeed," Red agreed.
And so they sailed on to many a new adventure.