Open Wardrobes

Recently my murder mystery "Ace of Diamonds" was performed by Silver Spring Stage in Maryland as part of their annual one-act festival. (You can see a few pictures from the production on their site here.) I happened to run across an online review of the festival's first weekend, which included "Ace of Diamonds," and here's what they had to say:

Belich’s script is a wonderful homage to those one room Agatha Christie mysteries, from the cryptic invitations to the isolated manor to the multiple twist endings. ...and Belich’s script will keep you guessing right to the end.

David Cannon, Prince George's Sentinel

So, something for the "warm fuzzy" file. "Ace of Diamonds" will be coming out soon with Big Dog Plays, and based on the interest it's received so far (almost exclusively from people finding it on my website) I have high hopes that it will do well in the community theater market.

I'm currently working on a full-length play called "The Princess and the Moon," an original fairytale. The story centers around Lizzy, a princess who wants to be the first girl to become a knight. But once knighted she finds out she is actually the ninety-sixth girl to become a knight and in a fit of anger fires her herald... who then decides to take over her story as the new villain.


The play started as an exercise, almost 2 years ago. Once I had the original idea I decided to try turning off the internal editor and just take the story wherever it would go. After about 2 months I had a very, VERY rough draft that was nearly 100 pages long. (Which then sat on the hard drive for about a year and a half.)


It was a very freeing exercise to just write and not worry about if it was actually good. (Some was, some wasn't.) And most of the second half had to be scrapped, but I came out of that initial draft with a solid core to the piece and a lot of fun, quirky characters. I've spent most of the summer reworking the piece, especially the second act, and now it's about 90% of the way there!

This is the inaugural post of my new blog, to focus primarily on the art of playwrighting, but also more generally on theater and the creative process in general. I was inspired in part to start a blog after reading the blog of fellow Minnesota playwright Claudia Haas. So I've decided to try something similar and record my own thoughts on the pieces that I'm working on. At the moment I am working on the finishing stages of "The Princess and the Moon," an original fairytale play (more about that in its own post).