Open Wardrobes

This morning at 6 AM I left Saint Paul and drove to Bismarck, North Dakota for the premiere of The Princess and the Moon. I arrived in Bismarck in the afternoon and, walking around the town center, came across this as I passed the theater.

I don't know that it gets much better than that (unless of course they added my name up there as well. In lights). Several hours later I went to the theater to meet with the cast and crew and spent awhile signing programs and chatting with everyone before the performance.

It was a fun show. The kids clearly had a good time with it and it was exciting to finally see this play up on its feet, after almost four years since I first sat down to start to write it. There are some things in the script that I want to fix for the future, but I appreciate Shade Tree Players taking on a new play and all those who poured their energies into this production. In talking with the kids, some were old pros having spent years with Shade Tree, while others were stepping onto the stage in front of an audience for the very first time tonight. It was humbling to have written the script that gave them that opportunity. I wish them luck for the rest of their shows this weekend and I now enjoying having seen another play take flight.

So once again I've neglected the blog for awhile, owing mostly to the fact that Kelly and I are learning just how much time it takes to raise an infant. (You wouldn't think something that little would take up so much time, would you?) But I have over the past month been working on another rough draft, one I started just before the little guy was born back in April. I've been wanting for awhile to write a play based on a series of folk tales. Actually, I've had an idea to do a series of such plays, each based on the folklore of a different continent. And, of course, me being me, I decided to start with the continent of Antarctica. Now, you're probably thinking that's an odd choice since Antarctica doesn't actually have any indigenous folk tales. And you would be right. Which simply meant that I had to make them up. Which is much harder than it sounds. So the process has gone in fits and starts, as while I came up with a general through line awhile back, I tended to get stuck each time I came to a new story-within-the-story. But it's been fun to try and create something like this from whole cloth. The characters are all animals from the Antarctic region, and so I started by doing some research on that which gave me a base of potential characters to draw from. It also makes for a relatively simple set. I mean, creating a barren land of snow and ice doesn't exactly scream high budget, does it? At any rate, while this first pass at the idea (finally finished not ten minutes ago) is a bit rambling, but the end I started to get an idea of the general threads and how things fit together towards the end. It will need a lot of work (much as The Princess and the Moon did after its first draft), but I think it has the potential to be a lot of fun.