No, don’t be put off by the title. The subject isn’t cooking or household management. You haven’t wandered into the wrong blog. We’re still talking about writing, here—just not about books, this week. You see, I do other kinds of writing, too. One of them is plays.
I wrote my first play when I was nine years old. I didn’t know then and don’t know now what on earth inspired or impelled me to sit down and write a play, but I had co-opted my mother’s typewriter and the family bridge table by then, and I sat down and hammered out a short play.
As might be expected from a nine-year-old “playwright,” the play had its faults. Just for starters, the title totally telegraphed the ending, And I wasn’t sure if the play was in four scenes or four acts, since I was quite muddy on the distinction between the two. I also had no audience in mind. At nine I may have had talent, but I certainly had no connections. Our school didn’t put on plays, and there were no producers or theater-owners in my family.
So when the play was written, I shelved it…literally. I hid it on a closet shelf under a pile of sweaters. No, I have no idea why I hid it. But I did.
Fast-forward to the summer. After a miserable previous summer at a large, athletic, competitive sleep-away camp, my parents had sent me to a small, arts-oriented, non-competitive sleep-away camp, where I was in my element and felt I had found a home. One day the drama counselor asked if any of us girls had ever written a play. Mine was the only hand raised, but I waved it wildly in the air to be sure of not being overlooked.
I wrote to my mother, telling her where to find the hidden script and asking her to send it to me ASAP. The drama counselor approved it, cast the play, rehearsed it, and we put it on. The night of the performance, after the final bows, someone in the audience—I think it was one of the camp’s directors—shouted, “Author! Author!” and, as I took a solo bow, one of the counselors tossed a bouquet of wildflowers, picked at the tennis courts, onto the stage at my feet. No other flowers I have ever received have been more meaningful.
Well, that seemed the end of the line for the play. I had no other venues in which to see it produced. I filed it away, and eventually the script got trashed. But the plot stayed in my mind.
Fast-forward again—this time by a LOT of years. Now an adult and a writer, I kept finding my mind drifting back to that play, and I determined to write another play based on that same plot and premise. By now I knew the difference between scenes and acts, I knew not to title the play in such a way as to give away the ending, and I had certainly sharpened my skills as a writer. I still had no connections for getting a play produced, no logical venue where I could hope to see it mounted. But I felt inspired, so I sat down and wrote the thing anyhow.
It was basically the same plot and still written for children, but this time by an adult with sharpened writing skills and more knowledge of stagecraft.
I didn’t hide this script in my closet. I sent it around to play producers listed in WRITER’S MARKET. They all ignored it. But I kept sending it until I ran out of places to send it to. At one point I had a producer interested, but that fell through. And then….
I was talking with a fellow writer who lived in New York, and it came out that he owned an off-off-Broadway theater. I asked him if he ever produced children’s plays, and he said, “Every weekend.” I asked if I could send him a script for his consideration, and he said, “Sure.” I did, and he responded positively. He liked it. He wanted to produce it.
Hallelujah!
The show ran for a pre-arranged number of weekends. I flew back up to New York (my hometown) from South Florida for the premiere. My show—a play I HAD WRITTEN—was being produced in a REAL NEW YORK THEATER I was almost as thrilled as the night in summer camp when I took a bow to cries of “Author! Author!” and was thrown a bunch of wildflowers.
Reuse. Recycle. Sometimes that’s a good motto for writers, too.