In last week’s blogpost I told you I had written a play while still in elementary school. Let me tell you about it…and what followed thereafter.
I don’t have any idea what on earth inspired me to write a play when I was in sixth grade. By then I had co-opted my mother’s typewriter and set it up on a bridge table in my room semi-permanently. The writing bug had bitten and bitten hard. Yet, at that age, as I said in this space last week, my ambition when I was asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was still to act on the Broadway stage. So I suppose it was only logical, loving both writing and the theatre, that I would write a play.
The play was in either four scenes or four acts. I wasn’t sure which. I still didn’t know the difference. It was rather short, and the title totally telegraphed the ending. So it certainly wasn’t a perfect piece of dramaturgy. But for an 11-year-old’s first effort, it was passable.
For no reason I can put my hand on, instead of telling my family that I had written a play, I buried the script under a pile of clothing on a closet shelf and thought my “secret” was safe. Summer came, and I was sent off for eight weeks of sleep-away camp.
What happened next I can only surmise.
I surmise that my mother found the script. I surmise she got in touch with the camp directors or even the drama counselor herself. As I say, though, that is only supposition.
What I know for a fact is that Gert, the drama counselor, asked our bunk if any of us campers had ever written a play. So far as I know, she didn’t ask any of the girls in any of the other bunks. That’s why I suspect my mother’s fine hand in this sequence of events.
At any rate, my hand shot up into the air, waving wildly. “Me! Me! Me!” I called out.
Gert asked for the script. I wrote home and told my mother where it was hidden. My mother sent it to me. The camp office mimeoed copies. And Gert chose campers among my bunkmates for the roles. I was very, very, did I mention very disappointed not to get the lead. As a wannabe actress who usually got the lead in other venues, like the arts foundation program I attended during the winter, I wanted…nay, expected…to get the lead. Gert informed me it was not customary for the playwright to also play the lead. I had to settle for a very minor part.
We rehearsed. We rehearsed again. We rehearsed some more. On the night we finally put the play on, it was well received by my fellow campers, and one of the camp directors called out, “Author! Author!” I proudly took a bow. Several of the counselors had gone up to the tennis courts, where wildflowers grew in abundance, and had fashioned a bouquet, which they now threw “over the footlights”—or where the footlights would have been had the Little Theatre (as the camp’s theatre was called) had any.
It remains one of the proudest moments of my life. (Even if I didn’t get to play the lead.)
Fast-forward. Fast-forward a lot, to a time just a couple of decades or so ago. Again I was seized with the notion to write a play. And again I have absolutely no idea what put that notion into my head. By then I had scads of published books to my name, including one that contained some poems for kids. I had written fiction and nonfiction, for adults and for kids, as well as the aforementioned poems, but the chances of my turning a play into a commercial success were somewhere between nil and zero.
Nonetheless, I wanted to write a play. And I decided that even if the play wouldn’t ever get produced on Broadway or published in a book of plays, and I never made a dime from it, it would still be fun and I would still go ahead and write it. After all, there is no rule that says writing can’t be both a career and a hobby.
But what to write about?
My mind drifted back to my previous play-writing experience, at age 11. The memory of that performance in the camp’s Little Theatre endures, glowing golden in my mind. I decided I would write a children’s play…and, I decided, I would base it on the concept of that play I had written in sixth grade.
This time I knew the difference between a scene and an act. And this time I wouldn’t give it a title that telegraphed the ending.
King Theo-What’s-His-Name and Joey was produced by a local theatre group I was instrumental in starting. (The old dream of acting had never quite gone away.)
But later, it was picked up by a theatre in New York! Not, of course, on Broadway. This was what is classified as an off-off-Broadway theatre (the classification has to do with the size of the “house,” not the proximity to the Great White Way), but it was still New York. The real deal. I flew up to the city to see the opening. (Born and raised in a New York suburb, I had lived in the city itself for over two decades before uprooting myself to move to South Florida.)
It was another proud moment in my life. The play whose idea I had stolen from myself, from that play I had written in sixth grade and seen put on in summer camp, was now actually being produced in New York.
The producers had shortened the title to King Theo, but they hadn’t meddled with the script. Seeing it put on on a New York stage was inarguably a thrill.
But it still couldn’t compare with the night in summer camp when one of the camp directors yelled, “Author! Author!” and some counselors threw a bouquet of wildflowers “over the footlights.”
Some thrills just can’t be equaled.