The reading went well. Lovely audience. Wonderful actors. David Gold, Sonja Berggren, Erin Henriques, Pete Taylor, Paul Major. They brought my little play to life. Gave it bones, flesh and blood.
And the venue. We were in the neatest part of Long Beach. Naples. It's an island. Here's a satellite pic:
Every house in Naples backs up to a canal. Everyone in Naples has a boat.
I wanna live in Naples. I wanna live where gondoliers deliver pizza right to the slip...
Sigh.....
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Oh yeah, the play. Here's the cover of the program. Understated. Though I do like that they put my name in bold type.
They asked me to write 5 questions for the audience to ponder. They told me to be serious. After all, this is a sophisticated group, most of whom have advanced degrees in theatre and the performing arts. We're talking crème de la crème here. Not the sort to be trifled with...
Okay. It's official. The reading is a "go" for next Monday. Here's the email...
We're gonna have snacks and programs and I get to invite eight people. More on that in a minute. The eight people, I mean.
For the program, they want a bio, so I stuck in some stuff about being a "Fed" and about being the great-grandson of Hans Christian Andersen.
They asked for a pic. They said "be creative." So I sent them a pic of me when I was one-year-old in a stroller at the Miyake house.
Now, regarding the eight people...
I used to belong to an Orange County writers' group. We'd meet in the back room of a library and read our plays out loud. Sometimes the people from the local theatres (Rude Guerrilla, The Chance, etc) would come and we'd always ask them about producing our plays and they'd always say "send 'em along." We did but nothing ever happened.
One time when I was in a South Coast Repertory playwrighting class, Jennifer Kiger, the Literary Manager there, came in and spoke to us. Someone asked her if the SCR was a good place to send our plays. "Oh yes," She said with a perfectly straight face. "We're always looking for plays by Orange County writers." She told us to "send them along."
After she left, one writer in the class, a good ole boy who'd been around the block a few times, leaned across the table, grinned and said, "That girl's got a bucket with a hole in it. It'd be easier growin' barley and hops in a Florida swamp than gettin' the SCR to do one of your plays."
He was right.
You know the story of Sodom & Gomorrah. God tells Abraham he's about to rain fire and brimstone on the two cities because of their consummate wickedness. Abraham argues with him (he has kinfolk living in Sodom). He "jews him down," as they used to say, and he gets the Big Guy to agree to spare the cities if ten righteous men can be found living there.
Stay with me. This is going somewhere.
So I sent out emails to every theatre in the OC, excluding the community theatres and dinner theatres which do only musicals and light comedy. Here's the list....
Grove Theater Center The Chance Theater The Hunger Artists Theater Rogue Artists Ensemble Theatre Out STAGEStheatre Rude Guerrilla Laguna Playhouse South Coast Repertory California State Long Beach Theatre Arts UC Irvine Drama Department Fullerton College Theatre Arts Cal State Fullerton Department of Theatre
Here's the email I sent them...
A polite, not-too-formal "please come" missive, don't you think? Informative, but not wordy. Striking just the right balance. Neither too fawning nor too arch.
Oh yeah. One last thing. I struck a bargain with the Theatre God. If even one of the above deigns to make an appearance at my reading, He will not rain fire and brimstone on the next Shakespeare-By-The-Sea production and, as a bonus incentive, He will forgive the South Coast Rep for not apologizing for naming a stage after a slumlord's wife...
