What's A Minnesota Playwright Doing In Omaha?

I’ve been a very lax blogger. Apologies.

Currently, I’m down in Omaha, NE at the Great Plains Theatre Conference.

Freudian slip, I first typed “I’m done in Omaha” - which, depending on the day you caught me this week, wasn’t that far from the truth.

I comfort myself with remembrance of past blogs on the road from my pal Phillip Andrew Bennett Low when he was making his way around the country on the Fringe Festival circuit. I recall his remarks on how hard it can be to drum up an audience with a bunch of strangers. It takes a couple of years of coming back and coming back before people remember who you are. Loyalties don’t crop up overnight. And audiences aren’t all like they are in Minnesota. They feel no obligation (or interest) to come and see theater just because it’s there and it’s different and it’s something they haven’t had a chance to see before. The existence of something new in particular doesn’t excite them. There needs to be some other reason to go.

Plus if you’re a newbie, and your reading’s at 9am on a Monday morning, and a large chunk of the people you actually managed starting to get to know were out until 2:30 the night before getting drunk, well... let’s just say turnout for the reading of my play “Leave” was pretty slim.

The official attendance slip they handed me at the end, along with my two sheets of audience feedback, said 20 people. But let’s break that down, shall we? 6 of them were my cast, 2 of them were the designated responders from the conference (thank God for the designated responders at each reading or the authors wouldn’t be guaranteed any useful feedback), 1 was me, 4 were the tech crew (one of whom, god bless him, after two full days of readings and events, nodded off in a chair down the row from me - at least his labored breathing didn’t become a full-on snore, and he did wake up for the second half), 1 was I think a combination of a person who came for the first part but had to leave plus a person who sidled in toward the end reading her cell phone and sat in the back. So I actually had six audience members. 2 of whom were the parents of one of the actors, 1 of whom was a friend of the director, 1 of whom was a friend of another of the actors. So, of the community of playwrights at the conference, a whopping two showed up. Two that I’m very grateful to, and shall chat with the rest of the week, and whose readings I made sure to attend.

It’s been a good exercise in networking for me. Forcing myself to sit down with complete strangers at every meal and talk to them. Engaging them in workshops and on the fly between the various readings we’ve been attending. And I sat through readings during every slot they had one in the days preceding my own. So it wasn’t for lack of trying. But visibility takes longer to blossom in a foreign environment.

Still, it’s disheartening to go through a poorly attended reading of my own, then sit through two other readings later in the day that two to three times as many people in attendance, with the audience feedback flying through the air and enthusiasm very high.

I withdrew the day after my reading to work on a project I had a deadline for. I called home. I seriously considered leaving. But then I thought, no, I’ve already taken the time off, I’ve already driven down here, and it’s good to get away from the distractions of home and really be forced to focus on the writing, and trying to be a better writer. So I spent the day and the night Tuesday working on projects that forwarded my own writing. I took a break for lunch, since they feed us, and the lunch panel - with two men discussing their work in Africa, using theater to awaken community and promote healing after trauma. Then I plugged back into the community fully yesterday - another workshop, another reading, another evening of new theater being performed.

Even the disappointment is good because it makes me appreciate Minnesota so much more than I already did, which was quite a lot to begin with.

It makes me look forward to another major sit down with director Matt Greseth, to discuss the “Leave” script, like we did before I left for the conference - a talk I’m still processing all the notes from, but has given me a great source of inspiration with which to attack the rewrites.

And the workshops here have been helpful. And it has been good to see other plays, and types of playwriting. There are two plays in particular that really excited me, and that doesn’t happen often. Check out St. Fortune Productions - stfortuneproductions.com - and they’re also on facebook. John Gasper’s play “Strychnine” and Jack Frederick’s play “I Wouldn’t Piss Down Your Throat If Your Lungs Were On Fire” are amazing pieces of work. And the St. Fortune ensemble came down en masse from their base in Rochester, NY to support those readings and give the community here a real youth injection. It’s a good week to be one of the St. Fortune crowd. Great readings, good crowds, both well-deserved. But since I’m more than twice the age of either of those playwrights, I’m feeling more than a little old this week. Inspired, but old. Perhaps just a wee bit irrelevant, but I have to fight that.

Especially since everybody thinks “don’t ask, don’t tell” was magically solved just because it was in the news for a few days last week. I wish. It passed the House, but the Senate still has to vote on repeal “sometime this summer.” Then even if it passes as part of the defense spending bill, there are things in it the head of defense doesn’t like, and thinks are unnecessary expenditures. So he may ask the President to veto the bill, and back we go to the drawing board again. In addition, even it if clears all those hurdles, it’s not going into effect until the Pentagon finishes its survey of active duty military personnel, to see how they feel about lifting the ban. The hope is that this survey confirms that the time is right to make the change. But nothing’s certain. The Democrats are only trying to ram it through the legislature early (before the Pentagon finished their survey) because they don’t think they’ll have the votes to do it after the November elections.

It’s been a long time I’ve been waiting for this script of “Leave” to be a period piece. But it ain’t there yet. Will “don’t ask, don’t tell” be history by the February 2011 production of “Leave” by Urban Samurai? That would be a problem I’d love to have.

Well, that, and more than six people in the audience.