playwriting

Once again, thanks to all those who have submitted comments. I do read and appreciate them all but as I've explaned, I can't post them. Those kids who have asked for a reply...go to the "email" section of my website and send an email through there. Those are the ones I can reply to, not comments submitted to the blog. (Oh my, all this technoogy!)

Two days ago I received a DVD showing a group of actors in Milwuakee seated at microphones, reading the script for the stage adaptation I've done of "GOSSAMER." Now I must go at the script again, usng what I've learned from the reading: what doesn't flow well, what needs cutting, what is distracting, what is extraneous. The actors, too, and the theater director will send me their notes, and next week I'll go to Maine where I am completely isolated and undistracted, and I'll write the revised script.

In August I will go to Milwaukee, as will the theater director from Portland, Oregon - it is a combined commission from the two theaters - and the play will be professionally read again, this time with us all present, and then I will once again fiddle with it.

Ironically, when I took the 14-hour train ride overnight on Sunday, heading home from Richmond, I borrowed a nice thick book from a Richmond friend...a biography of Edward Albee. So I have just been reading about Albee going through the same process. (Well, not exactly the same; I'm not going to have Sir John Gielgud saying, "Sorry, old chap, that soliliquy is too long for me!")

But certainly his pre-production process was much the same: readings, revisions, more readings, more revisions. Cutting and adding and tweaking and honing.

Later, of course, comes the whole process of staging. The writer is less a part of that but gets to watch!

And all of it is so different from writing a novel.