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As I mentioned a little while back, “Sunken City” (then titled “Bottom
of the Ninth”) won the New Play Project prize at North Carolina Central University. As part of the prize, there were three nights of “staged readings” of the play
followed by audience/playwright talkback. I put quotes around “staged
readings” because what they did was nothing less than a full
production with scripts in hand. Three weeks of intense rehearsals,
full movement on the stage, and they even built a set. (yes, I can die
a happy man having seen my dubious Bourbon Street bar created on a
stage). Essentially they did a full production of the play; the scripts in hand weren’t
even noticed after the first couple of minutes. The 50-seat lab
theatre was SRO all three days, which was incredibly gratifying. The
audience asked tough questions and made me work my ass off taking
notes. I’ve got 20 pages of single-spaced notes and I expect to have a
much better play -- quite possibly the chimerical “almost-final draft” -- with a week or two more of heads-down work. Late nights and not a lot of sleep, but what a ride!
I’m also writing the proposal for my first non-fiction book.
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