Seeing a piece you’ve written in performance is always slightly surreal.  I don’t know if other writers experience this, but I tend to let go of the piece rather quickly and move on to other projects, so when I sit down to watch a play I’ve written, I almost always view it as a stranger.

Did I really write that? Hey, that’s pretty good. Ooo, maybe should have cut that line. Huh, wonder where THAT came from?

It’s been pretty consistent, even in the case of the 24-hour festivals I’ve written for: something detaches when I hand over the script to a director, and then I just want to see what the actors and the director do with it.

Of course, I can also assume the director’s hat and the actor’s hat, and I tend to wear them when I see shows, so I did have some critical evaluation of the performance elements. But listening and seeing the show itself is always a fresh experience that I enjoy. There’s a little bit of anxiety in that I hope other people like what I’ve done, but the first few titters on Thursday night alleviated most of that.

Writing short form is a challenge – 10 minutes is not a lot of time to tell a story. These restrictions can be a great boon, though , because they force you to streamline your thoughts and pick the best and most efficient  ways to move the action forward to a conclusion.

My main concern in the end was. “Does it work?” I think, that yes, it did. I’ll be interested to see it again, interpreted through another set of hands, just to see the changes.  That’s what this kind of art is to me: fluid and lovely.

One of the challenges in bringing Matt Beard’s “Waiting” to the stage is the character June. Matt has written a character who is young and naive, imaginative and curious while having moments of incredible emotionally maturity. It’s important to me that she not come off as a caricature or fall into familiar tropes of actresses “playing children.” As “adults” (why is that in quotes? Adulthood is so pretentious…We’re all tall kids with varying levels of social programming), it’s difficult to look at a child character from the inside. Track her emotional and logical journey rather than just saying “SHE’S A KID! SHE’S CUTE AND SAYS SILLY THINGS! AND MAKES FACES LIKE THIS!” That is entirely uninteresting to me. June is unique and complex. She has just as rich of an emotional and intellectual life as any adult character, she just deals with it in a slightly different way – that’s where the fun comes in.

Working with actress Leigh Yenrick, our goal was to capture that complexity, digging down beyond our first and second ideas. We explored how June deflects emotionally. How she organizes her thoughts and projects her worries and fears. She allows her thoughts to bounce around the room, off all the walls, which at times makes it seem like she doesn’t understand what’s happening or isn’t paying attention, but she always has one foot in the present, turning around with a question of incredible clarity. Physically she is very active and doesn’t control her impulses or have any concern for propriety. She enjoys dance, and her thoughts and emotional life manifest physically.  I challenged Leigh to create a physicality that was task-based, focusing her physical energy in a specific place for each emotional switch (the skin on her elbow, the strap of her shoe, the vertebrae at the base of her spine). We are continuing to find new things even going into tech last night.

All of it is still in process, but I look forward to seeing if our work thus far translates. With only ten minutes of material there’s a limit to exploration, but I think we’ve created something interesting. I look forward to putting it in front of fresh eyes this weekend! Ya’ll will have to tell us if it’s coming across! Find me after the show!

-Kacie, director

As soon as I saw “Waiting” I knew what was happening in the painting. Maybe it’s something about the downcast faces or the woman in black, but it was clear to me when I saw the painting that my story would be about a mother and daughter waiting outside of a hospital room.

Now to write the play.

During the writing process I was reading through a submission pile of short plays for a play fest my theatre company is holding. The 10-15 minute play is a challenging length. There’s not enough time for too much plot but you want there to be enough plot that by the end it feels like something’s happening.

One of the pitfalls of the short play seems to be the mystery /revelation binary. That is: for ten minutes we exist in a world that is obscure and unclear and the ending of the play makes the abstract thing we just sat through make sense. I wanted to avoid this.

Knowing that my play has a revelation in it I chose to front load it and have the action of the play be dealing with the plot point rather than counting on the plot point to serve as the point of the play. That would allow me to build in a second moment of change at the end of the play rather than the just having the one. Hopefully this will pay off.

I also wanted to use the dancer the painting gave me. Since there was no good reason for her to be dancing I let some expressionism work its way into the play and let her emotional life find expression through her dance. It’s a move I haven’t used before in a dramatic scene (it’s easier for me to make people’s bodies move in a comedy for some reason.) I’m excited to see how the dancing plays on its feet. I have full belief in my cast/director and can’t wait to see what they’ve done with it.