/ Theatre

New & Updated 10 Minute Plays

A new play and edits to two others. These are part of my “10 10 Minute Plays” project that I am in the midst of (currently just wrote 3 pages of play number four, tentatively titled “The Giant’s Head). One of the points to these plays is to write highly imaginative plays requiring a great deal of resourcefulness and ingenuity on the part of any director who chooses to stage them. I take exception to all of these short play festivals and contests that urge playwrights to remember that Festival _______ will have no money and no budget for sets so the writer needs to write simply, i.e. with a lack of imagination. As a producer and director, I understand the concerns about staging a series of short plays and the usual lack of money that makes intricate sets or costumes a problem. However, those realities should never shackle a writer’s imagination. It is the director’s job to figure out a way to stage even the most impossible of plays. It is the writer’s job to imagine worlds. To that end, I am deliberately attempting a series of plays that present various challenges to their very staging, especially in the context of most 10 minute play festivals. I am writing worlds that take an audience on a trip far, far away from the ordinary. In some instances I will have very concrete ideas on how a particular play might be staged with little or no money. In other instances, I haven’t the foggiest idea. What I do know is that, as a director, I prefer to direct plays that are difficult, plays that, on some level, I don’t understand and that, in order to understand them, I have to get some actors and designers and play out those difficulties in a number of ways until we run out of time and offer up the play to an audience. That offering is never the whole play, each performance is alway and only partial. But that is precisely where the magic and wonder of theatre lies: the liminal space between text and utterance, intention and mystification, performance and audience, desire and actuality.To that end, and in the order they were written:

Dancing Green Other Memories Mellon

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