June is bustin' out all over

We just completed our wettest month ever in Colorado Springs, so it's been nice to enjoy some warm summer weather and see the trees bustin' out with leaves at last.

And our meeting was bustin' out with energy and enthusiasm. We had 13 attendees last night, with the welcome return of many of the actors we'd been missing in recent months. I got to tell you, this made casting a dream, and I was thrilled with the dynamic performance of my own play last night.

We opened with a new comedy from August Mergelman's burgeoning collection of short plays exploring different theatrical traditions. This one was A Merry Interlude at Camelot, a medieval cautionary tale about the travails of a henpecked husband. Going into the reading, August was especially concerned about the pacing and although some thought it was a little long, others pointed out that the farce-like dialogue would go a lot quicker when rehearsed.

Next up was the beginning of Grant Swenson's high school fable Four Seasonal Quests. In it, four heroes pursue four quests, each with a different type of ending: comic, tragic, heroic and ironic. The sassy interplay between hero Julian and the feisty heroine Ember, who demands the right to pursue her own quest, was particularly well-done. As for the character descriptions at the beginning, one commenter suggested that the emphasis should be on the different personalities of the characters, rather than their ages,

After that we read the end of Sue Bachman's one-act family drama, Having Faith. Here we learn that the elderly Evelyn's difficulties are due to the onset of Alzheimer's. The audience really liked how the story wrapped up, with an upbeat yet realistic resolution, and felt that the emotions, as always in Sue's writing, are admirably true-to-life.

Next we read several new scenes from Chuck Cabell's dark comedy, Hemlock. In these scenes, we saw the financial noose tightening around the neck of hapless heroes, Bryce and Neville, as they're forced to borrow money from a loan shark to keep their death-oriented business going. Everybody loved the humor, and more than one person commented on the delicious irony in the fact that while the brothers are helping kill off others, they refuse to honor their own mother's request for a physician-assisted suicide.

We finished up with the ending of my cocktail party farce Butterfly Effect. All of the plot threads led to a final, shocking twist as one of the characters died a violent death and another character turned out to have plotted the whole thing. Before the reading, I was afraid that the ending might be too dark or that people would hate it because they're left with no one to root for. The consensus was that yes, it was dark, but the farcical elements were so over-the-top and the characters so nasty that it worked.

One side note. Longtime member Jeff Schmoyer brought one of the print-on-demand books he designed for local novelist Bob Spiller. It looked very professional, and I'll be talking to Jeff to see what he can do for my own novels, which I recently made available through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. If you've got a manuscript that's been sitting around, I strongly recommend that you talk to Jeff to see what he can do for you.

For more info, check out Jeff's website at www.jmarsink.com.

See you all next month! Have a great Fourth of July!

Spring is in the air

We've had an unusually wet May, with a surprise hailstorm and one last (let's hope!) snowstorm on Saturday, but there's no mistaking the generally warmer temperatures and the budding leaves on the trees. Springtime is here!

We had a great meeting last night, with 13 people attending, including two new actors: Danine Schell, who is well-known for her performances in numerous local plays as well as the Colorado Renaissance Faire, and Scott Loring, who was the drama teacher at Widefield High School for 20 years. Scott is also a writer, and I encouraged him to bring some of his stuff to the next meeting. Greetings and a big Drama Lab welcome to both of you!

We moved along at a good clip, reading six plays in two and a half hours. We opened with the first scene of Hemlock, a hilariously dark comedy by Chuck Cabell. In it, a pair of brothers find a solution for their struggling funeral home business when they realize they can make more money if they control the "raw materials". The hook is a great one and the characters were very well-drawn.

Next up was Penny from Heaven, the latest in August Mergelman's series of short plays exploring world theatrical traditions. This one was a vaudeville version of Pinocchio. People loved the rapid pace and the continuous flow of gags.

After that we read the next scene from cocktail party farce, Butterfly Effect. Here we saw the pompous boss Henry down an entire pork roast after a misfired rescue flare cut off the cottage's power. There was one question whether the pork would be that raw if it had been in the oven for an hour. Others commented that the play continues to move along well but that this section seemed less British than previous sections.

We next read Sue Bachman's short family drama, What A Mother Knows. This play started out as several loosely related scenes about a Depression-era girl named Missy, but after receiving some helpful feedback from Jess Weaver, Sue decided to use them as flashbacks, tying them together through the framing device of a grown Missy facing an unwanted pregnancy. Everyone agreed that the scenes worked much better this way, with the framing device lending them a deeper significance.

This was followed by a couple of new scenes from Tim Phillips' Prohibition-era drama, Abigail Finds Love. Here we're introduced to Iva, the former fiancee of piano player Paul, who has now joined the Salvation Army and wants to make sure Paul is staying free from worldly temptations. The audience liked the addition of this character and suggested additional directions that she could be taken.

We wrapped up the evening with a rewrite of Deirdre Gilbert's short comedy Capsaicin. This time, she relocated the play to Indiana, which allowed for some fun wordplay centered around that state's unusual use of the word "mangoes". Commenters liked the mother's struggle to accept her granddaughter's unusual name, Tasman, as it seemed to symbolize her struggle to accept the many difficult changes in her life, something with which many people could relate.

Our next meeting is Monday, June 8. See you then!

Drama Lab members win two local contests

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center has announced the winning plays for their Georgia O'Keeffe-themed Rough Writers New Play Festival. Eight plays were selected, including four from national playwrights, but it was a Drama Lab sweep for the local slots with all four going to longtime members of our cozy little group.

The winners are:

Sue Bachman, Georgia On His Mind

Jess Weaver, The Last Rabbit

Grant Swenson, Mary and Georgia

Todd Wallinger, The Real Meaning of Things

You can catch all four at the same time as the FAC will be reading them together as part of a single program. The reading is at 8pm on Saturday, June 7 and Saturday, June 13 in the upstairs Music Room. To learn more, visit the FAC website.

Just as exciting, Black Box Theatre announced that Lulu's Box by Drama Lab member Tim Phillips was selected to be performed at the Fives New Play Festival on June 25-27. We're all very happy for him!

Black Box's Nancy Holaday sent word that she could really use more guys to audition. Auditions are May 11-14. For more info, visit the Black Box Theatre website.

I highly encourage you to attend to one or both of these festivals. Not only will you be supporting these local playwrights, but just as importantly, you'll be supporting theatre companies that support local playwrights.

See you at the theatre!

The Liar opens next week at TheatreWorks

A reminder that The Liar opens April 23 (the Bard's birthday!) at TheatreWorks. This is a wonderful adaptation by David Ives of Pierre Corneille's 1644 masterpiece. The Liar is a hilarious farce about a charming young rogue with an unmatched gift for stretching the truth--and the troubles he gets into when he meets the woman of his dreams.

The play runs through May 10. Showtimes are 7:30pm Wednesdays through Fridays, 2pm and 7:30 pm Saturdays (no matinee on April 25) and 4pm Sundays.

Also the associated Prologue Lecture promises to be a fun one. Bill Lepp, fine-time winner of the West Virginia Lying Contest leads a workshop on how to tell whoppers. That's at 2;30pm on Sunday, April 26 in the Dusty Loo.

See you there!

Actorless

Or at least that's what we were when our April meeting started last night at 7pm. Eight people were there, but those eight included all six of our writers and two dedicated members who normally participate as audience members. And that's a problem because we had an unusually large number of large-cast plays. Later, a couple of our talented actors did show up shortly after the meeting started, and we were able to make the readings work by doubling up on the 10 people who attended the meeting. (Of course, some of our writers are excellent actors as well. You know who you are!)

But seriously, we need more actors. If you're an actor, and you've never attended one of our meetings because you weren't sure how much reading you'd get to do, let me tell you now: you'll get a lot.

The good thing is that our discussions were longer and more constructive than last time. At the beginning of the meeting,I had suggested that we try to target 5 to 10 minutes of discussion per play and we hit that target well, wrapping up the meeting around 9:30PM.

We read six plays, starting with a couple of scenes from Sue Bachman's relationship drama Having Faith. Sue rewrote the scenes to make the adult daughter less mean. It worked, and the daughter, while still frustrated by the infirmities of her aging mother, is at least somewhat sympathetic now. Special kudos to August Mergelman for bringing the mother to hilarious, spunky life--Brooklyn accent included.

We next read the beginning of August Mergelman's youth play A Commedia of Pairs, a funny mash-up between the Plautus's Menaechmi and Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. Everyone loved the humor, feeling that he only thing to fix--and August agreed wholeheartedly--was the title, as the current one is a bit clunky sounds more like a sub-title than a main title.

After that we read the beginning of Deirdre Gilbert's family comedy Capsaicin. In this play, a father and son struggled to get the cranky; judgmental mother to enjoy a family vacation on a South Carolina island. The audience said that the characters all felt very distinct and well-drawn. Deirdre was still trying to make up her mind whether to make the family Southern or something else, and by the end of our discussion had pretty much decided to give them a Midwestern flatness.

Next up was the middle section of my cocktail party farce Butterfly Effect. Here things are rapidly going from bad to worse as Philip and Roddy sneak a string of ancient rescue flares outside so that they can launch them. People liked the humor and pacing, and did not seem to have any issues with the few Americanisms in the script as it made the dialogue more approachable.

We then read the end of Chuck Cabell's medieval fantasy Jurgen the Pawnbroker. Everyone liked how the book wrapped up with Jurgen returning to his loyal--if shrewish--wife, deciding to be satisfied with his lot as it was. Some people felt that his moralizing at the end was a little heavy-handed, but others thought this fit perfectly with the medieval setting of the story.

And we finished up with a rewrite of Tim Phillips' Prohibition-era romance, Abigail Finds Love. The story continues to get better with each version, with the audience really liking the scene in which Abigail knocks out her arrogant husband by tainting his food so that she could have a rendezvous with her lover, the charming piano player Paul.

Our next meeting is Monday, May 11. See you then!

Happy Days opens next week at TheatreWorks

We're all familiar with Waiting for Godot, but how well do you know Samuel Beckett's other works? Well, you can find out next week as the playwright's Happy Days opens at TheatreWorks. It's a bleak, surreal play featuring a talkative woman half-buried in trash.

The play runs March 21 to April 5. Showtimes are 7:30pm Wednesdays through Fridays, 2pm and 7:30 pm Saturdays and 4pm Sundays.

For this month's Prologue Lecture, Murray Ross and Kevin Landis will lead us in a discussion of the absurd twists and turns of Beckett's genius.

I hope to see you at both!

Spring ahead

We set our clocks ahead on Saturday, which means it was still light out when we gathered last night for our monthly meeting--always a welcome change. The weather was nice too, sunny and cool but with the promise of spring in the air. Living in Colorado, we know there are some snowstorms still ahead of us, but after the cold winter we've had, we'll take any relief we get.

And that may be the reason we had such a healthy turnout last night, with 16 people showing up--the most we've had since September. We also had a lot of scripts--seven, to be exact--which we got though at a healthy clip, wrapping up the meeting around 9:30pm. Of course, it helped that discussions were kept to a minimum. I don't know whether people felt rushed or they just didn't have any comments to share, but I plan to encourage meatier discussions in the future.

We opened with August Mergelman's original folktale Tricky Tommy and the Tuffet Monster. In line with his published work for schools, August is trying to put together a collection of short plays for students exploring different cultures and theatrical traditions. Here we see a tricky spider using reverse psychology to dissuade the other spiders from eating the big juicy fly he has his eye on. Everyone enjoyed the humor and the sassy dialogue.

Next up was Grant Swenson's short comedy Yes-man, in which a stressed-out engineer learns to take control of his life. The audience loved the lively dialogue and the realism of the characters, with more than one attendee saying they've known people just like them.

We then read the first half of Deirdre Gilbert's one-act drama A Frame of Mind. As her entry to the FAC's Rough Writers Contest, it's centered around artist Georgia O'Keeffe, in particular the time that photographer Ansel Adams took her and the Rockefellers on a camping trip. The play had a lot of humor and heart, especially in the conflict between the haughty O'Keeffe and the more down-to-earth Rosa, an Hispanic guide who Deirdre invented for the piece.

After that we read more of Chuck Cabell's Jurgen the Pawnbroker, running out of time just a few pages from the end. The witty dialogue continues here as we see the clever Jurgen con his way into becoming emperor, pope and then, for a brief time, God, before deciding that the latter role wasn't for him. Lots of fun, as always. People especially liked the elevated, very theatrical language throughout.

We followed that with a rewrite of the beginning of Tim Phillips' Prohibition-era drama Abigail Finds Love. This part neatly sets up the budding romance between Abigail, the wife of a wealthy industrialist, and Paul, a struggling piano player. Many people remembered the original version and thought this version was much stronger and tighter. The characters were also richer, with Paul being more interestingly ambiguous now.

Next we read another scene from my cocktail party farce Butterfly Effect. In this scene, a disastrous chain of events is launched when the neurotic Philip randomly tosses the olive from his martini. I was concerned that some of the actions might be too over-the-top, but the consensus was that this kind of thing is expected in a farce. The audience said they loved the humor as well as the breakneck pacing of the piece.

We finished up with Sue Bachman's short drama Georgia on his Mind. This was also written for the FAC Rough Writers contest but focuses on a different time, specifically the beginning of O'Keeffe's relationship with photographer and future husband Alfred Stieglitz. The scene where Stieglitz's wife catches the two of them in bed was poignant. And it was interesting to see how O'Keeffe's artistic vision evolved and grew in the subsequent scene as she and Steiglitz struggled to make ends meet.

See you all at our next meeting on Monday, April 13!