Thespiana runs this weekend at Cottonwood Center for the Arts

Come out and support your fellow Drama Lab members this weekend at Thespiana, a staged reading of five new plays at the Cottonwood Center for the Arts. The theme is "comedies with a twist" as each play gives a dark and somewhat cockeyed view of the way we live today.

Writers include Drama Lab regulars Chuck Cabell and Jeff Schmoyer, both of whom are getting a staged reading for the first time, as well as Warren Epstein and Mark and Lauren Arnest. Actors include our own Sue Bachman, Roy Kieffer, Sallie Walker,Désirée Myers, Robert Tiffany, Greg Lanning, Elizabeth Kahn and Mike Miller.

I'll be emceeing on Saturday while George Preston, general manager of KCME, will be emceeing on Sunday.

I hope to see you there!

Digging out

We're still digging out from the snowstorm that hit last week but had a decent turnout for last night's meeting anyway. Ten people showed up and we read through 4 plays.

We opened with a rewrite of a scene from Sue Bachman's drama Ladies of the Chameleon. In this scene, two older women discuss their experiences getting defrauded by their romantic partners, only to discover that they were defrauded by the same guy. People liked the twist at the end but thought that the buildup was too long for the payoff and that the whole thing could benefit from some tightening.

Next up was Chuck Cabell's short comedy, Come Here Often? The play is set in a bar that is located in Heaven and is frequented by a variety of angels and demons. Gabe (the archangel Gabriel) is retiring and the others fight over who gets control of his human. The audience thought the play had an interesting premise and was very witty, but some felt that it bordered on preachy at times.

After that we read two more scenes from my Frank Capra-inspired comedy Trouble in Paradise Junction. Here we meet Wink Smiley, the self-absorbed host of the reality show that has come to town. We also see how he manipulates the conversation to drive a wedge between two of the town's families. There was some discussion about whether that conflict was revealed too soon.

We finished up with the beginning of Tim Phillips' comedy Seth and Tracy, also set in a bar. In it, a woman tries to make a connection with a guy who is writing at the bar, only to go off with another guy when she gets rebuffed by the writer. Everyone liked it and thought the characters were well-defined.

We meet again on Monday, March 14. See you then!

Recovering

We had a very lightly attended meeting last night with only seven people showing up, although that included one very talented new actress, Kelly. The attendance was low largely because my play The Last Radio Show closed on Saturday and the cast and crew--many of whom are members of the Drama Lab--were at home recovering from the intense two-week rehearsal period or illness or both.

The number of scripts was down too. We read just three, opening with a rewrite of Grant Swenson's Balance, a short play about a woman engineer struggling to deal with the stress of her job. One of the ways Grant revised the play was by changing the lead character from a man to a woman. The audience liked this change as it seemed to make the character's struggle more realistic and poignant. Grant also added a few touches of comedy to relieve the tension.

Next up was a rewrite of Barbara Summerville's Huckleberry Pie, a short drama about a cantankerous old woman who has lost the will to live and tries to talk her niece into poisoning her. Barbara moved the story elements around quite a bit and added a scene at the end in which the niece has a conversation with her aunt after she dies. People found the play quite moving, especially the way the characters bonded over their singing of some old familiar songs.

We wrapped up with two more scenes from my Frank Capra-inspired comedy Trouble in Paradise Junction. Here we see the townsfolk ignore the lead character's protests to approve a shady contract with a TV reality show. The audience liked the humor and thought that the story effectively portrayed the small-mindedness of small town people, though I'd like to keep that portrayal a fond one.

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

The Last Radio Show opens tonight

Tonight is the world premiere of my newest play, The Last Radio Show. It's a fast-paced farce about KUKU, a struggling radio station in the 1940's, and the mysterious series of "accidents" that threaten to shut it down for good. I brought the script to several meetings of the Drama Lab last year, and the members were hugely helpful in making it better.

The show runs fours shows only at Black Box Theatre, 1367 Pecan Street, in Colorado Springs:

• 7pm Thursday, January 14
• 7pm, Friday, January 15
• 2pm Saturday, January 16
• 7pm Saturday, January 16

Tickets for the two Saturday shows are going fast. To order yours, visit Brown Paper Tickets.

Storm warning

Fortunately, we missed a winter storm that was originally forecast to come through last night, threatening to disrupt or even cancel our monthly meeting. But the storm decided to hold off until morning instead, giving all of us lots of fluffy white stuff to shovel when we woke up.

What with all the holiday shows going on in town, we were missing quite a few of our regulars last night, but we ended up with a respectable turnout anyways, with 13 people attending. The play count was down again, however, with only three plays read.

Before the readings, we spent some time discussing what we could do to take the Drama Lab further. There's been a lot of interest in providing collaboration opportunities for writers and actors, as well as producing our own evening of short plays. There's no consensus yet on which direction we're going to take, but we're open to ideas. Let us know what you'd like to see!

Our first script was Quest for the Golden Fangs, another in Grant Swenson's series of four short plays representing different literary styles. This one represented irony and focused on four teenagers who are given a quest to steal a rival school's mascot head (a walrus). The ironic turn comes at the end when Julio, the leader of the quartet, decides he doesn't want to steal the head after all because his father had done the same thins when he was in school. Some people thought that the language was too mature and sophisticated for teenagers, but everyone loved the characters.

After that, we read a 10-minute romantic musical comedy by Howard Kirstel titled Reno. Here, we see a recently widowed Jewish man dip a tentative toe back into the dating pool, only to find himself winning the hearts of, not one, but two women. The script includes lyrics to a song that the multi-talented Howard still needs to wrote the melody for. The audience liked the story but thought that the relationships moved too fast. They wanted to see the characters fall in love.

We wrapped up the evening with the beginning of my large-cast comedy Trouble in Paradise Junction, a satire about a reality TV crew that invades a near-perfect, Frank Capra-inspired town. I was worried that the beginning might be too hokey, but people thought it worked because the townsfolk truly believed that their town was perfect.

Our next meeting will be postponed by one week since several members are going to be in rehearsal for my play The Last Radio Show. We'll see you on Monday, January 18!

Back to school

Well, it was fun using the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theatre for the last two meetings, but in practice, it didn't work as well as we thought. There was little room for the actors to sit between the edge of the set and the house, and the sound wasn't as good as we though.

For this reason, we moved back into our old classroom for this month's meeting, and will continue to meet there from here on out. This also allows us to go back to our second Monday of the month schedule, since we're no longer dependent on the move-in/move-out dates of of the shows in the theatre.

We had an excellent turnout, 16 people, which was our best turnout in months. And we only had four scripts, our lowest count in months. I've got to admit, it was nice having time to discuss each of the plays in detail, and still getting out by 9pm. Whether it makes sense to reduce the number of scripts per meeting is something I plan to explore.

We opened with the beginning of Sue Bachman's new drama, Ladies of the Chameleon. In it, the recently widowed Cynthia dishes to her best friend Maggie about the man who has swept her off her feet. Some said it was suspenseful and that they liked Cynthia's nervousness, while others thought it needed tightening. One person suggested that it might be fun to add a dash of alcohol, with the women revealing more and more about themselves as they get drunk.

Next up was Grant Swenson's 10-minute comedy Quest for the Golden Moustache. He originally wrote it for a collection of four short plays that start the same and end up going in different directions, with this one being the comedic one. Here, a teenage girl is sent by her father on a quest for happiness, only to find her real father at the end. The audience thought there was a nice contrast between the flippant attitudes of Tessa's teenage friends and the serious theme of parental abandonment that the play addresses. But some thought the characters weren't differentiated enough, and several thought that Tessa accepted her new father too quickly.

After that we read Snow White - Alternate Ending, the rewrite of a 10-minute comedy that Jeff Schmoyer brought to Drama Lab a year or two ago. He did a great job beefing up the humor, as both the audience and actors laughed a lot. Everybody liked the rapid-fire dialogue and thought that the Disney-with-a-twist-of-sass characters were fun. There was some concern that the contemporary references might quickly date the play, but others said those could easily be generalized in the script.

We finished up with the next scene from my old-time radio farce The Last Radio Show. In it, we get a Frankenstein spoof called "The Thing with Two Spleens". The consensus was that this show-within-a-show was not as funny as the previous three and that it needs to be to keep the energy rising. The audience also didn't like ending of this show, feeling that it was anticlimatic to have the Monster merely dent the wall of the lab rather than burst through to cause even more havoc.

Our next meeting is Monday, December 14. See you all then!

Drama Lab is cancelled for Monday, November 16

Due to the poor weather conditions, Drama Lab is cancelled for tonight. I'll see about getting a space for next Monday. Otherwise, we'll wait until December. Check back here for updates.