Last Gasp has been selected for the 2020 Mid-America Theatre Conference in Chicago. I’ve had fun working on this play, an apocalyptic dark comedy about an imagined climate-change end game. I try hard to keep the audience guessing about what what and who they are watching. That is all I will say. No spoilers here!
MATC is a development conference, so it will give me a chance to work some kinks out of a script that owes a debt to The Twilight Zone, and that some have found confusing. I may need to weave in a bit more exposition, but I don’t want to make it too easy to follow; it’s meant to be a play that makes you wonder and think.
I had a blast writing for the 2019 Boston One-Minute Play Festival, and just as much fun watching it. To see sixty plays performed in sixty minutes is both inspiring and profoundly disorienting.
The One Minute Play Festival (#1MPF) is a national organization that produces many festivals around the country each year. At each, they work with local writers, which allows them to bill the annual festival as a social barometer, something that takes the pulse of the communities and, overall, of the nation. I think it’s a really cool concept.
The prompt was simple: write one original, sixty second play that is a response to the world as you see it in this moment. There was one notable limitation: No Trump references, impersonations, allusions. My play, Walled, walked up to that line, but I don’t think it crossed it. Obviously, it was inspired by the various reactions to Trump’s border-wall proposal and the general attitudes and policies about immigration that are behind it. However, I don’t see it as a play about Trump, or even a play about immigration. Walled is a play about fear and the things that happen when fear rules us.
The team who performed Walled and the other plays in my “clump” at the 2019 Boston One-Minute Play Festival. They killed it! L to R: David Marino, director; Catherine Lee Christie; Scott Colford; Lynn Wilcott, Ethan Selby, and Pete Desiderio.
You can read, recommend and request rights to produce Walled and my other plays at New Play Exchange.
Are there really people in this world who believe that humans are not to blame for climate change and, therefore, we should not try to do something about it? Okay. Fine. Enter four dinosaurs and a cockroach, who are facing a potential extinction event, themselves. Or maybe two dinosaurs and a cockroach. Or even four dinosaurs, a cockroach, and a rat. I have three versions of Every Creeping Thing.
As I write this post, Every Creeping Thing been produced twice. The first production was the small-cast version at Oldies but Goodies, a festival of five-minute play Festival presented by Playwrights Round Table and Valencia College in Orlando, Florida (Daniel Garces, director; Cast: Katia Avalos, Josh Hernandez and Alexis Vazquez). The second, featuring the full cast, was at ArtsBonita’s Funny Shorts Live! Festival in Bonita Springs, Florida (Janina Britolo, director; Cast: Melissa Henning, Carolyn Bronson, Luis Pages, Kristin Voit, and Janina Britolo.) I realize that two productions of one climate change satire is not even strong anecdotal evidence; nonetheless, they seem to be thinking about climate change in Florida. Go figure.
The picture below is from the Bonita Springs production and, yes, that beach ball with rainbow polka dots is meant to be an asteroid. Actually it’s meant to be the asteroid. They had fun with this play. I had fun writing it, and I hope it makes people laugh. But I also hope it makes them think, and act. Because satire is not the same as comedy, and climate change is no joke.
The cast of Every Creeping Thing at Funny Shorts Live!, presented by ArtsBonita (September 2019). From left: Melissa Henning, Carolyn Bronson, Luis Pages, Kristin Voit, Janina Britolo, who also directed the performance.
