poets writing plays | an update

 

Last November, I got it in my head that I wanted to start writing plays. I would say 'again' but I would be harkening back to the late high school undergrad who once thought playwriting would be an excellent way to marry her two passions/majors--English Lit and theater. And I wrote a couple shorties in those years just playing around, but eventually life got complicated by grad school and library jobs and the next thing I knew, I was writing and publishing predominantly poetry somehow. Then came art and editing and video poems and all sorts of other creative diversions, but I barely set foot in a theater until a couple years back when I finally had my evenings free again, first time since 2001.

So last November, spurred by the idea of putting plays in the horror genre specifically onstage, I started with a one-act based on a series of poems that was already two-decades old by then, then another, then another (mostly 30-40 minute one acts, but also one that is long enough to be considered full-length. ) I've focused more this year on getting them written and in some readable form (I've been releasing them digitally and in print the past few months instead of my usual poetry e-zine projects, and amazingly have even sold a few copies here and there (so thank you!)

Not to worry, the poems are coming in the betweens (plus I have a backlog of unreleased work I'll be sharing at some point) but actually I've also been exploring ways to meld these more together fruitfully in future work.--the Macbeth witches project feels more poetry than drama. I've sent out a couple of the scripts to local calls, but I feel I am still very fledgling at the playwriting biz.

I was staring at my little stack of plays today, as I approach finishing the first draft of the project that features e-mail messages from the dead and thinking this is not a bad yield for almost a year of writing (and actually it's the editing and proofing/design details that takes the longest, not the actual writing, but my early drafts are messy as hell.)

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