Austin's One Minute Play Festival

I've had two pieces chosen for Austin's first One Minute Play Festival (which uses the hashtag #1MPF, if you're curious.)  It was a fun writing exercise for me, and given the talent involved, the whole thing should be pretty interesting.  Details below.

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The One-Minute Play Festival (#1MPF) & ScriptWorks, In Collaboration with Salvage Vanguard Theatre Present:

The 1^st Austin One-Minute Play Festival

Thursday Aug 28^th, Friday Aug 29^th, and Saturday Aug 30^th at 8PM

At Salvage Vanguard Theatre

2803 Manor RD

Austin, TX 78722

Tickets are $20 and available at: 

www.scriptworks.org

One-minute plays by 40 active Austin & Texas playwrights were commissioned for this special annual event, and developed with #1MPF’s playmaking process.

Featuring Brand New One-Minute Plays By

Katie Bender, Allison Orr Block, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, James Burnside, Monika Bustamante, Bastion Carboni, Katherine Catmull, Elizabeth Cobbe, Martha Lynn Coon, Adrienne Dawes, Trey Deason, Elizabeth Doss, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Raul Garza, Kirk German, Aimée Gonzalez, Meg Haley, Reina Hardy, Joanna Horowitz, Brian Kettler, Abe Koogler, Rhonda Kulhanek, Max Langert, Kirk Lynn, P. Paullette MacDougal, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Jennifer Margulies, Tegan McLeod, Briandaniel Oglesby, Jason Rainey, Candyce Rusk, Sarah Saltwick, Roxanne Schroeder-Arce, Hank Schwemmer, Diana Lynn Small, C. Denby Swanson, Lisa B. Thompson, Cyndi Williams, Anne Maria Wynter, & more

Directed by Christi Moore, Derek Kolluri, Ellie McBride, Jenny Lavery, Ken Webster, Linda Nenno, Will Hollis Snider, & Lily Wolff

Curated By #1MPF Producing Artistic Director, Dominic D’Andrea

SCRIPTWORKS

ScriptWorks (formerly Austin Script Works) is a playwright-driven organization that seeks to promote the craft of dramatic writing and protect the writer’s integrity by encouraging playwright initiative and harnessing collective potential. ScriptWorks is funded and supported in part by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future.  Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com. Find ScriptWorks on the web at www.scriptworks.org

Brevity

I was commissioned to write two one-minute plays.

That requires word economy.

Hint Fiction also required maximum value from each word.

Very different writing muscles from novels, but useful ones to build.

July is a busy month.

Worldbuilding: Art and Culture in the Fantasy World

The most fundamental way to define a culture is through its art.  Geography, food, religion, technology and government are critical as well, of course, but none of those quite get to the soul of a people in the same way.  With fantasy fiction, we're mostly dealing with forms of art of limited technology: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, literature and theater.

Music tends to be the way many fantasy writers go, to the point of cliché.  Especially with songs.  This is probably one of the quirks of genre that we inherited from Tolkien.  Let's face it, Tolkien loved his songs.  Personally, when I was reading him, whenever I saw indented, italicized text, I knew it was time to skip ahead a bit.  The same thing with poetry.  Now, part of the reason why these parts of a book seem so disposable is because the writers are not the poets/songsmiths of the ages that the work purports them to be.  It's one thing to say that a poem is a soulcrushing work of rhyme and meter that drives men to tears; it's another to actually write it.  I could do without it, personally.  I could also do without mention of lutes or mandolins.*

Painting, sculpture and architecture, I'll admit, are a little out of my ken.  Especially architecture.  For painting and sculpture, I tend to go in the direction of what they depict, rather than how they're depicted.  That's a nice way to drop a little worldbuilding history into the mix without it being as much of an infodump.  At the very least, having your characters seeing a painting or statue of a former king gives a slightly more organic way to drop in some background. 

Literature and theater are my favorite, though I tend to again go for what such pieces are about (and what that says about the culture) over trying to come up with excerpts.  In Thorn of Dentonhill, I have a snippet of dialogue from Three Men and Two Wives, which is going on in the background while Veranix is searching for someone in the public square.  Three Men and Two Wives is one of the ribald comedies of Darren Whit, a playwright from the previous century that I occasionally mention that is the Druth equivalent of Shakespeare**.  At a different point, I have Kaiana quoting from one of Whit's history plays, Queen Mara.  But, again, only snippets.  And in Holver Alley Crew, there's mention of the banned play The Marriage of the Jester, which is being performed in an especially shabby part of town.  While Three Men and Two Wives is a lusty, romantic farce (filled with crossdressing and confused identity), The Marriage of the Jester is little more than smut, presented to give the audience a cheap thrill, or for a little more coin, the opportunity to join in. 

I have to admit, I have fun just brainstorming potential play titles.

I intend to include a little bit of loftier theatre in Way of the Shield-- perhaps even an opera, if I can make it work.  Amanda Downum's The Bone Palace has a nice bit where her main characters go to the opera, and it's the blood-soaked tragedy kind. 

The other element I'm interested in adding to the mix is the use of magic in creating art.  I've hinted around that in Way of the Shield as well.  Still pondering that.  It's something I'd like to do, but at the same time, I don't want to stop the story dead in its tracks just to include it. 

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*- Yes, historical, but they also come off as Fantasy Clichés.
**- I also have some equivalents to Jonson, Marlowe and Webster.  Definitely Webster.  The Druth do so love a blood-soaked tragedy.  Especially since Whit was rarely a tragedist. 

Out of Ink Season Again

For the past 13 years, I've participated in Austin Scriptworks Out of Ink ten-minute playwriting "fling", as it is called, which basically works like this: Every year in November, on a Friday evening we receive three "rules" for a ten-minute play.  The deadline is 48 hours later (give or take, since it's usually by 6pm on Sunday).  Then eight of those ten-minute plays are selected for production in April-ish. (It varies from year-to-year, but it's usually April.)

It's a process I really enjoy, and it keeps various tools in my toolbox sharp.  This is a key reason why I participate every year. 


2000:  Last Train Out of Illinois (Selected) My first year with Scriptworks, the rules involved boots, a character directly addressing the audience, and someone performing an "aria".  I had, at the time, had the vague idea of a Tom Waitsish Musical called "Last Train Out of Illinois", but all I had was Atmosphere and an Ending. Which is just fine for a ten-minute piece. 

2001: Dead Air On The Open Road (Not Selected) I don't remember all the details, but one of the rules here was an "incongruous element".  So the story involved people in a car breaking down in the desert, and then a foul-mouthed puppet shows up to save them.  When we did the reading, it was actually pretty hysterical, but I can see that as a script, it's rather thin.

2002: Freaks of Nature and Acts of God (Selected) The rules aren't quite in my memory, save "only one chair" as set.  I came up with three young women stuck in a near-empty beach house during a hurricane, who are then rescued by a pizza-delivery guy who has the wrong address.  It's probably the weakest of mine that was chosen.

2003: Danger Girl's Night Off (Selected) The rules dictated 1. something involving superheroes and 2. a seduction, so I immediately thought of a grown-up sidekick who just wanted to have a date night.  This was a lot of fun.  Elements of this story ended up fueling the core ideas behind my story in The Protectors, which you can still purchase on Amazon.

2004: Triangles and Broken Circles (Not Selected)  The rules had something to do with chalk and a ceremony, but what I wrote was pretty much weak sauce.  Can't blame it not being selected.

2005: No Entry.  This year, for budgetary reasons (I think, I could be wrong) the format changed, asking for a 5-minute radio play.  I was at something of a loss with that idea, so I didn't enter this time around.

2006: Alignment of Celestial Bodies (Not Selected) Of the "not selected" ones, this is probably my favorite.  I forget the details of the rules, but it was a sweet romantic story of a couple going stargazing, with an interconnecting Creation-of-the-World Myth of my own creation. 

2007: Hourglass (Selected) I'm really pleased with this one.  The rules involved 1. A physical transformation on stage, 2. a secret and 3. a piece of music connecting to a memory.  This may have been, for me, the most synergous set of rules.  The discovery of an old hourglass reminds an old woman of the true paternity of her child.  Hannah Kenah did really lovely work on stage going from 107 to 20. 

2008: Ten Minutes Ago (Selected)  The play goes backwards!  That was the rule that had to define this one.  The idea I was struck with here was having an innocuous instigation (a woman answering her door) lead to events that had disastrous consequences (her husband and a stranger dead in her living room), and then show it Consequences-Events-Instigation.  This one was challenging to stage, but enjoyable.

2009: The Q (Not Selected) Here, I think I bit off more than I could chew.  The core idea was about people being smuggled out of a quarantine-zone after a biological attack.  I think it ended up too dense and too vague.  I like it, I may revisit it at some point, but I'll admit in the writing, I wasn't quite "feeling" it.  So when it wasn't chosen, I wasn't all that surprised.

2010: Entropy (Selected) "Time is Running Out", "Use the Beginning and End of Finnegan's Wake" and "A Ceremony of Forgetting".  How does this NOT say "two people stuck in a time loop"?  OK, it does to me, because I'm a sci-fi geek. 

2011: Slept the Whole Way (Selected) Again, the rules sent me to an SF place: the play needed to span 3000 years and have 300 characters.  So a cryosleep ship that missed its target and kept everyone in stasis for 3000 years made perfect sense to me. 

2012: I Asked My Friend Art, And He Said It Isn't Him.  Given that I just sent this, and don't know what it's fate is, I won't talk about it too much.  I will say I enjoyed writing it a lot.  I found myself cackling and grinning much of the time, and I'm hoping that's a good sign.

Being Too Aware of the Gearwork

Last weekend I went to see two plays.  Frankly, neither one was worth my time.  But in very different ways.

One was just plain bad.  It was ostensibly a children's play, but the kind of children's play that makes the assumption that kids are just morons and a vague mish-mash of music, gyration and animal masks is all you need to capture their attention.  It was just a failure, but the kind of failure that most anyone watching would have been aware of.  A pure, unfiltered F.

The other one was more subtle in its problems.  For me, it was a B-/C+, where a problematic script was held up by strong performances.*  But the script problems were ones that were obvious to me-- or at least to my particular tastes and proclivities-- because I've had experience in playwrighting to know what I'm looking at when I lift up the hood to check out the engine.

There is a writing tick I see a lot in plays, and it bothers me immensely. Usually, it takes the form of  a "thing", be it a moment of shared history, a mutual secret, or knowledge of an upcoming event, that informs the emotional threads of the characters or the entire plot.  Now, a lot of the time, characters just Don't Talk About the thing.  Where it becomes a problem, at least for me, is when you have characters Talk About Not Talking About It, aka the Dance Of Vague References.  You know you've seen it.

Joe: I have to say, it's nice to fly First Class.
Bob: True, but I've done it once before.
Joe: You have?  When?  Was it... that trip?
Bob: That... oh, no.  Different time. But anyway....

Ideally, this sort of thing can be used to set up a mystery or plot point, foreshadowing its revelation later: the gun hanging on the wall in the first act is fired in the third act.  However, in its inartful, clunky usage (which is often), you are essentially having characters screaming, "LOOK AT THE GUN ON THE WALL!  LOOK AT IT!  I WONDER IF ANYONE WILL SHOOT IT LATER?"
The first half of the play was essentially littered with the three characters pasting a whole arsenal of guns on the wall, many of which were fired in the back half by the use of a direct-to-audience monologue.  

Now, maybe it's just me, that I'm aware of how these things work, that I can't not see the internal workings, and that just plain ruins a lot of theatre for me.  Oddly, not movies or TV, even though often the same ticks apply.  I wonder if that's because I hold live theatre to a higher standard, or is it because the nature of stagecraft makes it harder to balance gravity and importance with subtlety. 

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*- As much as I like to believe that text is the most crucial aspect of a play, the truth is an excellent performance can bring a mediocre script out of the depths, and even a fantastic script will be lost if the actors can't do the heavy lifting.

Slept The Whole Way Interview

I was interviewed for my play for ScriptWork's Out of Ink, opening this weekend.

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Marshall Ryan Maresca's SLEPT THE WHOLE WAY is part of Out of Ink: Sound Off, the 14th Annual Showcase of 10 Minute Plays.
"Four people wake up from suspension sleep on a space ship to find something has gone horribly wrong."

1) Three required ingredients, 48 hours - how did you start your play?
 
 In this case, it was with a series of false starts. For the Out of Ink plays, I've found that one ingredient has to form the spine of the play, the driving force. So the first step was figuring out which ingredient worked best in that role. This year, I analyzed the three ingredients to see how they worked with each other, which ingredient might "demand" being the driving force of the play. The 3000/300 ingredient gave of a sense of scope, that the play needed to be epic in scale. This made it the most logical choice to be the spine. But figuring out what that scope would mean became the big challenge. Let alone the 300 characters-- how to express 3000 years in a way that can make sense on stage in a 10-minute play? I tried several different paths, most of which showed my roots as a sci-fi/fantasy writer, such as time travel.

2) Did one of the ingredients this provide a special challenge? If so, how did you approach it?
 
This time around, it was the children's song/rhyme/fairytale rule. Just as one rule makes the spine of the play, one rule tends to be almost tangential. In one of my failed paths, I played around with the idea of using it as a code phrase. ("Mother Goose, this is Rapunzel. I need to let down my hair. Repeat, Rapunzel needs to let down her hair.") Once I reached a certain point in "Slept the Whole Way", I knew I was going to need a code phrase, so that was the obvious way I could use that ingredient.

3) How do you like to approach a rehearsal process and collaborators - what are your expectations for any revisions?
 
For Out Of Ink, I'm personally opposed to making revisions, beyond the most minor of line/business changes. Anything more feels like cheating the process of the 48 hours.

4) What else are you working on right now?
 
I'm a fantasy/sci-fi novelist, and I'm currently working on a draft of an action-heavy political-thriller fantasy. I have three other manuscripts currently seeking a publisher. Excerpts of those three are available at my website, www.mrmaresca.com

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OUT OF INK 2012: SOUND OFF
ScriptWork’s 14th Annual Ten Minute Play Showcase
Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Rd.
April 19-21 and 26-28, 2012 at 8 PM
Tickets:  $15 general admission, $12 students/seniors/ScriptWorks
April 19th is a Pay-What-You-Wish preview
$25 includes pre-show reception at Zhi Tea (4607 Bolm Road) and performance on Saturday, April 21st
Purchase tickets online.

"Slow and steady wins the race" - Blog Post 200

Way back in high school, for a drama class, I strapped a spray-painted cardboard box to my back and played the Tortoise in a little production of The Tortoise and the Hare for elementary school kids.*    It's kind of funny, because if you look at the history of this blog, the first month I had it, I wrote Hare-style.  Twenty-seven posts in September of 2009-- BAM!  I was blogging something fierce then.  Then it tapers off to a slow drip.  Burned out fast. Once I switched to my twice-a-week Tortoise-style, I've grown and built and slowly but surely... two hundred posts. 

And that's really what it took, both in terms of this blog and in writing in general-- that willingness to take the long view approach, slowly and sometimes painfully, acknowledging, "It may take a while to get there, but I AM getting there."**

Slow and steady.  Always moving forward.

In the meantime, I've got a play opening in two weeks.  If your in the Austin-ish area, check it out.

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*- This is an important lesson in theatre and acting, though it can apply to all writing: if you want to be on stage, leave your shame at the coat check on your way in, because it's only going to hold you back.
**- If I want to start something, I might compare the self/e-publishing model to Hare-style-- rushing to nowhere because now and fast is more important than right and done well.   But, you know, I'm not going to start something on my 200th post, am I?
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We are very excited to announce Out of Ink! festival: Sound Off!

April 19-21 and 26-28, 8 p.m. at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale (click for map)

Playwrights: Colin Denby Swanson, Trey Deason, Aimee Gonzalez, Anne Marie Newsome, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Robert M Barr, Elizabeth Cobbe

Directors: Jason Phelps, Ellie McBride, Lowell Bartholomee, Sharon Sparlin, and Debbie Lynn Carriger

Dramaturgs: Kristen Harrison, Ellie McBride, Debbie Lynn Carriger

Production & Design Team: Christi Moore, Kayla Newman, Cassandra Castillo, Christina Smith, Pam Friday, George Marsolek, Jen Rogers and Robert Fisher

ScriptWorks presents OUT OF INK 2012: Sound Off, the 14th annual showcase of 10 minute plays

$15 general admission, $12 students/seniors/ScriptWorks members; April 19th is a Pay-What-You-Wish preview;

$25 for pre-show reception at Zhi Tea (4607 Bolm Road) and performance on Saturday, April 21st

RESERVATIONS/INFORMATION: www.scriptworks.org 512-454-9727

How do you encompass 3000 years in ten minutes? And do it in 48 hours? That was the challenge set before ScriptWorks members last fall at the annual Weekend Fling 48-hour writing event. At the Fling, member playwrights were tasked with writing a ten-minute play over 48 hours using three arbitrary ingredients.


This year's ingredients were:

1) Write a play with three hundred characters that takes place over 3000 years.
2) Include a children's song, game or fairy tale.
3) Include a sound that everyone hears differently.

At the end of the Fling, the plays were read in a ScriptWorks Salon at the State Theater. A selection committee picked eight of the plays to produce in the Out of Ink Festival. The selection committee included ScriptWorks co-founder Emily Cicchini, non-applying member Rhonda Kulhanek, and Cleveland Playhouse Artistic Associate, Corey Atkins.

The Sound Off scripts were written by: Bob Barr, Elizabeth Cobbe, Trey Deason, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Aimée Gonzalez, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Anne Maria Newsome and C. Denby Swanson. The plays will be performed by an ensemble of actors including Sarah Bading, Beth Burroughs, Amy Chang, David DuBose, Anna Maria Garcia, Heather Hanna, Anne Hulsman, Rhonda Kulhanek, Jenny Lavery, Christopher Loveless, Jason Phelps and Aron Taylor. They'll be directed by Lowell Bartholomee, Debbie Lynn Carriger, Ellie McBride, Jason Phelps, and Sharon Sparlin with dramaturgy by Kristin Harrison. Designers for the project are Robert Fisher, Pam Friday, George Marsolek, and Jennifer Rogers.

ABOUT SCRIPTWORKS ScriptWorks (formerly Austin Script Works) is a playwright-driven organization that seeks to promote the craft of dramatic writing and protect the writer's integrity by encouraging playwright initiative and harnessing collective potential. ScriptWorks is funded and supported in part by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future.

Austin Theatre Announcement, and the "Process Play"

I received this in my email last week:

At long last, selections for the upcoming ScriptWorks 10-minute play showcase have been made!

SOFTLY AS IN A MORNING SUNRISE - Bob Barr
UNFAIR PRACTICES AT THE DPS - Elizabeth Cobbe
THE MANY SUICIDES OF MOLLY McVEIGH - Trey Deason
OCEAN SONG FROM A DESERT PLACE - Amparo Garcia-Crow
MS. EDWINA BACKLE'S APPOINTMENT - Aimée Gonzalez
SLEPT THE WHOLE WAY - Marshall Ryan Maresca
THE NORTH STAR TRANSGALACTIC - Anne Maria Newsome
THE GREEKS - Colin Denby Swanson

The plays will run April 19-21 and 26-28 at the Blue Theatre.

Excellent news!  I always enjoy being part of this yearly production.  This year was the 11th time I've participated, and the 7th time my play has been chosen.  It's a fun experience, and a fun process.

I've often heard the term "process play" used for this kind of production.  A "process play" doesn't have a specific definition, but in my mind its a play that invites the audience to look under the hood to get a better appreciation of what's going on in the production.  At its best a process play is something where an additional level of understanding enhances the enjoyment of something that's already enjoyable.

In the case of Out of Ink, I think it works well because the process is front-loaded in the writing phase.  We write the plays in a specific time frame, within a specific set of rules, and then eight are chosen.  Do you need to know that, in order to enjoy the show?  No.  But in knowing it, your experience changes.  Case in point, in my piece from last year, there's a laugh line when one of the characters mentions Finnegan's Wake.  This isn't because Finnegan's Wake is inherently funny, but because the audience knew that including Finnegan's Wake was one of our rules.  But the play stands on its own without knowing that.  The scripts are developed via the process, but the production of the show itself is straightforward.


"Process play", though, can be used as a pejorative. At its worst, a process play becomes a masturbatory exercise where more emphasis is put on how the performance got put together over the performance itself.  I've known a few actor friends who have used the phrase as a backhanded knock on shows they were in.  "How are rehearsals going?"  "Well, it's a process play."  Code for, "The director doesn't have a plan and we're meandering and wasting time."  I've been involved in shows like that.  It's no fun.

But with Out of Ink?  I've always had fun.  I've always found it a fun show to watch.  If you're in Austin the last two weekends in April, come check it out.

Out of Ink: Review and some other thoughts

The Austin Chronicle has a review of this year's Out of Ink.  I can't help but be pleased with this bit:

Take, for example, the most successful piece in the evening: "Entropy," directed by Sharon Sparlin. (And yes, I'm going to spoil some of this, so stop reading here if you're going to see it.) In it, two scientists, Boson (Jose Marenco) and Higgs (Jacob Trussell), gradually discover that they are caught in a time loop. Playwright Marshall Ryan Maresca changes up the repetitive dialogue in each successive scene so that we discover what is happening at the same time the scientists do, utilizing just enough techno-speak to make it all sound real and possible, while actors Morenco and Trussell use a blistering tempo, a chair on wheels, a laptop, and not much else to make us imagine huge control rooms, massive computers, and the swirling vortex of time. Plus, it's laugh-out-loud funny.

Got to love that.  And you know what? It IS laugh-out-loud funny, but I've got to give most of the credit for that to Jose and Jacob.  Those two really click, both with spitting out the, I'll admit, downright Trekkian technobabble ("The integrity of the field is quantum tied to the half-life of the sample!") as well as building the necessary spiraling momentum.  And Sharon was the perfect director for this piece.  Rare is the artist who not only is an ace at coordinating movement and text into a stronger integrated whole, but ALSO reads quantum physics for fun. 

In short, I am incredibly happy, but mostly because I had a fantastic group of people who brought the absolute best out of my text. 

A theatre announcement

At long last, selections for the upcoming ScriptWorks 10-minute play showcase have been made!

COMMODIUS VICUS - Amparo Garcia-Crow
ENTROPY - Marshall Maresca
FAMILY TRADITIONS - Devo Carpenter
FINN'S LAST DAY - Max Langert
JOYCE, OR THE UNKNOWING - Hank Schwemmer
RIVER RUN PAST - Sarah Saltwick
THE DO NEVER - Lowell Bartholomee
TRASH TALK - Susan McMath Platt

The plays will run April 7-9 and 14-16 at Salvage Vanguard.

Raves for Muses IV

In addition to the excellent review from Now Playing Austin, you can read the many glowing reports from audience members, including this gem:  

Some of the best playwrights in Austin contributed to this awesome show...

Also this:

Each scene is a unique snapshot of one family, and the audience gets to act as a sort of fly on the wall, but sometimes more. The script holds strong and thought provoking material, and the acting is excellent.  

I have to say (having not seen the production yet), that's pretty impressive that the "script holds strong", especially consider there were eight of us working independent of each other.  Of course, the good folks at Vestige picked pieces that worked well together.  I know I'm honored to once again share stage space with Aimee Gonzalez and Sarah Saltwick, two fellow Austin playwrights that I highly admire.

I took a brief respite from my add-20k-to-Thorn of Dentonhill project to write a ten-minute play over the weekend for Austin Scriptworks. I've been a frequent participant in the 10-Minute Play Weekend Fling... in fact, I think I'm the most frequent participant. Over the years I've done it nine times, missing only the first two (before I was a Scriptworks member) and in 2005 when the project was to do a five-minute radio script instead of a ten-minute play. Of my previous eight scripts, five were chosen for the showcase production: Last Train Out of Illinois (which I still hope to expand into a full-length show someday), Freaks of Nature and Acts of God (what I would consider the weakest of my "winning" scripts), Danger Girl's Night Off (a personal favorite, and soon to be made into a short film by a friend of mine), Hourglass (my wife's favorite) and Ten Minutes Ago.

This year's entry, "The Q"... it's hard to gauge it off the bat, since I'm still "close" to it. But I like it, and I'd certainly put it up there with the two most recent as a strong piece.

But we'll see in February or so if it's chosen.