After strike following the Arts for Kids, ETC production of “Elves in the Toyshop?!” (again, coming to Heartland Plays summer, 2009), Mark and I headed across America on our way back to our home in Montana.    Kentucky is great, especially during the spring and fall. The magnificent colors and phenomenal weather make the winters in Montana seem shorter. I don’t mind the winter in Montana as long as I don’t have to go outside. Give me a warm fire, hot tea, a comfy couch for reading your play submissions and my computer for writing with views of the Elkhorn Mountains to top it off and I’m set. Anyway, we left Kentucky and headed north first to Ohio to visit family then northwest to Chicago for lunch with Mark’s son, Nathan and on to St. Paul Minnesota where Mark surprised me with tickets to a live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion. Garrison Keillor is by all means one of my favorite literary personalities, the Mark Twain of his generation. We sat on stage behind sound-effects wizard Tom Keith who can create just about anything out of his bag of props. We should see if he’d be interested in producing a sound effects CD for Heartland Plays. Just a thought. From there we headed to Fargo, ND prompting us on our return to pick up a copy of the movie Fargo which we watched the day after Thanksgiving. Quirky. The movie, I mean, not the act of watching it. From Chicago to Fargo to Billings to Helena we stopped at a number of city centers, one of my favorite past times. If you want to know something about the town you’re in, you have to go to the center of the city. Everything else is about the same. I wrote about the homogenizing of America years ago, when few seemed to notice. But find the city center and you find what makes that community tick and you can usually find a non-branded latte, one of my other favorite past times. We traveled cross country in my 1996 Toyota Corolla with 245,000 miles, the same auto we took two years ago on our adventure through Central America. It gets phenomenal gas mileage, about 40 miles per gallon. (Didn’t I use the word “phenomenal” already?). As we passed from one state to the next, through one city center to another, over open roads and through endless landscapes, I thought about the generations of great American writers we have come to love, or have never known, pouring their personal insights and unique experiences and perspectives into their work. And wondering why we aren’t getting more submissions. We know you’re out there. We know talented writers hover between mountains, behind city lights and around river bends. And we know it isn’t easy to get your work read by editors and literary agents without your own agent. Heartland Plays is actively soliciting new works by new and emerging playwrights from across America. Take the time to submit your play. The least you’ll get out of it is a professional critique. And if you’re good, really good, you’ll see your work added to our list of quality plays. Our list is small, and it will grow slowly, because we are discerning, but our goal is to represent at least one playwright from every state across this great country of America. That playwright could be you.

Okay, so maybe I’m dating myself, but when I say bad, I mean bad, like great! Like awesome. Like the very best. Our show “Elves in the Toyshop?!” (available in 2009 at Heartland Plays) opened this weekend to a standing room only crowd at Pioneer Playhouse, the oldest and longest running playhouse in Kentucky. Pioneer Playhouse has seen the likes of John Travolta, Lee Majors, Bo Hopkins and Jim Varney, not to mention myself who took to the stage there as Esther in Paul Osborn’s Morning’s at Seven this past June. (For those of you who remember, Johnny Crawford from the hit TV western “The Rifleman” played Thor.) Film and stage director, Robby Henson, who’s latest movie House opened nationally Nov. 7, asked me if I would step in when Kim Darby (True Grit, Halloween) bowed out of the play and he found himself an actor short. I hadn’t been on stage since I played Amelia in A Comedy of Errors in front of 1000 people at a Shakespeare Festival over four years ago. I was terrified. But I survived. Now I was directing a group of 30 kids, students in the Arts for Kids, ETC theatre training program for youth, at the same theatre. And they were great! Which was on the way to outstanding. Through the rehearsal process, the kids in the show grew steadily into the makings of a good show. But I told them good was okay but that we should shoot for outstanding and along the way we’d find great. And that they were. The main problem with plays with the characters played by kids, is that most people don’t realize that acting is a skill. No one places a flute in front of a child and tells him he’s playing in a concert in 6 weeks or hands a ball to a kid who’s never thrown a baseball, at least not across home plate, and tells her she’s pitching in the championship game on Friday. That would be disastrous!  And yet we put kids in front of audiences with no training all the time. And the results are just as bad. And by that I mean uncomfortably bad. But give a child the opportunity to learn, to develop acting technique through qualified instructors, acting coaches and directors, and the results are amazing. We play to 300 area school children on Monday and those kids are in for a treat. So the next time you hear there’s a children’s play playing with real kids playing the parts, don’t assume they’re bad or that the play will be bad. Check out the group’s history. If the theatre company provides acting classes and workshops for kids, you might be pleasantly surprised at the quality of their work. And in that case, I mean, bad, eighties-style bad, and that means great!

I just finished another 12-hour day working on the play. I remember a good friend of mine, who was a professor at Centre College and then took a position at Washington State University in Pullman, said his wife complained she wouldn’t see him for weeks on end when he was directing a play. He told her that was true, but one of the best peripheral advantages of a director is once the play is over, you hang around the house all the time. I’m not sure if his wife complained about that but I know I don’t. When I’m not directing or embroiled in writing a new script or reading the work of other playwrights, I have adventures. I don’t travel in the regular sense, and I never take vacations. Vacations are for people who want to escape from their lives. Only they usually end up staying at the Hilton in Paris or the Hilton in Mexico City or the Hilton in Beijing which oddly enough end up just like the Hilton in Salt Lake City so I’m never quite sure why they went anywhere else in the first place. Adventures, on the other hand, are life on other planets, a walk in the sandals of someone who looks different from you, a wrong turn down a paved road that disintegrates into a cowpath with no way to turn around. I love adventures.  When I’m used up, when my creative self shrivels into a prune and my muse stumbles from my shoulder, I have an adventure.  Within weeks or months or however long the adventure entraps me, my blood turns crimson red once again and my mind races with ideas.  I’m as excited to get on to my next script, no matter which side of the page I’m on, as I was as a child waking up on Christmas morning and rushing downstairs to open my gifts. Well, actually, we lived in a ranch-style house. But, if there had been stairs I would have rushed down them. The point is, when you’re an artist, it’s all about you. You are your work. You may have written a great play, you may have performed an outstanding role, you may have directed an intriguing masterpiece, but the next one that comes along may fall flat if you haven’t taken the time to replenish your reserve with new experiences and fresh perspectives. So the next time you find yourself just hanging around the house with writer’s block or director’s envy suffering from whatever it is that’s stripped you of your mojo, go outside yourself and discover a new life. It may be lurking right around the corner.

Okay, I’m ready to read something that doesn’t have a gay guy in it.  Don’t get me wrong, we welcome the work of gay playwrights and are open to all content, but frankly, unless your play brings something new to the table about the gay experience beyond the friend you think is gay but ends up sleeping with your wife or the wife whose husband runs off with his gay lover… you get what I’m saying here, right? …then save yourself the reader’s fee.  A good plot or a strong character driven play has to go beyond cliche’s.  And is everyone dying of cancer?  That seems to be the only way we dispose of ourselves these days.  Heartland Plays is dedicated to supporting the work of new and emerging playwrights.  If you’re new to this art form, take risks.  Root out fresh perspectives and unique twists to the classic, familiar, or even  popular issues.  Avoid tired story lines that have been beaten to death like an old dog that kills chickens.  There is more to be said on the gay front and on the intensity of death and dying and any number of important social concerns, but you might have to dig a really deep hole to strike gold.

A member of the cast in the play I’m directing asked me who I’m voting for. Our theatre is non-profit so I told him as a director of a non-profit organization I can’t discuss politics but if you drive by my house you’ll see the sign in my yard. Involvement in the arts hangs one out on the political limb. First off, everyone assumes you’re liberal. Which I am. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate opposing points of view. Conflict is the stuff of great drama and I am particularly drawn to work that spawns passionate debate over drinks or coffee after a night of theatre. Obviously artists leave their marks on politics in the making all the time. Look at Vaclav Havel or Saturday Night Live, for that matter. The Sarah Palin satire may do more to maintaining a separation of mirth and state while taking full advantage of our most treasured free speech right of mirth and state than any pundit on CNN. After the 2004 election I cried for days then got myself out of bed and in front of a keyboard and composed one of the best collections of politically tainted monologues I’ve ever written. It is true the inspiration for this absurdly funny work may have come at the expense of others, and as soon as my family back in Ohio passes on I’ll publish it. But finding the way to tell it like it is has fallen into the hands of writers and painters and filmmakers since the beginning of time. If you’ve studied theatre as an academic pursuit or thought about it in the shower, you understand that theatre is a reflection of the times in which it lives. And some of the best writing comes from those who hang themselves out on that political limb. So writers, feel free to submit your politically laced works. Do me a favor, though. Send that didactic play to the editor of your local newspaper. At Heartland Plays we espouse literary merit, regardless of the political limb you write with.