Submission 150 / Day 146

BENEATH SHELTON LAUREL to Playwrights Horizons

I should also note that the submission count in my blog post titles skipped #149. That's because I've added a submission for VALU-MART and Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre. While I did not initiate a submission to PPTC as part of this project, the folks there were motivated to produce VALU-MART because of a submission I made to another theatre as part of the project. Subsequently, I did have to submit a script to PPTC . . . hence the addition to the count.

Submission 148 / Day 145

BENEATH SHELTON LAUREL to Syracuse Stage

Last night I saw a competent production of Frayn's COPENHAGEN and I was struck by the actors who played Bohr and Heisenberg. Their interpretations of the characters seemed wholly based in the script and completely without the attitudinal or behavioral peculiarities that sometimes find their way into portrayals of historical figures. As a playwright who has written two plays that feature historical characters, I was relieved.

Whether it's the work of directors, dramaturgs, or actors themselves, there has arisen an almost fetishistic obsession with authenticity that sends folks scrambling for history books, letters, photographs, and film in an effort to "ground" characters . . . sometimes more rigorously than the playwright intended or the script can support. I can't speak for others, but when I create a character -- even one based on an actual person -- that character is none the less a creature of the play whose identity and characterization are built in the same way as those of purely fictitious characters. In other words, his or her entire being is to be found within the pages of the script. And, while supplementary claptrap can sometimes enhance the character, it is more likely to be a distraction or worse.

I don't think it's entirely coincidental that a disastrous production of one of my plays was the one most deeply immersed in historically accurate detail I think to the point that the play and the main character, the poet Ezra Pound, became something of a "clothes horse" for a series of affectations that didn't obscure, but at least muddied the script.

Submission 147 / Day 144 . . . and a win!

BENEATH SHELTON LAUREL to Dallas Theater Center.

Mark Southers, founder and artistic director of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater, has announced that PPTCO will open its 2009/10 season in September with VALU-MART.

The irony is that VALU-MART was not submitted to PPTCO as part of my "365 in 365" campaign, but rather it was sent almost two years ago when the script was still in draft form. The current enthusiasm for producing it, however, did come about from a 365 submission . . . of another play to a different theatre that happens to have a board member who also sits on the board of PPTCO. One thing lead to another and, voila. Very weird and very welcome.

PPTCO is neither a major regional theatre nor off-Broadway, but it's a respected company that does excellent work, and its productions are reviewed in two major newspapers and a weekly. A wonderful starting point for VALU-MART.

So, today, 144 days in, the first production has been won.

Submission 146 / Day 143

BENEATH SHELTON LAUREL to MCC Theater

No Submissions Today (Day 142)

Submissions 144 and 145 / Day 141

CLAUDIE HUKILL and BENEATH SHELTON LAUREL to Savannah College of Art & Design

This is the result of a resident dramaturg who has taken an interest in my work making a recommendation to a colleague and, by doing so, bestowing upon my plays a kind of equity that no amount copy written by me could ever produce. But, on a more personal level, it's also affirmation that the notion my plays have value isn't peculiar to me.

Submission 143 / Day 141

CLAUDIE HUKILL to Theatre Banshee, LA

I finished Moss Hart's autobiography, "Act One", last night and came to the surprising realization that it 's not an autobiography at all . . . at least not in the sense of being the story of a life. Instead, it's the story of a passion, in this case for theatre, that is happily and indeed fantastically fulfilled in a way and to a degree that could not be replicated in the present day.

Missing are myriad associations, events, and people that unavoidably populate and influence lives. Among the items that go unremarked upon by Hart are World War I, the stock market crash, the author's given name (he tells us only that it was "difficult"), and any reference whatever to an actual or even imagined "love interest" . . . not so much as a "so-and-so made my heart beat a tad quicker". "Act One" has only one subject in mind: a passion fulfilled.

But, as it turns out, this portrayal of pure passion is perfect because it coincides precisely with the time frame in which the object of that passion, the theatre, reached its apotheosis as an artistic and cultural force. Moss Hart died at age 57 in 1961, at almost the precise end of theatre's "golden era" making this a fairy tale story of a young prince when the kingdom was at its most glorious.

Appropriately, "Act One" concludes in a moment of triumph with the opening of Hart's first Broadway hit, 1930's "For Once in a Lifetime". The author was only in his mid-twenties. On that one night he not only reached the pinnacle of his chosen profession, but instantly made the leap from poverty to almost obscene wealth. The night before the opening he didn't have the money to take a cab from Manhattan to Brooklyn and the morning after the opening, he was able to walk into the box office and be given $500 in cash -- equivalent to about $5,000 in today's currency. With that money and the knowledge that he would continue to receive royalties of $1,000 a week for the foreseeable future, Hart went to his family's impoverished home and instructed his parents and brother to immediately accompany him from the apartment taking nothing, "not even a toothbrush" (he eventually relented and allowed some family photographs) and accompany him to Manhattan where they would henceforth live.

Great stuff . . . and even true, albeit with blinders.

PS. Penn State University rejected my VALU-MART submission yesterday.