Hawkeye Bookshop Christmas unites the generations

My Enchanted Bookshop plays have always brought multiple generations into the seats of theaters. But now it appears to be bringing multiple generation onto the proverbial boards as well.

At least that's the case at the Hawkeye Theatre in Fort Dodge, IA. They're performing An Enchanted Bookshop Christmas this weekend. And according to an article in the Fort Dodge Messenger, three generations of one local family have taken on some very important roles in the show.

Tim Olson plays dashing tech billionaire Philip Brantley, his daughter Kayla Harlow plays the scatterbrained bookshop owner Margie, and her son Beckham Barlow plays the pompous Nutcracker Prince.

But that's not all. The article goes on to say that there are at least two parent-child pairings as well.

Director Stephanie Cobie-Day explains that she chose An Enchanted Bookshop Christmas because it introduces today's kids to classic characters like Tom Sawyer that they may not be familiar with.

"That's one of the neat things about working with the cast and working with multi generations," Cobie-Day adds, "that you're sharing some old, old stories, bringing those to life, but also then creating a new story with the script that we're doing."

Break legs, all! With a cast like this, it can't help but be a heartwarming production.

Tulsa's Spotlight joins the club

A big shout out to Tulsa's Spotlight Children's Theatre, which became the fifth member of my Five Timer's Club by booking a production of my millionaire cat comedy The Purrfect Crime for next March.

Inspired by NBC's Saturday Night Live, the Five Timer's Club is, of course, the esteemed group of schools and community theaters which have produced my plays five times.

The first four productions that Spotlight so graciously (and tastefully) selected? They were:

• The Enchanted Bookshop, December 2022
• How I Met Your Mummy, October 2023
• An Enchanted Bookshop Christmas, December 2023
• Madhouse!, March 2024

As I've mentioned previously in this blog, I visited Tulsa several times when my older daughter Ashley lived there from 2014 and 2016. I loved the city, being impressed with how clean and modern it was, with a wealth of wonderful ethnic restaurants and surprisingly underused freeways.

Sadly, although I remember seeing My Big Fat Gay Wedding at the American Theatre Company there, I never got around to seeing The Drunkard, the longest running production in American theater history (71 years and counting), performed by the main company at Spotlight itself.

As for the children's theater, it looks like they're not quite done with me. Their 2025 season schedule shows that they've reserved a spot for The Stinky Feet Gang in August.

Hmmm. Maybe it's time for a Six Timer's Club?

For info on all these plays an more, please visit my playwright page on the Pioneer Drama website.

Aristotle was wrong

They say a good teacher learns as much as their students. I don't know how good a teacher I am, but I do know I learned a lot teaching my class on the Hero's Journey at the Arizona Thespian Festival this weekend. Above all, I learned that a quite a few people really don't like the Barbie movie.

But more on that later.

This is the second time I taught the class at this conference, and third time overall (I also taught it at the 2016 Colorado Thespian Conference, just before I moved to Arizona). But this time, in a very late move--like the night before my class was scheduled--I made a bold and possibly risky modification to the lesson. I changed my template from a three-act structure to a four-act structure.

Sacrilege, I know. The three-act structure has been ingrained in our culture going all the way back to Aristotle's Poetics. And it makes sense. As writers, we inherently know that every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.

But what does that middle consist of? And how do we as writers keep the tension building so that we don't lose steam there?

Those are the questions that were bothering me as I was preparing for the class on Saturday.

The answers came, as they usually do, from Blake Snyder's groundbreaking screenwriting book, Save the Cat!

Blake presented his story template as a three-act structure as well. But he divided Act 2 into Act 2A and 2B. And he gave them different names. Act 2A is Fun & Games. Act 2B is Bad Guys Close In.

He also claimed that the midpoint of the story, which divided Act 2 into two equal halves, was the single most important plot point in the story. More important than the acceptance of the challenge that separates Act 1 and Act 2 and more important than the final push that separates Act 2 and Act 3.

It's almost as if he wanted to call them two different acts but didn't feel he could get away with it because of, well, that Aristotle guy.

So as I was preparing my presentation, I finally got to the point where I'd had enough of trying to justify why we call it a three-act structure and just call it what it is. A structure with four acts that were equal, in importance as well as duration. This would make things easier to understand for beginning writers. And it would drive home the point that writers really need to make that midpoint big. Like life-changing big.

It also dovetailed nicely with an observation I'd previously made about those two arbitrarily-divided halves of Act 2. As I discovered, they often take place in completely different physical locations, just as Acts 1 and 3 do.

For example, in Star Wars, the locations of the four acts are:

• Tatooine
• Millennium Falcon
• Death Star
• X-Wing fighter

While in Legally Blonde, the four locations are:

• Southern California
• Harvard Law School
• Professor Callahan's law firm
• Courtroom

Committing myself to this brave new playwriting world, I went into the classroom on Saturday excited and, yes, I suppose a little nervous.

I was assigned two sessions, both in the afternoon. Unfortunately, neither one had as many students as last year. The first session only had twelve students. The second session had a few more, but the students kept coming and going so it was hard to get a definitive count. I would guess it averaged around twenty. And this in a classroom with over 100 seats.

But no matter. The sessions started well--even if I did have to shout when the musical theater class next door broke into very loud song. The students, as always, enjoyed showing off their knowledge of Star Wars trivia. And they were very good at figuring out which events in the film matched up to story beats in the Hero's Journey.

It was when we got to Barbie that things got interesting. I'd mentioned in my last post that I'd chosen this movie because I figured a lot more kids would have seen this movie than Legally Blonde. This was based on my trip to Idaho earlier this year, where only three kids out of a hundred knew the 2001 Reese Witherspoon vehicle.

Well, big surprise! In each session, there were around three students--always boys--who hadn't seen Barbie. And when I asked kids to raise their hands for Legally Blonde, I found that about the number--mostly but not entirely boys this time--hadn't seen that movie either.

So, unsure of how things would work out, I launched into my discussion of Barbie. And it was clear from the outset that even the students who'd seen the movie weren't as familiar with it as they were with Star Wars. They didn't know the names of the characters and they didn't remember the key events of the story.

But they knew the ending. And that's what made things interesting. After a fairly subdued discussion of the Act Two break, and the Midpoint, and the fact that there really was no Act Three, things got very passionate very fast as we came to the ending. You know, the whole "I'm here to see my gynecologist" thing.

Everyone either loved it or hated that ending. Those who hated it (about a third of the class) said it was too ambiguous and unsatisfying. Sure, Barbie had become human, but that wasn't enough for them. They wanted her to find her purpose. They wanted her to choose a career. And they wanted to know what that career was.

Those who loved it, while acknowledging the ambiguousness of the ending, felt it was realistic and satisfying in its own way. After all, humans don't always know what their purpose is. At least not when they're young. The important thing is the search for it. And now that Barbie was human, she could.

I lean more toward the second group. I don't think any one career would have been satisfying to us, the audience. What would she be? A toy designer? A gynecologist.

No, my problems with the movie lay elsewhere. I wanted there to be more of a struggle to defeat the Kens in Act Four. And I don't like how Barbie's external goal (taking back Barbieland) and her internal goal (finding her purpose) were so completely unrelated.

So what do I do next year? Well, I definitely plan on returning to the thespian festival with this class. After teaching it three times now, I'm more convinced than ever that understanding the Hero's Journey and three-act structure--sorry, four-act structure--are vital to the development of young writers. And I was gratified--and not a little surprised--to see how many budding playwrights from last year's class chose to attend the class again this year.

But now it appears I have the flexibility of choosing either Legally Blonde or Barbie for my second film. Legally Blonde is great because it follows the Hero's Journey so closely. But I believe there's a lot to be gained by studying how Barbie veers from that template and what effect that has on us as audience members.

One thing's for sure. I'm going to ask for one of the small class rooms. I think there will be much more give and take if everyone is sitting close to each other.

And I'm definitely going to see if I can get a room next to a mim class.

The Hero's Journey in Barbie

Of the 438 posts I've written over the last 13 years, far and away the most popular one is The Hero's Journey in Legally Blonde. Not quite as popular, but still getting a healthy number of views, is The Hero's Journey in Star Wars. And I think that's great.

It shows how important storytelling is to our culture. To our species. And it reflects how truly passionate storytellers are (and really, aren't we all storytellers?) about improving their skills so that they can better captivate their audiences.

I've seen this myself. Both posts came from a writing workshop I gave--first at the Colorado Thespian Conference in 2016, then at the Arizona Thespian Festival last year--based on my simplified, seven-step version of Joseph Campbell's original Hero's Journey (by way of Blake Snyder).

Eager young writers packed the rooms where I taught, and discussions were energetic, even heated at times. The kids attending the workshop really wanted to understand--to absorb--all the ins and outs of the Hero's Journey.

I'd chosen these films for three reasons:

1) They exemplify the specific story beats of the Hero's Journey extremely well.

2) They're nearly opposites in genre, setting, and theme.

3) Almost everyone has seen them.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Idaho, where I last led this workshop in February. Kids didn't know Legally Blonde any more. Out of 100 students attending my workshop, only three had seen it. And obviously this killed any conversation around the movie.

So when I decided to repeat the workshop at this year's Arizona Thespian Festival, I realized I had to replace Legally Blonde with a different movie. But which one?

Well, it had to be something that everyone in today's generation of kids has seen. It had to follow the Hero's Journey pretty closely. And I really wanted it to be female-centered, with many of the same feminist themes as my original choice.

There was only one possibility: 2023's Barbie.

I was a little worried though. I wasn't 100% sure it actually fits all of the beats of the Hero's Journey. So I watched it again a couple months ago. And guess what? It doesn't. After all, co-writers Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach come from the indie world, where plot takes a back seat to characterization and mood.

But I figured that was okay. As long as I could explain how it differs and why, it would be worth discussing.

So let me stop yappin' and give you my analysis of the Hero's Journey according to the Doll That Changed the World.

1) Status Quo

We start the movie in Barbieland (the first of our four worlds), a pink paradise for Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) and her friends. They're dancing. They're partying. It's a perfect world in which every day is the best day ever ("So was yesterday, and so is tomorrow, and every day from now until forever.").

2) Catalyst

But everything changes when a dark thought enters her mind. "Do you guys ever think about dying?" she says. The music stops with a ear-splitting record scratch as the other Barbies quit dancing to stare at her in horror.

As I teach in the workshop, the catalyst is always an external event, a shock to our hero's life that originates from outside the hero. In Barbie, however, it seems to be internal to our hero. Her thoughts of dying are just that: thoughts. And thoughts generally arise from a character's own mind.

Not in this case, however. As we are soon to learn, they come from the Real World and, more specifically from Gloria (America Ferrera), the mother of the girl who used to play with the Barbie. So, as strange as it may seem, the thoughts are in fact an external event.

If the initial state of the hero's world is negative, then the catalyst must be a positive event. In Barbie, the initial status quo is positive, so the catalyst must be negative. And this one definitely is, changing Barbie's world so that things aren't so perfect anymore.

She wakes up with bad breath. Her shower is cold. Her toast burns. She falls from the roof of her house. And, worst of all, her feet turn flat (oh, the humanity!).

3) Accept the Challenge 

Barbie wants to know why she's having these thoughts, so she visits Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), our first mentor, to find out what she knows. This beat couldn't be more clear as Weird Barbie offers Stereotypical Barbie a clear-cut, Matrix-like choice: a high-heeled shoe, which represents the status quo, and a plain old sandal, which represents traveling to the Real World.

Consistent with the Refusal of the Call (which is the second beat in Joseph Campbell's seventeen-beat Hero's Journey but does not appear in my version because it doesn't always occur in popular movies--cough, cough--Legally Blonde), Barbie at first chooses the high-heeled shoe. She's afraid of the Real World.

But Weird Barbie won't allow that, and when Barbie still refuses the sandal, Weird Barbie points out that choosing the high-heeled shoe will inevitably lead to Barbie getting cellulite, a fate so horrifying to our hero that she immediately changes her mind and joins Team Sandal.

And so, Barbie enters the Real World--the second of our four worlds--traveling by car, boat, rocket, bike, camper, snowmobile, and rollerblades to get there (with Ken going along for the ride).

4) Fun and Games

This isn't a single beat in my template but the entirety of Act 2. Here, mistakes are made by our hero and her clingy sidekick as they fumble their way around the new world they've entered.

Barbie and Ken make their entrance into the Real World wearing ridiculously bright neon colors, which earns them the derision of bystanders. They say wildly inappropriate things to strangers. They even get arrested for stealing new outfits. But these mistakes are relatively harmless (and comical!) because the stakes are low. None of these mistakes prevent Barbie from returning to Barbieland any time she wants.

Bad things are brewing, however, When Barbie and Ken split up to go their own ways, Ken discovers just how different the Real World is from Barbieland. In Barbieland,  the Kens are subservient to the Barbies. But in the Real World, men rule everything. Ken is thrilled to his core, setting up the darker events that will occur in the second half of the film.

Barbie, meanwhile, has her own adventures. At first, she's dismayed to learn that she, in fact, has not inspired a generation of young girls to grow up and build a kinder, more female-centered society. No, women are pretty much on the sidelines in the Real World, raising the question which will dog her for the rest of the film. If she had no real impact on the Real World, then what was she made for?

Before she can delve too deeply into this, however, she gets taken to Mattel headquarters by a some mysterious figures in a black limo. There the executives attempt to neutralize her by urging her to step inside her box.

Barbie immediately senses something is wrong and escapes. A chase through the office building ensues, and when she finally manages to slip away, she happens upon a kind, matronly figure sitting at a kitchen table. This figure calls herself Ruth, and while Barbie doesn't really learn anything from her during their brief conversation, the scene is important because it introduces Barbie to the figure who will become her second mentor. More on that later.

5) Stakes are Raised

Now comes the midpoint of the story, the beat that Blake Snyder considered the single most important one in any story. And that's because it's the beat that flips the story from bright and sunny to dark and grim. For the first time, the hero sees the true face of her enemy. And from this point on, the hero's mistakes are no longer amusing because they come with a cost. Someone could get seriously hurt--or worse.

In a drama, a minor character might die here (a development I call First Blood), a victim of the villain's evil plans. But, of course, Barbie is a comedy so there will be no death. Not a literal one anyway.

No. What dies, in a figurative sense, is the old Barbieland that our hero knew and loved. And that's because when she returns to it, she learns that the Kens have taken control, instituting a male-dominated society and relegating the Barbies to mindless, sexually-objectified servant roles.

As I said, in Act 2, Barbie always had the option of returning to Barbieland. But now she's a doll without a country. She doesn't recognize what Barbieland has become. And she definitely can't return to the Real World.

If a movie has a ticking clock, it's usually introduced at the Final Push beat. But in Barbie it's introduced here. Barbie learns she only has forty-eight hours before the Kens will vote to change the constitution and solidify their authority forever.

What in the Barbie World is she going to do?

6) Bad Guys Close In

Similar to Fun and Games, this isn't a single event but the entirety of the second half of Act 3.

Things get really interesting here because this is where Barbie significantly diverges from the Hero's Journey. In a typical movie, this half-act would run for 30 to 40 minutes and show the hero's increasingly desperate attempts to defeat the villain or, more likely, escape the villain's clutches. Either way, this can be a very exciting act, with tension-filled scenes of high-stakes action (think the escape from the Death Star in the original Star Wars).

Barbie doesn't have any of this. Instead, Stereotypical Barbie goes directly from learning that the Kens have taken over (Stakes are Raised) to giving up entirely (All is Lost).

Oh, sure. There's a brief bit about the Mattel executives following Barbie into Barbieland with the goal of getting her back inside that dumb box, but they're just comic relief. The real bad guys are the Kens (sorry, Ryan Gosling fans!).

What would a true Bad Guys Close In sequence look like in Barbie? Well, you might have Stereotypical Barbie trying to convert the other Barbies back to their former status and fail. Or you might have the Kens finding new, increasingly dastardly ways of exerting their control over the Barbies. You might even have the Barbies secretly infiltrating a meeting of the Kens to uncover some weakness they use against them. There are all sorts of possibilities.

But nope. In Barbie, the bad guys have already closed in.

7) All is Lost

So how does Barbie respond to her defeat? She gives up. Like, literally. She falls to the ground as she falls into an existential crisis, doubting her worth in a world that places a premium on practical skills. "I'm not smart enough to be interesting," Barbie says. "I can't do brain surgery. I've never flown a plane."

There's one more thing she can't do. She can't take power back from the Kens.

Sidenote: I actually cheated a little bit in the beat chart for the workshop. I show the Stakes are Raised moment as Kens Take Control and the All is Lost moment as Barbie Gives Up. But I should have used Kens Take Control for both because it's an external event that happens to our hero. Barbie Gives Up, on the other hand, is our hero's internal, emotional response to her defeat, a beat called The Dark Night of the Soul in Blake Snyder's template, which I don't include in mine. But that would have messed up my chart so I tweaked it.

Some movies have a sidekick pulls the hero out of their funk with some words of encouragement or offering a new, mind-expanding insight. Weird Barbie does try to encourage Stereotypical Barbie here, but it doesn't help. Stereotypical Barbie remains rooted to he ground, wallowing in depression and self-doubt.

Instead, Gloria is the one who finally breaks through with her speech about the crazy, contradictory demands our society places on women--arguably the most powerful scene in the film. Except that she doesn't break through to Stereotypical Barbie. She breaks through to Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), who suddenly remembers who she is: "Wait. I did write a book. It's like I've been in a dream... but what you said broke me out of it."

Note that just as there's no real First Blood in this film, there's no Death of the Mentor either, not even a figurative one. Weird Barbie is still there, trying to help. And Ruth has yet to return.

8) Final Push

So Writer Barbie has snapped out of her daze and came to the conclusion that Gloria's speech is what did the snapping. That's all well and good, but to wrap up the movie in a satisfying way, we need our Hero to lead the battle from here. And that's what exactly happens as Barbie uses this information to develop a plan to wrest power from the Kens:

1) Deprogram each Barbie one-by-one by having Gloria repeat snippets from her speech to them.

2) Making the Kens believe they have all the power by fawning over them as they sing their manly beach song.

3) Take it all away by flirting with the other Kens in the hopes that this will turn the guys against each other.

9) Final Victory

If that all sounds too easy, it's not. The plan succeeds, triggering a no-holds-barred beach-off among the Kens. In fact, the Ken are so distracted that they forget to vote, allowing the Barbies take control of Barbieland again.

Only this won't be the old Barbieland we saw in Act 1. This is a new and improved Barbieland. The Barbies have learned from their previous mistake--not fully respecting or even empowering the Kens--and vow to correct that going forward

Yippee! Barbie has achieved her external goal, and in a typical movie, that would be the end of it. But Barbie isn't a typical movie. No, in Barbie, it's not the external goal but our hero's internal goal that matters most. And, in another departure from most big-budget studio movies, there's no connection between those two.

So we're left with another 22 minutes of the movie in which Barbie must achieve her internal goal of  finding her purpose. And that internal goal requires an internal mentor: Ruth (remember her?).

10) Reward

Barbie doesn't know exactly what she wants to do. But she's starting to get a sense of it. "I want to be part of the people that make meaning," she tells Ruth. "Not the thing that's made. I want to do the imagining. I don't want to be the idea."

To Ruth, that means only one thing. Barbie must become human. She warns Barbie that being human is really uncomfortable and then you die. Barbie is unswayed. Ruth takes Barbie's hands and tells her to close her eyes and just... feel. A quick montage follows, showing brief clips of what it means to be human.

Ruth releases Barbie's hands and slips out of sight, leaving Barbie all alone in the world. Barbie stares into the ephemeral distance and responds to the montage she's just seen with a single word.

"Yes."

11) The New Normal

The next thing we know, Barbie is headed into a medical office, where she informs the receptionist that she's there to see her gynecologist.

It's a funny line, but it's important too because it tells the audience, in the most intimate way possible, that Barbie has achieved her goal. She has become human.

Barbie still may not know what her purpose is. But now that she's human, we're confident that she can findi it. All she has to do is live her life.

Final Thoughts

So we've seen that despite the indie pedigree of its creators, Barbie follows the Hero's Journey pretty closely. There is, in fact, just one key way in which it differs. Namely, the Stakes Are Raised and All Is Lost beats are identical, eliminating any need for Act 3 (Bad Guys Close In).

But there are a few minor ways in which the film, while not outright breaking the rules laid out by Blake Snyder and Joseph Campbell, does play things fast and loose with standard Hollywood story structure.

For one, there was no death of the mentor. Also, her internal goal was completely independent of her external goal, which led to an unusually extended sequence in which Barbie explored what it meant to become human. And finally, I found it a little strange that Barbie's final plan for victory succeeded so readily. There are usually a few setbacks on the road to final victory.

Does the movie still work? Well, that's a question that needs to be answered by each viewer for themselves. But seeing how successful the movie has been--not just at the box office, but in the number of accolades and awards it has received--suggests that it worked very well indeed.

So yes, you can veer off the path laid out by the Hero's Journey. But as they say, you have to know the rules in order to break them. And you have to know why you're breaking them.

If you can do that, then you're well on your way to creating your own compelling story.

I hope this outline has been helpful. If you'd like your own copy of the Hero's Journey diagrams for Star Wars and Barbie that I'll be presenting at the Arizona Thespian Festival, just left click on the images below to open them, then right click on the the opened images to download them. .

The Worst Fairy Tale Ever comes to life

When I talk to theater classes, the most common question I get is: Where do you get your ideas from? 

The second most common question is: What did you think of our performance?

And by far the least common question--because no one's ever asked it--is: What is your favorite part of your job?

I guess I've never been asked it because people assume the job of playwriting involves only one task: writing plays. And yes, that takes up the bulk of time. I write like clockwork, four hours a day, five days a week. And I love it.

But I also spend another two to four hours a day doing other playwriting-related things: writing emails, social media marketing, tracking productions, reviewing contracts. And all of that is fun too, even the contracts thing. It's definitely more fun than the 37 years of engineering I did.

Still, my absolute favorite thing to do is talking to those same theater classes. Their enthusiasm is always so incredibly infectious. It also allows me to make a connection--a real-live human connection--that's so often missing from what I do the rest of the time. But most importantly, it reminds of who I'm writing for: the kids.

Anyway, I got to talk with a great bunch of kids today as the Theatre Arts Honors class at South Florence High School in Florence, SC hosted a Zoom meeting so we could chat about The Worst Fairy Tale Ever, my new one-act play that they premiered November 8.

Their theater teacher Frankie Sullivan sent me a video of their performance last week, and I was able to watch it a couple of times before the call. The first time I simply let it run so that I could get a feel for how the actors portrayed their characters as well as which gags worked and which didn't. The second time I paused the video line by line so I could compare their dialogue with my script and see where they differed.

It was very enlightening--and surprising. There were 250 people in the audience, and they laughed a lot. The biggest laughs, however, didn't come from my script but from the students' ad libs or the stage business they came up with. As they say, theater is the most collaborative of art forms, and I love collaborating with talented young actors and directors.

Which is a nice way of saying I'm going to steal these ideas for my own script.

But hey, that's why we workshop plays, right?

One of those bits of business came in the middle of the play when the dragon had defeated the first knight it faced and went on to terrorize the peasants. In my original script, I segued directly from the narrator describing the defeat to the second "knight" arriving to take on the dragon.

I missed a big one. But the kids didn't. They added an entire scene in which the dragon chases the screaming king and peasants back and forth across the stage. That kind of stuff always get laughs and I think I missed it because I tend to think in dialogue  rather than action. I need to get better about that.

Anyway, that's definitely going into the script.

Then there was something the king screamed as, at the end of the chase, the dragon grabs him by the feet and drags him offstage. The hapless roya first screams, "No no nooooo!" as you'd expect. And then he screams something hilarious.

"STELLAAAA!"

It makes absolutely no sense, of course. How would a medieval king know about A Streetcar Named Desire? But it got one of the biggest laughs in the pla.

As it turns out, the actor playing the king had just played Stanley in the school's production of the Tennessee Williams drama, and Stella was still very much on his mind. Which is why I think it works here.

You see, the way I've written the play, the students aren't just playing the fairy tale characters. They're playing the high school actors who are playing the fairy tale characters. And Stella is very much something a high school actor might yell in a hastily thrown-together play like this one is supposed to be.

So yep, that's going in as well.

As for the language, that was a surprise too. I take pride in making my dialogue as true-to-life as possible. I keep the grammar simple. Use slang whenever possible. Throw in lots of uh's and um's. And yet, when the kids spoke their lines, they didn't deliver them as I had written them but somehow made them even simpler. More casual. More contemporary. Clearly, that's another thing I need to improve on.

In the call, I asked the students the two questions I always ask groups that produce my plays. Did you find any parts of the script boring? Answer: No. Did you find any parts of the script confusing? Answer: Just one, when the king tries to demonstrate his wisdom by declaring "Two and two are four" rather than "Two and two is four." That grammatical awkwardness was intentional, but I don't want anyone in the audience to be thrown by it so I changed that line. Easy peasy.

Beyond that, I gave the students some advice on how to break into playwriting, for those that wanted to pursue it. And I spoke about some of my other plays, which I thought they might be interested in.

Mr. Sullivan is going to send me photos from the performance soon, and you can bet I'll post the best ones here. In the meantime, I've got some more stealing to do.

Collaborating, I mean. Definitely collaborating.

Too Many Ghosts to be published

 
Something spooky is coming your way. And I'm not talking about Halloween. No, I'm talking about the fact that my 31st play has just been accepted for publication by Pioneer Drama Service. It's titled Too Many Ghosts, and it's set in a hilariously haunted bed-and-breakfast in Salem, Massachusetts.

That spark of inspiration

I've spoken before about where my play ideas come from. Big surprise! They come from a whole hosts of sources: brainstorming, TV shows, old Warner Brothers cartoons, other plays, even dreams. But Too Many Ghosts is the first time I've been inspired by a TV show I'd never seen. Can you guess which one?

Bingo! It's the currently-running CBS sitcom Ghosts. When the show was first being promoted in early 2019, the premise instantly grabbed me. A show about a bed-and-breakfast haunted by not one, but a motley crew of ghosts from very different time periods? I'm there!

That's when I made the point of not watching the show. I didn't want to be accused of copying it. But more importantly, I didn't want to be influenced by the narrative choice that the creative team had made. I wanted it to make it my own.

A touch of magic

When you write a fantasy type of story--and by that I mean anything that includes magic or the supernatural--it's important to be very intentional about the rules you define for that world. That's because the plot, the mood, even the theme of the story will be driven by those rules.

For example, when I wrote The Enchanted Bookshop, these are the rules I created for the famous literary characters who are brought to life:

1) The characters are brought to life through a fairy's magic spell.

2) The characters are not allowed to leave the bookshop or be seen by humans (cats are okay!) or they'll disappear into their books forever.

3) Scatterbrained bookshop owner Margie doesn't have a clue that her book characters are coming to life.

Rule number 1 inspired the wonderful character of the Book Fairy, who's resented by the literary characters because she can be kind of a nag.

Rule number 2 is why the literary characters only come out at night, which gave me the structure of 

It also set up the main conflict of the play as the literary characters are forced to choose between revealing themselves in order to warn Margie about the smugglers threatening her shop and staying silent so that they can continue to come to life. 

The fact that cats are given an exception allows me to stage some humorous interactions between the cantankerous bookshop cat Bombalurina and the literary characters.

And rule number 3 provides for some additional humor as Margie suspects that the messes that the literary characters leave are due to Bombalurina.

Needless to say, if I'd changed any one of these rules, it would have been an entirely different play.

Ghost stories

It's the same thing with Too Many Ghosts, though here I went in a different direction:

1) The ghosts can be seen by anyone, but only when they choose to be seen.

2) Levelheaded owner Jo and her horror-film-loving teenage daughter Lily definitely know the ghosts are haunting the inn from day one.

3) Ghosts can't be destroyed a la Ghostbusters, but with the proper equipment, they can be shrunk down and locked away inside a small, everyday item.

Rule 1 means that the ghosts could be a threat to Jo's business, with the ghosts threatening to scare away her guests so that they can keep the once-abandoned house to themselves.

Rule 2 allows the story to cut right to the chase as Jo forbids the ghosts to haunt her guests. Of course, the ghosts can't help themselves, leading to an online review from a guest describing the place as the "most haunted bed-and-breakfast in New England." The consequence? The inn is soon mobbed by ghost-loving tourists.

Rule 3 gave me the critical turning point of the play as three marginally competent ghostbusters rid the inn of the ghosts--seemingly forever. Where did they go? And how can Jo stay in business without her primary draw: the ghosts?

After I finished the play and sent the manuscript off to Pioneer, I finally gave myself permission to read the Wikipedia entry on Ghosts. I was relieved to discover that the rules for that show were vastly different from the rules for mine. The biggest difference is that in Ghosts, only the woman who inherited the inn (and later her husband) can see the spirits. As you might expect, this means that much of the humor revolves around the awkwardness that occurs when the ghosts interact with the woman in the presence of other people and she has to pretend she can't see them. Not a possibility in my play.

Of course, the personal histories and characteristics of the two sets of ghosts also differ drastically. I've got a cranky Irish maid, a persnickety cobbler, a boisterous snake oil salesman, a self-absorbed silent movie star, and a clumsy teenager. The CBS show has a melodramatic Viking, a cynical Native American, a closeted gay Continental Army officer, a drug-addicted matronly type from the late 1800's, a flamboyant Prohibition-era lounge singer, a naive hippie, and a nerdy scoutmaster.

So yeah, mine are entirely family-friendly while theirs are quite a bit edgier. And I think that's great. There's a place for both.

Oh, I also thought that Salem, Massachusetts--one of the most haunted towns in the United States--was the most logical setting for a show about ghosts, and allowed me to tie in a little bit of the history surrounding the witch trials. But the producers of Ghosts decided to set their show in upstate New York (not sure how a Viking ended up there, though).

Playing tricks

I expect the play to come out in spring 2025. In the meantime, let me leave you with this scene from when Jo and Lily first meet the ghosts.

As the scene begins, the ghosts are hiding in the living room so that they can jump out and scare these two interlopers who threaten the sanctity of their spooky home: 

LILY (Fans herself.): Do you mind if I open the curtains? It's kind of stuffy in here.

JO: Sure. I'll go bring in a couple of boxes. (JO EXITS DOWN RIGHT. LILY crosses to the curtains.)

ROLAND (Hushed, to ORLA): Now?

ORLA (Hushed.): Can ye see the whites of her eyes?

ROLAND: I don't know! My eyes are shut!

ORLA: Well, open 'em up and look! (LILY opens the curtains. ROLAND sees LILY. LILY sees ROLAND.)

LILY (Screams.): Aaaah!

ROLAND (Screams): Aaaah!

JO (ENTERS DOWN RIGHT, running): Oh, my gosh, Lily! Are you all right?

LILY (Points at ROLAND.): It's... it's... it's a ghost!

ROLAND (Points at LILY.): It's... it's... it's a mortal! (The OTHER GHOSTS come out of hiding.)

ORLA: Roland, ye yellow-bellied milksop! Ye ruined our whole plan!

BARNEY: Good job, Roland!

CASSANDRA: You don't take direction very well, do you?

JO: Whoa!

LILY: Mom! I thought you said there's no such thing as ghosts!

JO: That's right! There isn't!

ORLA: Well, what do ye call us then?

JO: Why, you must be a figment of my imagination! A hallucination brought on by a combination of stress and exhaustion! Yes! That's it! I must be so exhausted my mind is playing tricks on me!

CASSANDRA: If I were a figment of your imagination, would I be able to do this? (Waves her arms and laughs ominously.)

JO: I don't know. What are you doing?

CASSANDRA: I'm creating a cold spot to chill your blood and make shivers run up and down your spine!

JO: Nope. Not feeling it.

CASSANDRA (To the OTHER GHOSTS.): See? This is what happens when you don't get to practice your art!

BARNEY: Here, Cassandra. Let me try something.

CASSANDRA (To JO.): Ooh, watch this! This'll frighten the socks right off you!

BARNEY (Knocks one of the housewares off the counter.) There.

JO: Is that it?

BARNEY: What? I'm a poltergeist. This is what I do.

JO: I think it would have been scarier if we couldn't see you.

BARNEY: Well, that's not my fault, is it? I'm not the one who insisted on apparating prematurely... Orla!

I'm thinking this play might be really popular, not just at Halloween but all year long. After all, it's got everything audiences want. Humor. Chills. A creepy mystery. Even a little romance.

But more about that last one later...

Belmont Diary: Worst Fairy Tale gets a premiere

Not going to lie. I was a little nervous when I emailed my script for The Worst Fairy Tale Ever to Belmont Day School, the school in Massachusetts that commissioned it from me. I really love the play, but it isn't anything like my other plays and I wasn't sure if it's what they were looking for.

It's very self-aware, with the actors often commenting on the fairy tale they're supposed to be performing. Pretty much the entire play is like this. Every character, every line operates on two levels: that of the actors and that of the characters they're playing.

If this sounds confusing, that's because it is. Extremely confusing. And now you know why I was nervous.

I also wasn't sure about some of the gags, which are even quirkier than most of the stuff I write.

I shouldn't have worried. The school had their first readthrough a couple of weeks ago and the theater director raved about it. He said it was a real winner and was so funny when read in the various characters' voices.

Whew!

That's not all. I just got word from South Florence High School in Florence, SC that they've booked the world premiere for November 8 (as I explained in a previous post, Belmont Day School is only using it for in-class instruction). Yay!

How did I find them? Through a fantastic Facebook Group named High School Theatre Directors and Teachers. It's mainly a group for theater teachers to help each other solve productions issues on their shows (and only occasionally to gripe about those annoying helicopter parents).

The group frowns on commercial self-promotion, but on the first day of each month, they allow playwrights to promote their plays. And the most common way to promote them is to pitch the story (briefly, very briefly!) with an offer of a free perusal script to anyone who asks.

I posted my pitch of The Worst Fairy Tale Ever on August 1 and I got a respectable 90 requests for the script. Three weeks later, I was contacted by a senior at South Florence High School in Florence, SC, who wanted use the script for her student directing project. When I told her theater teacher that this meant they'd get world premiere credit in the script if and when it's published, he was thrilled. I was just as thrilled for them.

The school will be sending me a video recording of the production so that I can give the script a final polish based on the response from the audience. I'll then be submitting it to Pioneer Drama Service for their consideration.

But wait. There's more. Just today, the theater director at Shenandoah High School in Shenandoah, IA said she'll be taking the play to the Iowa Speech Contest this winter. I was hoping schools would see this easy-to-produce play (no set! no costumes! many laughs!) as a competition piece, so I consider this a big win.

If you're a theater teacher and you're not a member yet of this amazing Facebook group, I strongly urge you to check it out. And if you're a playwright looking for a powerful way to reach out to high schools, look no further. You've found it.

Oh, and if you'd like to receive your own free perusal copy of The Worst Fairy Tale Ever, just email me at todd.wallinger@gmail.com. Thanks!