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.