The critic lives!

Once upon a time there was a theatre critic. He enjoyed being a theatre critic very much.

He loved seeing shows, night after night after night. He loved writing about those shows. And he loved supporting the local theatre community.

But seeing so many plays made him realize one thing. What he really wanted to be was a playwright.

So he wrote a play about what he knew. And that was being a theatre critic.

Only the theatre critic he wrote about wasn't very nice. In fact, he was downright awful. He was so awful, in fact, that an impulsive young actor kidnapped him in order to prevent him from slamming his Broadway debut.

Sadly, the actor wasn't very careful. When the critic asked him for a bottle of scotch, the actor accidentally handed him a bottle of rat poison. And the critic bit the dust.

Oops.

The playwright liked what he wrote. So he asked a friend to direct it.

The director cast some of the funniest actors in town. And the play was a big hit. At least in Colorado Springs, where the play received its world premiere.

The actors loved the play so much, they performed it at another local theater a couple months later. Full of hope, the playwright submitted the script to over a hundred theaters and contests. It had its second production at a theatre in Austin and even received a staged reading at a theatre in Hollywood (yes, that Hollywood).

And there it stopped. No other theaters wanted to perform it. No publishers wanted to publish it.

And so the script sat. Unperformed. Unpublished. Unloved. For eight long years.

That playwright is me, of course. And the play is Kill the Critic!

The story does have a happy ending. Kill the Critic! was finally published by Heuer Publishing two years ago. And this week, the play is receiving its third production--eleven years after its second!

The lucky theatre company? Hawkeye Community Theatre in Fort Dodge, Iowa. This article in The Messenger tells the tale.

In it, director Lindey Krug doesn't go into detail about why she chose the play, opting to focus instead on the audition process and the set design. But she does describe the play as "laugh out loud" and waxed poetic on how easy it was to visualize the play.

Hide-the-corpse farces are like that.

And with that, I'll wrap up this post by wishing the entire cast and crew very hearty broken legs. I just know you're going to "kill" it!

Kill the Critic! is now available!

I'm thrilled to announce that my 4th play of the year and 28th play overall has just been released by Heuer Publishing. It's called Kill the Critic! and it may be the funniest play I've ever written.

Set in 1955, Kill the Critic! is about Trevor Stanton, an impulsive young actor who kidnaps New York City's most powerful theater critic to prevent him from writing a negative review. There's just one problem. Trevor accidentally poisons the critic, and as showtime nears, he must take increasingly desperate measures to hide the corpse from a parade of outrageous characters.

It's the perfect showcase for a young male actor with serious comedy chops, especially if he's skilled at physical comedy. There's a ton of it in this play. But he must also have the endurance of an ox because Trevor has a whopping 511 lines and is on stage for the entire play, much of it running around in a frenzy.

And then there's Bertram Finch, the theater critic himself, who has much fewer lines but spends the play being dragged, shoved, carried, propped up, and manhandled a dozen different ways as a corpse. 

If you're a fan of my other, family-friendly plays, be aware that Kill the Critic! is not that. Some of the story revolves around alcohol, although none of the characters are ever drunk. Guns are drawn, as is a very dangerous frying pan. The play includes a few gags about sex, with Trevor's matronly co-star asking him whether he's sleeping with her only to get a part in the play. There's also some extremely mild cursing (three damns--that's it).

All of this may make the play inappropriate for some high schools and that's fine. But if your high school has performed shows like Moon Over Buffalo (alcohol!) or Mamma Mia! (sex!) or Guys and Dolls (guns! alcohol! also sex!), I'm confident you won't consider anything in this play objectionable.

Of course, most community theaters won't have those concerns, and a high-energy farce like this would be perfect for them.

The play runs about 90 minutes, has a cast of nine (4M, 3F, and 2 roles that can be any gender), and uses a single set representing a backstage dressing room.

If you love comedies, you really owe it to yourself to check out Kill the Critic! Just visit the play's web page, where you can download a free script sample and view some of the crazy photos from the original production.

Kill the Critic! to be published

A couple of years ago, when I learned that my old-time radio comedy, The Last Radio Show, was going to be published, I mentioned in a post that it had been a long time coming. And it was. Five and a half years long, to be exact, from world premiere to publication offer.

Well, it turned out that was nothing. Heuer Publishing has just accepted my backstage farce Kill the Critic! for publication, one month short of eleven years from world premiere to that glorious, glorious publication offer.

A long and winding road

To tell you the truth, I'd given up on the play a long time ago. And that hurt. Because the original response to it was nothing short of phenomenal. 

I'd produced the world premiere at a small performing arts center in Palmer Lake, CO, with my friend Nancy Holaday directing. I was nervous at first because I didn't know what I had. But the audience loved it. The laughter was constant, the applause was enthusiastic, and the comments from the audience afterward were overwhelmingly positive.

I had a soft spot for that production for another reason as well. My daughter Brooke played the ditzy debutante Melanie Monzoni in that production (that's her on the left in the photo at the bottom of this post), and the feedback on her performance was just as positive as it was for the show itself. Some people even told me they thought she stole the show. As a proud papa, of course, I had to agree.

The play went on to get a staged reading that year at the McLaren Comedy Festival in Midland, TX, coming in a close second in their play competition. It also came in second in that year's Robert J. Pickering Award for Playwriting Excellence.

Do the hustle

With high hopes for success, I pushed it hard, submitting the script to as many theaters, contests, and publishers as I could find. In 2015, it got its second production with the Stage Presence Players in Austin, TX.

Tennessee Stage Company expressed an interest in producing it, but when they found out they would not get the world premiere, they quickly lost that interest.

The play reached its high water mark in 2016 with a staged reading at Theatre of Note in Hollywood, CA, which remains one of only two performances I've ever had by a professional theater company.

And then it just kind of... died. No other theaters wanted to produce it. The play didn't place in any other contests. And every publisher I submitted it to rejected it.

I understand why my regular publisher, Pioneer Drama Service, gave it a thumbs-down. The play is much too risque and dark for their catalog. But I don't understand why publishers like Playscripts and Dramatic Publishing weren't interested.

So I shoved the script in a drawer (or, to be more precise, a folder on my laptop) and forgot about it.

Back to life

But the play kept tugging at the back of my mind. It was, after all, The One That Got Away.

I have three other full-length plays that have never been published, but they don't bother me because they hadn't had such an auspicious start. And Kill the Critic! is funny. Like really funny. It's my one true farce, with mistaken identity and sexual innuendo and lots of doors slamming and opening and slamming shut again.

In fact, now that I think about it, it may be my funniest play. The Last Radio Show has, I think, the wittiest dialogue. It's a Madhouse! features the most over-the-top characters. But only Kill the Critic! has the constant, outrageous physical comedy that audiences love.

So I returned to it late last year, racking my brain once more to figure out where else I could send it. And in checking my submission log, I realized that for some reason (undoubtedly a stupid oversight on my part), I'd never submitted it to Heuer Publishing.

Which is weird. They already publish The Last Radio Show, and their sister company Brooklyn Publishers publishes my Hollywood mystery Lights! Camera! Murder! (they're releasing my kid's climate change comedy The Real Reason Dinosaurs Went Extinct later this year). And both publishers go a little darker than Pioneer. It was a perfect fit.

So I sent off it off to Heuer in September. And today, I got the word that they're going to publish it

Sweet, sweet success.

I guess if there's a lesson in all of this, it's to never give up. If you really believe your work is good, and it has received a lot of positive feedback, keep pushing it. If it's meant to find a home, it will.

But it might be a long wait.

Curtain up

And so, for the first time ever on this blog, I now share a scene from Kill the Critic! It's the opening scene, and I like it because it gets right into the action, setting up the premise and showing us the contrasting personalities of the two leads. 

ACT ONE

Lights up. BERTRAM enters, his hands tied behind his back, a wastebasket over his head. TREVOR enters behind him holding a knife.

TREVOR: Don't move. (Locks the dressing room door.) Now where can I put him? I know. The bathroom. (Peers into the bathroom.) No. I might need to use this. (Closes the door.) How about the broom closet? (Looks inside, picks up a dead rat off the floor.) Yeesh! I wouldn't put a dead man in there. (Tosses the rat back in and shuts the door.) Aha! The wardrobe! (Throws open the wardrobe. It's crammed with old costumes. He tries to grab them up in one armful, but the knife gets in the way. He switches the knife to the other hand and tries again. Big surprise. The knife is still in the way. Finally, TREVOR has a brainstorm. He places the knife between his teeth—and immediately cuts his lip.) Ouch! (Touches at his mouth, sees blood.) Damn it! And on the night of my Broadway debut!

(TREVOR goes to the mirror to look at his wound. Tired of waiting, BERTRAM shakes his head until the wastebasket falls off.)

BERTRAM: Stanton. I should have known it was you.

TREVOR: Put that back on!

BERTRAM: You can't even play a kidnapper convincingly.

TREVOR: I said put that back on!

BERTRAM: I'll bet that's a stage knife too. 

TREVOR: What, this? No, I just cut myself with it.

BERTRAM: Well, you bleed like a real actor.

TREVOR: Thanks— (Pause) Now cut that out! That's exactly why I'm doing this! 

BERTRAM: You don't appreciate my wit?

TREVOR: Yes. I mean no. I mean, that's not wit. That's just the same venom you write your reviews with.

BERTRAM: Good actors don't read reviews.

TREVOR: They read you.

BERTRAM: Yes. Well, that's one of the advantages of being the most powerful theatre critic in New York. So how are you going to do me in?

TREVOR: What?

BERTRAM: The method. The means of execution, man. Strangulation, perhaps? A quick blow to the head? Wait. I know. You're going to subject me to a soliloquy. 

Want more? Then be sure to visit the New Play Exchange for the full synopsis, cast list, and a 20-page sample. 

Kill the Critic! returns

After two years and over a hundred submissions to contests and theatre companies, both large and small, Kill the Critic! is finally getting its second production. Stage Presence Players in Austin, TX has just announced that they'll be performing the play in September.

I couldn't be more excited. My published plays have been getting a ton of productions, and I'm thrilled for every one of them. But this production is especially meaningful to me because this is probably my favorite play I've written. And its the first full-length production I've arranged myself.

Why did I take this route instead of submitting it directly to my publisher? Well, Kill the Critic! is my first "mature" play, a bawdy farce in the spirit of Noises Off or Boeing Boeing. I produced it that way for its world premiere, and audiences responded enthusiastically. I thought that professional theatres would gobble it up.

Well, they didn't. I got a few nibbles, with theatres in both NYC and LA asking to read the whole script. But no bites.

I thought the play was dead.

And then a funny thing happened. I heard from two different groups who had performed The Butler Did It!, wondering whether I had anything similar. I sent them Kill the Critic!, warning them that it was considerably more risque than my murder mystery.

They both loved it. And a great new theatre company in Austin, Texas, the Stage Presence Players, decided to produce it. (The other group, a church in Canada, would have done it but worried that some members of their congregation might complain.)

That's when I realized something. I'd been targeting the wrong markets. Despite the "maturity" of Kill the Critic!, no professional theatre company is ever going to produce it. They simply don't do farces, at least not new ones. No, they'd rather do yet another grim social drama. (Seriously, have you seen the schedules of most professional theatres?)

But community theatres love farces. And if I clean this one up a bit, I may be able to get high schools and churches interested.

So that's what I'm working on now. It's not easy, turning a naughty comedy into something that your grandma will enjoy. But, as I'm discovering, it can be a lot of fun.

If you're in the Austin area, I urge to see Stage Presence Players' production of Kill the Critic! It runs September 24-26.

For more info, visit the theatre company's Facebook page.

More free samples

I've just uploaded free samples for my unpublished full-length plays. This includes my backstage farce Kill the Critic!, my fractured fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, Private Eye and my newest play, a restaurant face titled Million Dollar Meatballs. To read them, visit my Plays page or just click on the links below.


Million Dollar Meatballs
Comedy, 6M/6F, 90min

A pair of bumbling jewel thieves hide from the police in a struggling restaurant, only to misplace their diamonds in a plate of spaghetti and meatballs that gets served to the local restaurant critic. Read a sample.


Rumpelstiltskin, Private Eye
Comedy, 6M/11F/12U, 90min

Fairy Tale Land has been hit by a crime wave. The Three Bears had their home broken into. The Three Little Pigs had their homes destroyed. Now Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother is missing.  Could an evil mastermind be behind them all? Only hard-boiled detective Rumpelstiltskin can crack this case. Read a sample.


Kill the Critic!
Comedy, 7M/2F, 90min

On the night of his Broadway debut, Trevor Stanton kidnaps New York City's most powerful theatre critic to prevent him from writing a bad review. There's just one problem. Trevor accidentally poisons the critic, and as showtime nears he must take increasingly desperate measures to hide the corpse from a parade of outrageous characters. Read a sample.


If you'd like to see a full script for possible production, please email me by clicking here.

Enjoy!

Free copies of Kill the Critic!

Now that the world premiere of Kill the Critic! is wrapped, I'm focusing all of my marketing efforts on getting a second production. (And third and fourth...)

Any playwright who's ever gone this route knows how difficult and frustrating it can be. Most theatre companies won't even read new works, and those that do often take a year or two to get back to you.

But I know my play is good. Damn good. Everyone who saw it loved it, and that includes teenagers and old-timers, theatre professionals and people who never go to shows. In fact, it got more laughs than just about any play I've ever been to.

So I know that if I can only the word out, it'll be a hit.

That's why I'm giving out free copies of the script. If you'd like to read the play for possible production, email me your address. I'll send you a bound, lovingly printed copy of the script.

Or you can read the first 20 pages of the script by clicking here.

Kill the Critic! gets an encore

Good news for those of you in the Pikes Peak region who missed the world premiere of Kill the Critic! in June. The play will get an encore production next weekend--Thursday, August 22 through Saturday, August 24--for four performances only. All performances will be at Black Box Theatre, 1367 Pecan St., Colorado Springs.

This production is directed by Nancy Holaday, as was the premiere, and features almost entirely the same cast. But if you did attend the premiere, there are some key differences that may make it worth seeing again.

For one thing, the venue fixes a lot of the issues we had at the Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts. It's air-conditioned. Trains don't roar past every 15 minutes. The back row is much closer to the stage. And it's a true black box theatre, making the entire stage visible.

This last one isn't always an important consideration, but it is for this play. In case you haven't figured it out yet, one of the characters is dead for most of the play, and when the stage is raised, as it was at Tri-Lakes, people sitting in the back of the house miss much of the all-important floor action (at one point, a cop inadvertantly uses the blanket-covered corpse as a footstool).

And there's one other thing about this production. The actor who plays the hapless kidnapper was unable to make the last two performances so Nancy cast a new actor in the part.

I liked the original lead. Although he struggled to learn his lines, and ended up ad libbing most of them, he delivered them with panache, giving the character a childike charm despite the self-centeredness that seems to define him.

Responses from the audience were more w. Half of the people I talked to thought he was a brilliant comedian, but others thought he was painfully hammy.

Early reports from rehearsal indicate that the new lead is much better, a natural comic who is also much more disciplined in his line readings.

For complete info on the production, visit www.blackboxdrama.com.

Kill the Critic! takes 2nd again

I just found out Kill the Critic! placed 2nd in the McLaren Memorial Comedy Playwriting Contest. This is on top of the 2nd place it took in the Robert J. Pickering Award for Playwriting Excellence.

I won't lie. I was really hoping for a win as that would have almost guaranteed me another production and at least one published review--something I'm still seeking.

But I'll happily accept 2nd place. The McLaren is one of the best known comedy playwriting contests in the country and the competition was tough.

So you want to produce your own play (Part 10)

And so we come to the last and possibly second most important when it comes to producing your own play (second olny to Rule Number 1):

10. Don't sweat it.

Of course, as producer, your job is to make sure everything runs smooth and problem-free during the rehearsal and performance of your show.

But guess what. It won't. Despite your best efforts, things will go wrong.

And that's okay. As long as your show is good, your audiences will leave happy. And in the end, that's all that counts.

So you want to produce your own play (Part 9)

9. Don't be afraid of the media.

This is a biggie. And by media, I mean newspapers.

Yes, newspapers are dying. But good luck finding TV station that will actually do a piece on a local playwright. Despite their imminent demise, newspapers are still the best free advertising you can get.

But many people feel they need some secret key to unlock the gateway to the world of publicity. They need to write the perfect press release. Or they need to know somebody already in the biz. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Of course, if you live in a city with a ridiculousy rich theatre community like Colorado Springs (cough cough), the likelihood of getting a review is practically nill. But it doesn't cost you anything to contact the media. And even if you don't get a review, you might get a preview.

Wait, what?

All right. Let's step back a bit. Reviews and previews are two completely different animals, but few people are even aware of the difference, including those who are active in the theatre community and whose livelihood depends upon knowing the difference.

What is that difference?

First of all, previews are written and published before a show opens, hence the prefix "pre". They're generally written by a reporter, not a critic (although on small newspapers, those two positions can be held by the same people). They're factual, i.e. the article restricts itself to talking about the history of the play, what it's about and what the director's vision is for this particular production, with a few choice quotes from the director or an actor sprinkled throughout. And as a fact-based article, there is no critique of the production itself, although they're often given a mild rah-rah tone).

Reviews are written and published after a show opens. They're written by (hopefully!) an experienced and knowledgeable critic. The critic should not have spoken to anyone involved in the production (that could have an undue influence and their judgment). And the piece consists largely, if not entirely, of opinion. Does the show suck or does it rock?

You may think you'd rather have a review. After all, you're taking a risk on getting slammed in print. But I have it on good authority that reviews sell many more tickets than previews and even a negative review attracts more people than it repels.

So how do approach the media? Emails are fine. Editors and reporters are used to getting emails, so one more doesn't phase them.

But that's also the main problem with emails. Yours can easily get lost in the shuffle, especially if yours is long. Chances are the editor or reporter will scan the subject line and the press release title to look for the hook. If there isn't one, they'll hit delete sooner than you can say Kinky Boots.

What's a hook? It's something that sets your play apart form all the other plays opening that weekend (and yes, it REALLY helps if you scheduled your production so no other plays open at the same time).

Ask yourself this: Why should people see your play? "Because I wrote it" isn't a good answer.

Do you have "star" casting (a highly regarded actor or some local celeb?). Does it have a tie-in to local history (newspapers love all that local crap)? Does it explore some controversial topic that's been in the news (post-traumatic stress syndrome among combat veterans is a particularly juicy one)?

I don't care what your hook is. But you've got to have something.

So forget the press release and send just a short two- or three-sentence email. That way you can put your hook front and center. And your friendly newspaper person will love you for it.

Or just skip email entirely and phone directly. Yes, it's a little more annoying to the editor or reporter. But everyone last one of them knows it's a part of the job.

And to be honest, newspaper people are feeling awfully lonely these days.

So you want to produce your own play (Part 8)

8. Skip the posters.

I know. I know. Everybody loves posters. They're familiar. They're eye-catching. They're cool. And that makes them the go-to advertising medium for both small-budget and large-budget theatre companies alike.

But here's the dirty little secret about posters. They don't work.

Think about it. Where do you put up posters? Coffee shops. Libraries. Places where there are probably already a boatload of posters.

And let's face it. With posters, you're focusing your advertising efforts on the general public, most of whom have no interest in seeing any play, let alone yours.

The answer? Postcards.

VistaPrint will sell you a stack of 500 oversized postcards for just $75. That may seem steep at first, but consider this: If only 1% of the cards motivate someone to come to your show who otherwise wouldn't have, you've just paid for the cards. And your success rate will probably be much higher than that.

The great thing about postcards is that you can carry around a stack of them at all times. Then, when you have the chance to tell someone about your play, you can hand them one of your postcards. Now they've got something to stick on their fridge or bulletin board which will serve as a constant reminder of your show.

And give a stack of postcards to your cast so they can do the same.

Just make sure you've got your ticket-selling website on the postcard so that you can convert all those eyballs to $$$.

Oh, and there's one more thing about postcards. They're a great way to reach theatregoers you don't know. Just leave a stack at the box office of theatre companies opening plays just before yours.

You'll have to ask permission, of course. But the theatre community is nothing if not supportive, and you'd be surprised how willing other theatre folk are to promote your show, as long as you're willing to promote theirs.

So you want to produce your own play (Part 7)

7. Leave the director alone.

I know you want to watch rehearsals. I wanted to. Badly.

But I forced myself to stay away as much as possible. In my case, that meant attending one rehearsal a week. But looking back, I see that even that was excessive.

Attending rehearsals served no earthly good. It made me worry about the progress of the rehearsals--unnecessarily, as it turns out. And it intimidated the actors.

So hire a director you trust, then get out of their way. You'll learn everything you need to know about your play during the actual performance.

And besides, you've got enugh to keep you busy as producer. Why aren't you out there selling tickets?

So you want to produce your own play (Part 6)

6. Don't be afraid to annoy people.

You're a producer now. You're expected to be a jerk.

Okay, maybe you don't have to be a complete jerk to get things done. But it's important to remember that you're the one putting up the money. You have every right to expect excellence from the people around you.

Case in point: the web site error I mentioned in Friday's post. It was a simple bug, something the arts center should have been fixed in 5 minutes.

But it wasn't. I had to email them and call them and email them and call them. Agian and again. In fact, it took about a month from the time I first contacted the arts center about the problem until they got around to fixing it.

Did they find me annoying?

Yes.

Do they want me to go away?

A big fat no. In fact, now they're begging me to come back and do another two shows this year.

So don't worry about annoying people. If you do a good job, people will want to work with you anyway.

So you want to produce your own play (Part 5)

5. Pay attention to details

You're the producer now, so you're ultimately responsible for everything that happens with your show. The most surprising thing I learned about producing is how really wide-ranging the job is. Here are just some of the issues I had to handle.

Can people buy tickets easily?

As I described last in my post, I allowed the venue to sell tickets to my show through their own website. When I went to check out the website, however, I found that their drop-down menu only allowed people to purchase tickets for the Friday show, not the two Saturday shows. I could have missed out on some significant ticket sales if I hadn't checked this and gotten it fixed.

Where's the toilet paper?

During rehearsal, the director complained that the women's bathroom didn't have any toilet paper. Guess who got to talk to the box office person about replenishing the bathroom supplies and making sure they well well-stocked for the run of the show?

Is the venue safe?

This by far the most important issue of all. At our opening performance, one older lady stepped took a tumble when she took a shortcut from the bathroom and didn't see the low step that was there. You better believe that for the rest of the run, we had that step blocked off so no one could use it.

So you want to produce your own play (Part 4)

4. Keep your eye on the goal.

And as producer, your goal is to sell tickets. Sure, you have to review the rental contract and choose the performance dates and pay your actors, but every single one of those decisions should be made with an eye toward getting butts in seats. And at the lowest cost.

We went through Brown Paper Tickets. Their web site is kind of wonky, but their services are free, easy to use and they offer buyers a boatload of ways to order tickets: Will Call, Print-at-Home, Mobile E-tickets and more. To maximize your ticket sales, choose them all.

Your venue may sell tickets on their own web site. Should you let them sell tickets to your show?

I would say yes. You may feel squeamish letting someone else handle your money, but if you're counting on the venue to bring in their regular customers, then those customers are going to want to buy tickets through their usual channels.

On the other hand, it's now two weeks after my own show closed, and I'm still trying to get the venue to send me my proceeds from their sales. So this isn't without its pitfalls.

So you want to produce your own play (Part 3)

3. Choose a good venue

And by that, I don't mean a venue that will provide the best environment for your play. I mean one that will make you the most money.

After all, your single biggest expense is going to be the rent on your venue. And if your play is any good, your audience won't care if they're sitting on folding chairs, if the place is non-air-conditioned on a blistering hot summer day or if trains rumble past at regular intervals (all of which happened during my production).

Of course, if you have free access to a usable venue, then more power to you. You're already well on your way to profitability. The rest of us, however, have to make some compromises.

When I went theatre-hunting for Kill the Critic!, I quickly found that most theatres won't rent at all and of those that do, many charge exorbitant rates. I ended up with two that charged a reasonable flat fee.

The first venue was a 50-seat black box theatre that offered me their space for $500 a week (Sunday to Saturday). Even though the performances were only on Friday anbd Saturday, my director was adamant that the cast be able to rehearse on the actual performance stage the full week before opening night.

The performance space was intimate, so the acoustics would be a dream, but you have those awful folding chairs. And while it was located in Colorado Springs, it offered only limited parking and was unlikely to steer any of its regular clientele my way (the theatre company that owns the space does mostly serious dramas, while my play is a farce with no socially redeeming value whatsoever).

The second venue was a large art gallery. They wanted $1000 for 8 days (Saturday to Saturday), giving us an extra day to set up. The space nominally holds 100 chairs (folding, again), but if the crowds got too big I could set out another 50 seats or more.

The stage was tiny, it was tucked away in the corner of the room, and we had to contend with those annoying trains rumbling by just across the highway (about five per 90 minute performance!).

Also, it was located in a small town about 15 miles north of Colorado Springs. That means I couldn't count on a lot of my friends and neighbors attending.

But the art gallery had it own contact list of 1200 members, many of whom would love to see a farce, a drama, a Kabuki performance or, really, just about anything (they're seriously starved for culture up there). In fact, they had sold out the place for an original musical production of Sense and Sensibility just the month before.

Oh yeah, and the art gallery's insurance covered our group, so we didn't have to buy any of our own.

Guess which one I picked?

So you want to produce your own play (Part 2)

2. Do the math.

How do you plan for success? Simple. By putting together a budget.

It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but it does have to include a reasonable estimate for each of the expenses you expect to incur. For us, those were rent, salary, set, costumes and advertising.

Here are our numbers:

Rent: $1000 (not including $200 security deposit)
Set: $500
Costumes: $500
Cast and crew: $800
Advertising: $200

Total: $3000

Now the big question: can you sell enough tickets to cover your expenses? We were overly optimistic. We thought we could sell 300 tickets at $15 a pop. That would have given us a total of $4500.

We ended up selling only 210. But our expenses came in a little lower too, which is what allowed us to turn a profit. I'll go into more detail in a future post.

Don't spend a dollar of your money until you've put together a budget. And make sure the numbers are realistic.

So you want to produce your own play (Part 1)

On top of the wonderful response I got on my play Kill the Critic!, it now looks like my business partner (the director) and I are going to make a little money (about $250 each on a $2500 production, but who's counting?).

Not only was it my first full-length production as a playwright, it was also my first full-length production as a producer. So yeah, I'm feeling pretty good. But mostly I'm feeling pretty lucky.

Over the next few weeks, I'd like to share some of the lessons I learned along the way. I made plenty of mistakes, and yet everything worked out in the end. If I can produce a play--and I am the least businesslike person in the world--then anyone can.

So here we go. The first lesson is far and away the most important one. And that's because it's all about attitude. Even though it may seem obvious, it bears repeating.

Every. Time. You. Produce. A. Play.

1. Expect success.

Don't go into this planning to lose money. Sure, you may end up burning a whole pile of greenbacks on your way to opening night, but that shouldn't be your goal.

If you're in this for the long haul, and by that I mean you intend to produce more than one of your plays, then it's important that you try to make at least a little money. Otherwise you're going to quickly lose enthusiasm for what could be viewed as a vanity project.

Kill the Critic! named finalist in the McLaren

Just got word that Kill the Critic! was named one of three finalists in the McLaren Memorial Comedy Playwriting Competition. All of the finalists will get a reader's theatre presentation by the Midland Community Theatre in Midland, TX on August 3. The audience fave will then get a full production in 2014.

In the meantime, I've got some work to do. The theatre needs my play cut down to 60 minutes for the reading. They offered to have the director do it, but I'd rather do it myself. After all, it's my baby.

And really, it shouldn't be too hard. The play is only 80 pages as it is, and I'm sure I can get it down to 60 pages with some judicious trimming. I may not even have to eliminate any scenes.

As for the reading itself, I'd love to drive down for it, but there's something even more important going on that weekend. My daughter Brooke will be performing in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Youth Rep production of Pippin. And she's got a lot of magic to do.

Kill the Critic! kills it

Okay, so now I feel stupid. A week ago, I was stressing out about how few tickets had been sold for the world premiere of my play Kill the Critic!

I shouldn't have. As I discovered with my reading of The Butler Did It!, 95% of the audience waited until the last few days before the performance to order tickets, and almost 50% bought at the door.

We ended up with a huge turnout: 105 on Friday night, 25 on Saturday afternoon and 108 on Saturday night. In fact, so many people streamed in for that final performance that I was still scrambling to set out chairs after the play had started.

Even better, the show was a monster-sized hit. The audiences ate it up, laughing uproariously in all the right places and in a bunch more I never intended to be funny.

But the best part of the evening were the people. One of the reasons I love theatre so much is that it brings people of such varying backgrounds together, and this production in particular enabled me to connect with old and new friends alike.

My editor at Pioneer, Brian D. Taylor, drove down from Denver to see the show. Although we email each other frequently, I had never met him before, so it was nice to be able to chat face to face. And, great guy that he is, he even gave the play a fabulous review.

Also, a couple who were the first friends my wife and I made when we moved to Colorado were there. We haven't seen them for probably, oh, 18 years. Sure, we could have met for dinner or drinks over the years, but we didn't. Instead, it took a play--and a pretty silly play at that--to bring us together.

And then there was the entire contingent from my day job (believe it or not, I'm an electrical engineer for a semiconductor company). I have no idea how most of them had heard about the play, but there they were on Saturday night, laughing and cheering as much as the rest of the audience.

Life is good. Theatre is even better.