Woke up this morning with no memory of how I got here.  Play in a Day started last night at 11:00pm, and I was one of the four writers.  The basic idea is, writers go in a 11:00pm, and work until 7:00am on a ten-minute play.  Then the actors, directors and tech come in in the morning, and all four plays are performed that night.  This was my second year writing, and it wasn’t nearly as easy as last year.  Last year, I had a story, and an idea, and I shot through four drafts and left at a quarter to seven feeling satisfied.  The show got plenty of laughs, and a few of the cast members came up to me afterwords and told me how much they liked the script.  Maybe my writing style or proclivites have changed.

The play I wrote last night is called “I’ll Say Something Moving at Your Funeral” and involves a woman, Kim, meeting her potential girlfriend, Mal, at her home for their second date.  The date is interrupted when Kim’s brother Silas falls through the kitchen window, and then explains to Kim that not only is he dead–having been shot in the face by a convenience store clerk he was trying to rob–but also that Mal had come to Kim’s house tonight with intent to kill her.  I feel really good about the people I was able to cast, but there’s a certain amount of apprehension because many of the plays are written to be quick, funny things that get laughs and get offstage.  Perhaps having only a background in fiction and not in playwriting hobbles me a bit, because both of my plays have felt more like story stories than they have stageplays.  There are funny bits, sure, Silas has a few good lines, but the tone is on the whole much less light than the play I wrote last year.  So I’m sitting now, while across campus the cast and the director work on the script, and I’m excited as hell and scared to death at the same time to see how it all comes out.  If one person laughs, I’ll be fine.

You can read the script here: I’ll Say Something Moving at Your Funeral