I’m very happy with how my one-act play, “About the Deep Woods Killer,” has turned out in the 2008 Moving Arts Premiere One-Act Festival. It’s a tribute to the cast, to everyone involved in the production, and especially to the director, Mark Kinsey Stephenson. Mark really understands the undercurrents in the play and has worked with the actors to express them. If you’ve never had a bad or mediocre production (and I have), you can’t fully understand how invaluable it is to have a director who understands your play and, in Mark’s case, your overall body of work — and who also has the talents to bring that vision to the stage. I’m grateful. Mark and I have been doing theatre together for 15 years; he’s directed my plays before, has acted in my plays, and I’ve directed him several times, as well as producing plays he’s been in. We’re a good match. If I’m lucky we’ll be doing theatre together for another 15 years, and beyond.

In the same festival, I think Terence Anthony’s play “Tangled” is a standout (and is a play I’m going to blog about later today or this weekend, when I have a chance), and I’m quite taken with “Compression of a Casualty,” which marries an Ionesco-esque device with  contemporary CNN coverage of the death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq, to great effect and, to my immense thrill, into an indictment of the timid and celebrity-obsessed mainstream media. I’m glad we’re doing that play, and I’m delighted to see the inestimably talented Michael Shutt prove, yet again, that he’s among the most versatile theatre artists I know.

The festival runs three more weeks. Here’s more info, including ticket information.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under On seeing, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.