My plays fall into three categories:

• Those that are unproduced and better left that way (I have more than a dozen that I don’t like and don’t send out, but for which I still harbor the hope to one day “fix”)
• Those that are unproduced because either they are recent or I wrote them and kind of lost track of them (fewer than 10)
• And those that have been produced.

Last weekend I devoted a day to reviewing about 20 of the latter to submit them for further productions. And here’s what I discovered:

Even though they’re only between five and 15 years old, many of them have become period pieces.

There’s the play that references Johnny Carson’s show. OK, a while ago I updated that to reference Jay Leno. Now Leno is leaving in a few years. I could keep updating that one — or allowing directors to do so — but the play also references another show, popular at the time, that is long-gone and largely forgotten. Understanding that reference isn’t key to understanding the play, but it adds a large undertone throughout.

There are all the plays that seem to revolve directly around newspapers. Yes, I am an inveterate newspaper-reader. Or used to be — even I don’t read it every day any more. These plays for sure have to be staged as period pieces, because the newspaper is in some way crucial to the play and it is vanishing from our culture.

There is the play about the rock band, written before, believe it or not, “dude” became the preferred form of address between males of a certain age. The play also revolves around the Chapman stick, a cutting-edge instrument of, oh, the late 1980’s. And when the band has a fight with the bassist and has trouble finding a new one, the drummer says they have to find one because you can’t have a band with just one guitar and drums — something disproved by a little band known as The White Stripes.

There are many, many more such examples; plays that seemed to me so trapped in the moment of their time that I actually wondered if most of my “back catalog” had any further performance value. I started to understand how the Beach Boys must have felt, watching the British Invasion roll in. But here’s something that clearly I never foresaw:

In one of my plays, an unscrupulous vacuum cleaner salesman dupes a television-addled housefrau into buying a vacuum cleaner at a ridiculous price. I thought of this yesterday as I decided to buy a really good vacuum cleaner once and for all and be done with it. The ridiculous price of such a cleaner in my play? $400. The price of a good vacuum cleaner now? $400.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 1:23 pm and is filed under 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.