FEBRUARY / MARCH productions!

FEBRUARY PRODUCTIONS:

ADVENTURES OF ROSE RED (SNOW WHITE’S LESS-FAMOUS SISTER)
Sartartia Middle School, Sugar Land, TX

ELEVATOR GAMES
Graettinger-Terril CSD, Graettinger IA
Stratford High School, Stratford WI
New Lisbon High School, New Lisbon WI
Chetek-Weyerhaeuser High School, Chetek WI

EXPOSED: EIGHT 10-MINUTE TALES ABOUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED (with Mike Beyer, Amy Seeley and Jenny Kirkland-Laffey)
Greenville Middle School, Greenville AL

MARCH

ADVENTURES OF ROSE RED (SNOW WHITE’S LESS-FAMOUS SISTER):
Live Theatre Workshop, Tucson, AZ
DeSoto West Middle School, DeSoto, TX
Pflugerville Middle School, Pflugerville, TX
Browns Valley Middle School, Browns Valley, MN
Grace Co-op, Beaumont, TX

END OF THE WORLD (WITH PROM TO FOLLOW):
Churubusco Junior Senior High School, Churubusco, IN

EXPOSED! EIGHT 10-MINUTE TALES ABOUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED:
Cache Middle School Drama Club, Cache OK
Tri-County School District, Jamesport MO

HORROR HIGH:
Thurgood Marshall School, Rockford IL

NOVEMBER PRODUCTIONS

NOVEMBER PRODUCTIONS:

NOVEMBER 1:
THE ADVENTURES OF ROSE RED (SNOW WHITE’S LESS FAMOUS SISTER) – Primghar Community Playhouse and Sandburg Middle School Drama
HORROR HIGH – Hammond Central School, Hammond NY
DRACULA’S DAUGHTERS: A FAMILY COMEDY – Kankakee H.S., Kankakee IL

NOVEMBER 2:
ELEVATOR GAMES – Madrid Community Schools, Madrid IA

NOVEMBER 5:
EXPOSED! EIGHT 10-MINUTE TALES ABOUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED – John Muir Middle School, Burbank IL

NOVEMBER 6:
HISTORICALLY BAD FIRST DATES – South Hills High School, Fort Worth TX and Briarwood Academy, Warrenton GA (Take state!)

NOVEMBER 20:
HISTORICALLY BAD FIRST DATES – Sacred Heart School, Falls City NE

PRODUCTIONS FOR OCTOBER

Hey everyone! October and November are going to be busy months! Check out the productions for October below…

ADVENTURES OF ROSE RED (SNOW WHITE’S LESS-FAMOUS SISTER):
Mt. Vernon-Lisbon Community Theatre, Mt. Vernon, IA

BAD SUBSTITUTE:
South Carleton High School, Richmond, ON Canada

ELEVATOR GAMES:
STARS Tucson, AZ

EXPOSED! EIGHT 10-MINUTE SCENES ABOUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED:
Wester Middle School, Frisco TX

HORROR HIGH:
Sugar Creek Players Crawfordsville, IN

HISTORICALLY BAD FIRST DATES:
Briarwood Academy Warrenton , GA

RISE OF THE HOUSE OF USHER:
Soledad High School Soledad, CA

JULY UPDATE

We’ve been crazy busy here at Plays To Order since the last update. Tomorrow will be the world premiere of our newest musical, HORRIBLE SHAKESPEARE: A MINI-MUSICAL, at the Tri-Dac Summer Theater Program in Columbia, SC. This is a really fun musical about a group of AP English students who are trapped in the Horrible Productions of Shakespeare’s Plays Museum. As they check out the various exhibits for Horrible Shakespeare Past, they are magically transformed into the characters from each display – The Scottish Play set in a fast food restaurant; “Taming of the Shrew” starring a real shrew; “Romeo Mime vs. Juliet Clown”; and “Twelfth Night of the Living Dead.” Clocking in at 30 minutes, HORRIBLE SHAKESPEARE features 6 songs with music by Ryan O’Connell (who also composed HORROR HIGH: THE MUSICAL), and lyrics by Ryan and Sean. This is a perfect musical for festivals – 30 minutes, plus zombies!

We also had our world premiere of WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF…? SIX 10-MINUTE PLAYS OF IMPROBABILITY. Kankakee High School in IL, under the direction of Deena Badr-Cassady, mounted the very first production of this weird and funny collection of short plays.

And, finally, just a few weeks ago, “Dr. Jekyll and Little Miss Hyde,” one of the short plays in EXPOSED! EIGHT 10-MINUTE PLAYS ABOUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, premiered at the 10 By 10 in the Triangle International 10-minute play festival in NC. A couple of reviews:

“Mark Filiaci directs Dr. Jekyll and Little Miss Hyde by Sean Abley, a take off of Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, in which two people play several parts, including both genders for each actor. In Ludlam’s play the two actors must of the same gender, but Abley twists the gender-changing one step further by using a man and a woman. And the humor/drama is enhanced by having the changes occur behind a Wayang style white screen. Owen Daly and Leanne Heinz camp it up beautifully; pay particular notice to Daly’s “problem” when he changes back to male roles.”

“Of the night’s offerings, the seed-play most in need of expansion as a full-length work was “Dr. Jekyll and Little Miss Hyde.” In this rewarding gender-role comedy, playwright Sean Abley gives the Robert Louis Stevenson potboiler the Charles Ludlam (Irma Vep) treatment, assigning multiple roles across gender to two actors. Abley’s witty writing hinges on the definitions of monstrous behavior that differed substantially for men and women in Victorian England—before connecting Stevenson’s “horror” to the rise of the suffragettes.”

“Judging by the reactions, the favorite of the evening was “Dr. Jekyll and Little Miss Hyde”; the laughter and applause meter peaked for this entertaining little examination of Victorian mores.”

Lesson Learned

I was contacted by a young drama teacher interested in having a play written for her advanced play production class. Unhappy with the availability of smart material for her class (she dismissively called Playscripts “Sillyscripts,” which should have been a red flag), she thought my work would be a good match for her students.

Fast-forward to months later, and it became apparent that the director A) wasn’t used to working in a workshop situation and B) wasn’t prepared for rehearsals. You have to be ready when you rehearse a large-cast show like the one she’d requested (forty speaking parts, several dozen extras), but I could tell she hadn’t even reviewed the script most days. I watched her struggle, offered input when I thought it was appropriate, and dealt with all those conflicting emotions playwrights have during a first production.

Things seemed to going okay (not great, but okay) until the third week. The teacher called me on Monday morning. “I’m not used to working this way, and I realized I’m not being true to myself during rehearsals. I need to run rehearsals as if the playwright isn’t sitting in the room. Normally when I do a show, if something isn’t working I cut it. I rearrange things. Writers hate me!” At first her tone sounded as if she was afraid of my reaction, but this last statement was spoken with a not a small amount of pride.

I love the collaborative workshop process. Perhaps I’m just a lazy writer, but I prefer going into production with a second draft and working out all the kinks during rehearsals. I’m not precious about my work, and learned a long time ago to listen to feedback, regardless of whether or not I take it. It’s amazing what you can glean from even the most ridiculous advice if you listen rather than prepare you defense while they talk. If you’re afraid taking a note is going to bring your script crashing down around you, then you probably haven’t built it on a firm foundation in the first place. So although a second red flag was raised when this teacher/director admitted “Writers hate me!”, I was ready to keep my mouth closed and mind open.

For the rest of the rehearsal process, I was invisible to her. I’d anticipated difficulties staging certain scenes, so included suggestions in the script, most of which were either ignored or, more likely, unread. If a line didn’t work after trying it only once, it was cut without asking for a rewrite or suggestion. I arrived one day to find three scenes had been cut and replaced with a musical montage featuring Hall and Oates’s “You Make My Dreams Come True.” She seemed frustrated in rehearsals, and at times a bit panicked. Despite this, there would be times she would start to run a scene then walk away, go into her office, start conversations in full voice with other students, and then move on to the next scene, never having paid attention to what was happening on stage. And not once did she turn to me for input or advice.

The worst day was near the end of the rehearsal process. The final scene of the play involves the characters facing their worst fear – the end of the world. They can’t stop it, so instead of panicking they allow themselves to become philosophical, shed their emotional armor and be vulnerable with each other.

Having struggled to wrap her mind around the end of the show, the director stood on a chair and announced to the cast, “I don’t understand why these people would do what the script says they do. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. They wouldn’t just stand there. They would panic, cry, scream, whatever. So I’m going to cut it and we’re going to rewrite it.” As I sat there silently, face red with embarrassment and anger, she proceeded to throw out the script, bark orders at the actors, dictate new lines and staging to the stage manager, and completely rewrite the last ten pages of my play. I thought to myself, “This is a playwright’s worst fear; I am irrelevant.”

I have a thick skin after years of writing, so well intentioned (and some not-so-well intentioned) criticism rarely bothers me. What bothered me in this situation was what that teacher did, or didn’t do, for her students.

During the rehearsal process for this play, I watched a teacher, a person in charge of helping young people formulate their opinions on so many aspects of their lives, teach sixty-plus enthusiastic, talented young actors that the playwright doesn’t matter. Rather than take advantage of the playwright being in the room, the teacher forged ahead, treating the script as a problem to be solved rather than a challenge to create something from the ground up. This was a huge missed opportunity for her students. They could have learned what it was like to collaborate, have an artistic discussion, workshop material. Who knows, maybe there were budding playwrights in that room. Instead they watched her treat me like a hindrance and, at times, a joke, and I’m afraid that is a lesson difficult to unlearn.

When the dust settled, I ended up with a play I’m incredibly proud of (with my original ending, thank you very much), and a great story to tell other playwrights. The teacher told me her students were thrilled to have their names in the published version of the script. Hopefully someday they’ll be taught they deserve even more.

HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!

It’s June, and by now most schools are out for summer break – yay!

Thankfully (because I love to write), I’ll be working throughout the summer. I have at least one commission on deck, tentatively titled TWO-FACED: A TRAGEDY…SORT OF, a highly theatrical comedy about what it takes to be part of every group at school.

I’m also revising HORROR HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL (which I may retitle “Horror High: The Musical”) for Gladstone High School’s summer program. I’ve found a great composer, Ryan O’Connell, who is revamping much of the music, including adding two new songs to the show! I’m thrilled to have a chance to revisit this show and do the rewrites necessary to make it awesome. The script should be available Fall 2012.

I’m also working with a great group of playwrights on a collection of ten-minute plays called EXPOSED! TRUE STORIES OF WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. Each of these pieces will be perfect for forensic competitions and festivals, so keep your eyes peeled for the Fall 2012 release of this hilarious collection.

In early late Summer/early Fall I’ll be traveling to California State University: Stanislaus for a workshop production of my new musical ANGELS! This is a family-oriented musical about the Afterlife. Basically, the entire audience has passed on, and while they wait for their paperwork to be processed (because even in the Afterlife civil servants move slowly), they are entertained and educated by a group of angels performing a musical review. I’ve already done one staged reading of the script, and am really excited to get it up on its feet this Fall!

I hope you all have a great summer!
Sean

The Gifts You Give Away – Follow up

I had quite a few people ask me about the understudy mentioned in my blog post, “The Gifts You Give Away“. How did his performance go?

I got this email from Michelle, the drama teacher:

Sorry it took me so long to reply. Wrapping up the school year has been insane! However, Casey’s performance was amazing – he brought something different to the character than Taylor, but it was just as good. I am going to pass your email along to the cast and crew of our little production. It will mean a lot to them. Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. It has meant a lot to us and brought a personal aspect to performing your play. I always believed that both laughter and tears are cathartic experiences, but laughter has a healing quality that humans need so badly in this day and age.

Have a Great Day!
Michelle

The Gifts You Give Away

I received an amazing email from a drama teacher in regards to a performance of one of my plays, HORROR HIGH. It inspired me to write a blog post for the Playscripts website, and I reprint it here.

I received this email from a drama coach who had directed a production of one of my plays.

During the performance last night, one of the audience members was laughing so loud, I thought he had been drinking (haha). He approached me after the play was over. It was a community member who lost his wife to cancer last fall, and his son, Casey, is an extra in the play. He said that since his wife had passed, he had been unable to laugh – until he saw your play. For a couple hours, he was able to forget everything and just laugh. He wanted to know who wrote it. He plans on coming again Monday.

Well, his son is an understudy. When I told the cast what Casey’s dad said, the student for whom his is understudying decided to let Casey play Victor on Monday. It’s going to be a surprise for Casey’s dad. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Michelle Miles
FHS Drama Coach

My response:

Dear Michelle and the cast and crew,

I can’t tell you how flattered I am to receive this email. Reading it reminded me of an exchange I had years ago with a really great improv teacher. I was bemoaning the fact that, because of the war, we had been adding more and more serious scenes into our graduation show. He asked me, “Why do you think people come to the theater?”

“To be entertained.”

“No, they come to be affected.”

I think most of us, when we realized we were destined to work in theater in some capacity, proceeded because we wanted to be part of entertaining audiences, and then, years later, we learned our relationship with the audience is a little more complicated than that.

Maybe the audience doesn’t think of it in those terms, but in truth they are there to be affected, manipulated, moved by the experience. Laughter is certainly part of that, but so are tears, anger, and heated conversations in the parking lot after the show dissecting the meaning of what they’ve just seen. We want to affect the audience, the audience wants to be affected. A perfect, symbiotic relationship.

But sometimes, sitting in that darkened theater, there is an audience member who doesn’t want to be affected. Sometimes that person needs to be affected.

A very smart actor with whom I often work once said, “The most important gifts you receive are the ones you give away.” Casey’s father has given you the most important gift someone in the theater can receive; He made what you do matter. And in turn, you gave him the gift of affecting him in the way he needed most at that moment. Many speeches are given by many theater practitioners about the importance, honor, and responsibility of the theatrical arts. I can’t think of a better example than this one. You never know when someone like Casey’s father will be out there, but you should always assume they are, and approach the stage as if tonight’s show can be a transformative experience.

(And just to be clear, I’m speaking of everyone involved in the show. Without the director, playwright, costumes, props, sets, lights, stage manager, running crew, or the person handing out tickets and programs, Casey’s father wouldn’t have had that experience.)

Speaking of gifts, I must applaud the actor who stepped aside so Casey could take his role for the evening. When you hear actors speak of other actors as “gifted” and “generous,” generally that refers to their onstage habits. Rest assured, your generosity and gifts were definitely on stage that night, even if you weren’t.

So, again, thank you for the email; thank you for choosing my show; and thank you for reminding me of what’s important about what we do.

Sincerely,
Sean Abley