Over the summer, I held a virtual cold reading and discussion of a new one-act play that I wrote called Waiting for Glory. The play is about a team tasked with casting a new show and forced to hold open calls – with ridiculous results. The participants were mostly CCNY Educational Theatre graduate students, but I did invite a few other friends of mine who are actors and teachers or teaching artists, both locally and nationally. The mission was to think through the play for an educational theatre market; I’ve been writing plays for decades, but I have not typically written plays primarily for that context. I work in college admissions for The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the high school I graduated from didn’t have a theatre program at all so I’ve only recently been directly exposed to high school thespian festivals (main lesson learned so far from my festival visits: I’m jealous!)
In its current stage, I’ve revised Waiting for Glory down to two versions: a shorter, festival-length version (35-40 minutes) and an expanded version (50 minutes). Many of the actor-characters in the play audition with classical monologues, building in opportunities to work on verse and heightened language and to teach about plays by Goethe, Shakespeare, Marlowe, as well as Everyman by Anonymous. Both versions are also currently in the hands of a few publishers and several dozen drama educators worldwide (although I’m still tinkering with ways to tighten it up even more, just as I am with every play I’ve ever written), so I hope to see it out in the wild someday soon! I’m so grateful to my fellow CCNY Educational Theatre graduate students for helping out with their generous (and hilarious) talents and feedback, and to the graduate program in general for helping me think in a new way about who I’m writing for.