one-act play

Green Lake Play Series – The Staged Reading!

/ Rebecca Demarest / Leave a comment

I will get back to my regularly scheduled Hugo Award Voting reviews next week, when I will hopefully have finished all the novels (or given up on them, there’s a couple…) but I have some fun news to share with you for the moment.

I have been working with a fantastic group of people on a series of short plays called the Green Lake Play Series. It is a group of plays written by current and former Seattle residents, about Green Lake Park, and will be staged in said park in the near future. However, we’re currently in the midst of preparing for a staged reading (so we can hear what our lines actually sound like and get feedback from actors and an audience), so if you happen to be in the Seattle neighborhood on July 27th, and want to see a little free theater in the making, please stop on by!

Indiegogo

Also, if you’d like to snag a copy of the plays, or a poster, or get to sit in the best seats in the house without having to show up super early, we’re running an Indiegogo campaign to help us defray the cost of renting the facilities and all the printing. So come check it out!

You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep abreast of the project and find out when we are going to get to a full staged production of the plays! We plan to get to that sometime within the next six months.

Hidden in This Post

/ Rebecca Demarest / Leave a comment

In the midst of trying to learn to write my own one-act plays, I turned to the master of snappy, witty dialogue, Aaron Sorkin, and his one-act “Hidden in This Picture.” Sorkin is most known for his television work, including West Wing, and for the fact that his characters are constantly running at the mouth and fit more information into a quarter inch of script than most playwrights could dream about. This one-act is not an exception.

In it, the main characters are trying to film the final sequence of their war film: hundreds of tired and injured marines traipsing over the hillside in what is ostensibly not-America, timed to the setting sun. No retakes possible. But then a cow wanders into the frame.

They try desperately to do something about it, then give up, and eventually just pretend they always meant for it to happen that way and doesn’t just add a certain kind of commentary to the whole piece?

It is Sorkin at his finest, full of interpersonal problems, dry wit, and heavy on the banter. I was laughing my head off by the end of it, and will definitely be taking some lessons away to work with some of my own play projects down the line. I’d love to see this one staged at some point, so drop me a line if you’re doing it!