The Reading

 So, how did it go?

All in all, it went very well. Very well indeed.

Readers at the Theater

This past Monday, our play-writing group, The Quills, held a reading of our works at the Driftwood Players in Edmonds. The Quills are a group of would-be playwrights who have been meeting mostly monthly for the past few years, reading scenes and commenting on each others work. This was the first public reading of most of them.

This was reader's theater, which meant we were not doing blocking, sets, action, or anything. Just sitting in chairs. The Readers, a group of students from Shorecrest High School and some women of a certain age who were friends of the other playwrights were seated in front of the curtain. OK, I read for one of the plays, which needed an older man of a certain age for the reading. 

The plays were a a mixed bag of types we've been working on, and included: Plays about earthquakes, WWII history, masking, layoffs, moving to Seattle, sending kids to college, making a recipe book in a concentration camp, and wildfires. And lest you guess, I was responsible for the layoff and wildfire scenes. They were comedies.

The venue was excellent, with great sound (though we had to get the young people to speak up initially), and they even managed to put the music from the Moving to Seattle play over the speaker system. It is a large small theater with a lot of seating. Edmonds is more than an hour north of Grubb Street, but I'd definitely take in a play there again.

And the readers were good. There were a couple misfires - one young person referred to a local restaurant as "Ivan's" instead of "Ivar's - but in general they acquitted themselves well. There were a couple of the younger folk who understood the brief and took control of their parts. That qwas greatly appreciated.

We had, counting authors, actors, and audience, about 50-60 people total in the house. The overwhelming bulk were friends and family of the playwrights. We passed out review sheets and encouraged people to respond to the plays. Most of the friends and family were very kind their comments. Since my plays were comedies, I was hunched in my seat, seeing what lines landed and which ones missed. Most of them landed.

The Housemates made the long drive up to Edmonds, as did a couple who were members of my regular Monday Night D&D group and a fellow designer from Amazon. Afterwards a group of us adjourned to Bucatini, a small Italian joint about four minutes south of the theater. The food was excellent, the portions large, and the conversation involved a lot of gossip about Amazon. 

Thanks to fellow Quills Catherine Benson, who organized the whole shebang, Susan Weingarten, who MCed the proceedings, and Lisa Emerson who provided the response sheets. And of the young readers, a shout out to Peyton Catt, who will never know I've given him proper credit unless he's the kind of person who googles his own name. 

And who knows? We may do it again sometime. 

More later,