by Dave DeBord
A public reading in Winterset, Iowa several years ago led to a stranger in California recommending my script to a professional theater group in Kansas City who performed the short play this spring. It was a roundabout process that I had little control over, but it turned out well.
I wrote a short play, in an hour actually, a number of years ago after I was challenged to start a script with the line “Nobody told me it would be like this.” I had a public reading of the script—“I’ve Never Done the Tango”—in Winterset during the summer of 1993, as part of an afternoon presentation of central Iowa writers’ material. Two non-actors read lines from the printed script in front of friends, relatives, and strangers and received polite applause upon completion. I put the script away a few days later after making minor alterations and thought little of it until two years later when I was looking for material to send to a radio script contest and to the Actors Theater of Louisville National Ten Minute Play Contest.
After a quick polish, mostly removing the minor alterations made two years earlier, I submitted the script to both contests. Some time later I received a letter from the KOPN National Radio Script Contest noting they had given the script an honorable mention and included it in their Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop Scriptbook. Great. Then a second letter arrived, from Louisville, indicating the script had “made the cut” in their contest. It didn’t win (you would have heard me bragging, it’s a major contest) but I was surprised and pleased it did as well as it did.
I thought little about the script again until 1998 when I got a phone call from someone who had been with a friend in the audience in Winterset five years earlier. The caller wondered if I had been the writer and if so could I send a copy of the script to her friend in California who had enjoyed the reading. I sent it to California and a few days later received a thank-you note and a request for permission to share the script with some friends.
I heard nothing else until I came home one evening in February [2000] and had a short phone message saying someone wanted to put on “a play of mine and would that be OK?” It was Friday evening so I heard only a non-specific phone-machine message when I called the number they left. I didn’t know which play they were talking about, who the caller was, or where they were from (no city, state, business or other clue) so I had to wait until the following Monday to call again.
Monday I found out “Tango” was to be part of a performance March 10 and 11 of one-acts and vignettes about women’s issues performed by Broadsides Productions, a theater group formed in Kansas City several years ago. The short plays dealt with everything from God creating her first human to a woman shopping for a sperm donor.
The vignettes were by playwrights Kristen Lazarian, Los Angeles, recipient of the 1999 Green Theatre Company’s International New Playwright Competition in England (and one of Bill Coleman’s students a few years ago); PS Lorio, Baltimore, who has two productions opening this year in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.; Rich Orloff, New York, an award-winning playwright whose works has been produced off-Broadway; Mike Phelan, Philadelphia, who has won playwrighting contests in Virginia and Texas; Cat Hasson West, Philadelphia, whose plays have been produced by many theater ensembles in that city; and me. I was in very good company.
My wife Kris and I attended the Saturday night performance and had a great time after the show with the two fine actresses who performed the piece. Typical of professionals, they brought unique interpretations to the characters and gave the script real life. Their understanding of the farcical nature of the script impressed me, as did their understanding of how comic timing was critical to its success. They were very pleased we attended and particularly happy I didn’t let them know I was in the audience until after the performance. Importantly, they also asked if I would write more scripts for them.
The moral of the story is keep getting your work out there. Someone may see it who can have an impact on your career.