You guys! I got back on Sunday from the first annual Dramatists Guild Conference. It was really great! Well, it was mostly great. Turns out conferences as a whole are very weird things. Also, I’m really shy, so it took me the majority of the conference to come out of my shell and make some friends. But then I did make friends! So that was great. Great great great. Here’s the thing about playwrights: we’re all so crazy to even be pursuing this as a profession that whenever we meet another person who is also stupidly doing this it’s like finding a kindred spirit. It’s such a weird, niche thing to do. I saw that this was really true when I got home and had dinner with a bunch of (non-theatre) friends and tried to tell them that I talked to Doug Wright! And David Ives sat next to me at the bar! And Christopher Durang sat on the couch next to me to wait for his taxi! And nobody cared. My friends, I mean. Just because, if you didn’t see
I Am My Own Wife then you don’t know how moving and thrilling and imaginative it was. And if you were never an actor then you were never in
All In The Timing in school
. And you might never have read anything by Durang. Because most people don’t read or see those plays. We’re making art for a very small (some would say elite) group of people. Uh oh! Sad face alert! This is the part of the recap where I tell you about the theme that kept popping up at the conference: theatre is hard and nobody likes it! Haha. No, it’s not hard. It’s fun. And lots of people like it. But the economics are all wrong. It’s too expensive and playwrights don’t get any money, ever.
You guys! I got back on Sunday from the first annual Dramatists Guild Conference. It was really great! Well, it was mostly great. Turns out conferences as a whole are very weird things. Also, I’m really shy, so it took me the majority of the conference to come out of my shell and make some friends. But then I did make friends! So that was great. Great great great. Here’s the thing about playwrights: we’re all so crazy to even be pursuing this as a profession that whenever we meet another person who is also stupidly doing this it’s like finding a kindred spirit. It’s such a weird, niche thing to do. I saw that this was really true when I got home and had dinner with a bunch of (non-theatre) friends and tried to tell them that I talked to Doug Wright! And David Ives sat next to me at the bar! And Christopher Durang sat on the couch next to me to wait for his taxi! And nobody cared. My friends, I mean. Just because, if you didn’t see I Am My Own Wife then you don’t know how moving and thrilling and imaginative it was. And if you were never an actor then you were never in All In The Timing in school
