Keeping Up With the Joneses
It's that time of year again. No, not baseball. No, not drum corps (that's a few months away). It's time for this year's school play. Every year around this time PS100 starts up their Arts program, so my wife asks me to write their play. I don't mind for a couple of reasons: First, it gets me writing. Second, the school plays benefit a lot of kids. And third, the school plays get done. A lot. An awful lot. Far more than I can keep track of (and yet publishers still say they're not commercially viable).
The hard part with these is that I'm given a topic to write about, and sometimes that's tricky. This year the subject is the 50's. Now, we're dealing with a school where the students' PARENTS were born after the 50's, so for them there won't be much to relate to. So, we had to think of a way to create a play that wasn't so much a homage to the 50's, but incorporated elements of the 50's.
The finished product takes place in 1955 -- a family gets an invitation to attend opening day at Disneyland. Along the way they visit the first McDonalds and bump into a budding Elvis. The messages are the same as they are in most plays for kids of that age -- listen to your parents, it's good have the family stick together, etc. Rehearsals start tomorrow.
I will admit that they're getting harder and harder to write. Am I dried up? Have I written all I can write? Surely some feel I reached that point before I every wrote my first play back in 1989. But it is getting more and more difficult. Something is missing -- the spark that drove me to write all that I've already written. Is it my job that's draining my creative juices? Many think it is. I think it has a lot to do with it as well. But I'll never really know.
In the mean time, I'm just happy that another school play is in the can, ready to be done by schools around the world.
The hard part with these is that I'm given a topic to write about, and sometimes that's tricky. This year the subject is the 50's. Now, we're dealing with a school where the students' PARENTS were born after the 50's, so for them there won't be much to relate to. So, we had to think of a way to create a play that wasn't so much a homage to the 50's, but incorporated elements of the 50's.
The finished product takes place in 1955 -- a family gets an invitation to attend opening day at Disneyland. Along the way they visit the first McDonalds and bump into a budding Elvis. The messages are the same as they are in most plays for kids of that age -- listen to your parents, it's good have the family stick together, etc. Rehearsals start tomorrow.
I will admit that they're getting harder and harder to write. Am I dried up? Have I written all I can write? Surely some feel I reached that point before I every wrote my first play back in 1989. But it is getting more and more difficult. Something is missing -- the spark that drove me to write all that I've already written. Is it my job that's draining my creative juices? Many think it is. I think it has a lot to do with it as well. But I'll never really know.
In the mean time, I'm just happy that another school play is in the can, ready to be done by schools around the world.
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