Surprise endings

I spent most of the 80s as a playwright-in-residence, first for Gary O'Brien's New Rose Theatre and later for Peter Fornara's Cubiculo Theatre. A playwright can have no better environment. There is profound satisfaction in this ultimate support: you have a slot on the future season for the play you haven't written yet. At the New Rose, they even produced plays I wrote beyond this "one a year" arrangement, Christmas at the Juniper Tavern being one of them (I wrote it while commissioned to write my play about Moliere, making O'Brien very nervous, but JT turned out to be my biggest hit there, even moving on to public TV). Few playwrights get this kind of extraordinary support for their work, and I was blessed to experience it.

Later I felt homeless, a playwright without a theater, which is the common frustration of most playwrights. I never expected to find such support again.

And I haven't -- and yet I've stumbled into an experience very close to what I experienced in the 80s. I've been working with the same seven actors on video projects for over a year now. We seem to have an informal, unnamed video production company. We're finishing up a silent comedy, our most ambitious (and I think best) project to date, with an even more ambitious project starting immediately thereafter. Next summer we'll tackle a feature -- shooting a feature on the Flip! Working with the same actors is exactly like being a playwright-in-residence. Moreover, I've discovered a great love, and hopefully some talent, for editing. I love doing these projects.

So this is an "ending" in the broad sweep of my career that was totally unplanned. Indeed, if you told me 14 months ago I'd be making videos, I wouldn't have believed it. Technology makes it possible; and, of course, the discovery of a group of talented actors eager to work on our projects. Yes, this is as much fun as the 80s. I never would have thunk it.