10/9/2024 0 Comments How I Became a Theatre Middle-AgerThe big news I've been sitting on awhile is now out. My second full-length play is making its premiere in November, following on the heels of last year's Straight On To Stardust: I began writing The Garish Sun almost immediately after the final performance of Straight On. Partly, I'd had so much fun writing my first play that I wanted to see if I could do it again. Partly, I wanted to write a play. Yes, yes, we staged Straight On as a play, but in terms of canvas and characters, I'd really written a movie script. The thing sprawls, taking place in four states and involving upward of a dozen characters. I wanted to strip a story down: five characters, max, having to deal with each other on one set. (Side note: Any filmmakers out there interested in taking a look at Straight On To Stardust? I have a script! Call me.) The Garish Sun is a race-the-clock-and-the-rampant-corruption thriller about the last three people standing at a newspaper that's being put out to pasture. They decide to go after one last important story. The Yellowstone Repertory Theatre cast—led by Chas Llewellyn (editor Sonny Sturgis), Haley Sielinski (reporter Randi Hutch), and Adam Roebling (recent graduate Dexter Collins)—is breathing life into it in surprising and beautiful ways. How I know they're nailing it: In rehearsals, I feel like I'm back in a newsroom, a place where I spent the first 25 years of my working life, a place where I was most at home, and a place that used to be filled with the people in the world I most admired and loved. The aggregate effect of these two plays is that I now feel as though the "playwright" descriptor I've taken on legitimately sits alongside two other professional appellations I carry: "novelist" and "editor." I can't imagine sustaining the kind of creative life I want without writing more plays. They're fun. They're affirming, when they work. And I have so much to learn. So how did I get here, at the relatively advanced age of 54? I've had no formal training in the dramatic arts, unless you're willing to count a few weeks when I was 9 and 10 years old and attended acting classes at Casa Mañana in Fort Worth, Texas. (I'm not willing to count those; I was a ham as a child but had little talent for acting.) What I have, still, is an abiding love of live performance. Of seeing actors, without a net, spin a world into which I can disappear. Of beholding the magic drawn out by a director and an ensemble who take words on the page—something I can create—and apply their own interpretation to them, thus creating something else entirely. It's so different from the solitary art of creating a novel. Certainly, readers subsequently absorb it and interpret it as they will, but that happens out of the view of the writer. The performance of a play is available to all who attend. And in the case of The Garish Sun, there will be nine such performances, each different from the others in ways subtle and obvious. I can't wait. It was a YRT performance of The Glass Menagerie that made me think I'd like to try to write one. Beautiful words, beautiful performances, the breaking of the fourth wall. Magic. That's what it was. So now I've written two. If there's any regret at all, it's that I didn't find my place in theatre as a much younger man, with more energy, more ideas, and presumably more time to get to them. I envy the theatre kids and what they get to experience, and though I think there's little point in wishing for a return to one's youth—it wasn't as great as it seems in the backward look, and it'd be even harder now—I wish sometimes I'd been one of them. But I wasn't. I'm a theatre middle-ager. I got here at the time that was right for me. The Garish Sun will be staged at NOVA Center for the Performing Arts, 2317 Montana Ave., Billings. Performance dates: Nov. 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23. Please join us!
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About CraigCraig Lancaster is an author, an editor, a publication designer, a layabout, a largely frustrated Dallas Mavericks fan, an eater of breakfast, a dreamer of dreams, a husband, a brother, a son, an uncle. And most of all, a man who values a T-shirt. Archives
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