A playwright for one minute
Back in the late ‘80s, a Minneapolis screenwriters' group sponsored a couple of public readings for a movie script I’d written. It was small performance, for maybe 40 to 50 people, but it was professionally done, with local stage actors volunteering their time and talent to act out my words. And though the script never amounted to much beyond that, I still remember the thrill of hearing my characters come to life, hearing my jokes getting actual laughs. I didn’t go on to become a screenwriter or TV writer, but last year, I started thinking about the possibility of again having something I wrote performed on stage, this time via those 10-minute play competitions that are popular with theatre groups. I had a story that I’d started to tell in a movie script 40 years ago, but never finished; I lifted a sequence from that screenplay, and through a lot of rewriting, turned it into ten-minute, two-person play. Twenty-five submissions later, that play remains unproduced. But in the pro