"Unchecked Baggage" arrives

In early 2025, I saw a competition for 10-minute plays that took place anywhere within an airport. 

 

I assumed most people would naturally gravitate to scenarios around the most obvious settings – TSA lines, airport gates and baggage claims. So it seemed one way to stand out was to set my script in none of those.

 

Instead, I’d feature a family of four as they arrived at the airport with their bags. No interactions with airport personnel – just an all-out comedy about their inter-family conflicts, triggered by the stresses of traveling together. 

 

I thought of it as writing a scene for the cast of a family sitcom – All in the Family in particular, not that I was trying to use their characters. But like that show, and other well-crafted sitcoms, I wanted every cast member to have a distinctive relationship to each of the other characters, that would guide their responses. In fact, I (sloppily) diagrammed out how each of my family members would relate to each other.

The resulting script was one of my funniest and strongest, and I felt validated when it made it into the Winter Yield 2 play festival by the Vidalia Theatre Company.

 

I thought the title I chose – Unchecked Baggage – was appropriate. But when I saw the names of the other plays in the show, I wished I had been a little less clever in my naming. There was also a Baggage and a Check Your Baggage. 

 

I offered to change my play’s title – since the daughter referred to her parents’ behavior as one of the stages they go through on trips, I realized Flight Stages would have worked, too – but I didn’t hear back from the theatre. So Unchecked Baggage it was.

 

I planned to fly to Atlanta to see the final performance – but the January weather didn’t cooperate. An ice storm cancelled the last night’s show. 

 

But happily, Vidalia Theatre Company recorded the performances, so I was able to see my play performed – and get the most laughs of any play I’ve yet had performed. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fly Me Again

Image
We referenced this ad campaign in an earlier post , but it really deserves its own entry. This memorable/notorious American Airlines campaign appeared back in 1971, at the behest of National Airlines'  Lewis Maytag  who sought to modernize the airline and the image of its stewardesses.  (Yes, they were still known as stewardesses back then.) At the time, airline advertising had frequently based their messages on the friendliness and attentiveness of their stewardesses, but previous efforts tended more toward the chauvinistic end of sexism spectrum, treating them more like Ladies Of The Air than ladies of the night: (Despite the caveman ethos of the headline and illustration, if you click on the ad to enlarge it and read the copy, you'll see it's actually about men being so beguiled by their stewardesses that they often took them for wives -- after first mistaking wives for servants, I suppose.) But now, with the sexual revolution and women's liberation in full swing (an...
Read more

Doing the Shark Dance

Image
So there I was, on the sands of a Florida beach, surrounded by a group of young people in swimwear, all eyes on me as I instructed them in the dance they were about to perform. The dance I was still coming up with barely five minutes earlier. The Shark Dance.   In 1994, I was a writer at an ad agency in Minneapolis, where one of my projects was the launch of that year’s Tigershark personal watercraft models made by Arctic Cat. Along with writing the ads and brochure, I would be going down to Florida to help supervise the film shoot of people riding Tigersharks in the gulf.    That included a riff on  Jaws , where beachgoers are panicked by a kid yelling “Shark!” as he spots a guy on a Tigershark. And later, the four Tigershark models zooming left to right across the screen, followed by a large shark fin we had made that was pulled through the water on a submerged rig. The fin was convincing enough that two riders unconnected to our shoot darted over and started yelli...
Read more

If two minutes is funny, why not ten?

Image
Last fall, I posted here about having a two-minute (yes, two-minute) play,  Thinking of Elephants , produced by the Minnesota Shorts Festival.    It was a simple idea for what was essentially a quick skit. Taking place in a laundromat, one person’s discomfort at having the “underthings” in her basket seen by a coworker ends in a kind of “mutually assured destruction” scenario; she demands a peek at his own “unmentionables.”   But even for that simple scenario, I wrote too much dialogue and had to throw out many lines to keep it to about two minutes.   But after seeing the two-minute production, I wondered if the idea couldn’t sustain the 10-minute length that most short-play competitions request. The key wasn’t just to add back in my excised dialogue, but to find an emotional core to the story that would make it about more than just embarrassment. Pondering this for a while, I realized that the text of the story – feeling exposed before a coworker – could be su...
Read more