One Giant leep for Playwright Kind......
The process of writing my first play Twentysomethings that has been one immense joy and also pain. The funny thing is how I started writing it. When it started was it a back porch, then, it went from a porch in Mystic CT, after a summer of 2004, standing around with no job or I was probably too tired too look for a job. So, this became my job. I remember that i wanted to tell the world three things.
1) I wanted it to be about the struggles of life.
2) I wanted it to explain that secrets that we all tell must be broken at some time.
3). I wanted to include Jazz in it.
Those been at my requirements. I set to work. They say write what you know and what you know about. Truth be told... I knew very little by the subject of mental illness... And specifically what I was going after.... In the early stages that is too say about 2004 an I went to the main research library in New York City and started researching, Mental Hospitals and mental patients specifically schizophrenia. Once all of this research was completed I started writing. The very first time Twentysometings with attempted to be read was at Mitchell College, in New London CT. And I gathered four of my friends with who I tried in vain to read my work however, it was a premature effort. Thus the spring of 2007, I left to go home for spring break, well, the director for my alumnus Theater The Main Street Theater and Dance Alliance began to gain interest in what i was up too.
Sofia Landon Geier who was then the head of the Teenage Theater and I took a script notes meeting. I remember that in the earlier part of the process she and I talked very little about what It was truly about... I just kept writing and moving forward. and filling her email box... as i wrote I begin to discover was that my play was really about a 23 year old Intern named Benny McKinley who had a lot of trouble with the world. I could identify with that, so could millions of other teenagers and Twentysomethings. However, that is the normal story, what we all hear.... What i put in was the notion that pretty much it was Matriarch, June McKinley who was keeping the family secret at bay by telling her 7 year old son Benny that his father was on an archival dig. Folks, this is called a white lie.....
The Original cast of Twentysomethings on June 27th 2007 directed by Sofia Landon Geier included
James Barniker.....Benny McKinley
Deborah Drucker..June McKinley
Ron Roth.............Stage Directions
Emily Leavitt.......Jennet Conner
Marc Leavitt........William McKinley
After this there was three year laps in which i kept working but never brought it up because i was still developing it, until the summer of 2008 I was visiting The Museum of Television and Radio and bumped into the person who for a long time was in charge of editing my work with me. D.H. Johnson. who worked on it as long as he could. Then I remembered that i did a small informal bunch of readings with a woman named Margie J. Harris who was a former school teacher. I called up because i really needed a dramatuge who would work with me. Margie became just that and from fall 2008-2009 i kept revising and rewriting. Then over the summer of 2010 i went to see a very good production of The Housewives of Mannheim and approached one of the producers Vasi Lawrence who was looking for New Work. lets just say we have been talking...Twentysomethings is just that. So recently in November just before Thanksgiving we had another reading of it..... So i will tell you it went well. ... still i keep saying to myself what Sondheim's Evening Primrose said by the character Charles who is alone in a department store "Is it done? Are they gone? Am i alone? I am alone. It's done their gone. Jamie you're an unadulterated Genius You are an indisputable extraordinary, What was that.... not a thing.... You're a fool.....You are alone.... And it begins.... "
