The reading on Tuesday of Tucumcari Tonite! went very well.  The cast of Ian McEwen and Skyler Ray Benson Davis with stage directions (and a coyote howl) by Tamar Bolkvadze under the direction of Cody Goulder made the characters come to life.

You can watch it on YouTube from now until the end of the month.

The Sugar Ridge Rag is now available on-demand, so you have no excuse for not watching it.  Plus, I get a cut of the gate, so yeah, there’s an ulterior motive for me to nag you to see it.

I hope you will watch it and let me know what you think.

The cast and most of the crew of The Sugar Ridge Rag after the premiere last night at LAB Theater Project.  Thank you all.  It was wonderful.

My play The Sugar Ridge Rag opens tonight at the LAB Theater Project in Tampa, running through May 15.  It’s been two years since I began to write it and six months since Owen Robertson, the producer at LAB, wrote me to tell me they wanted to add it to their 2022 season and have it directed by Caroline Jett.

My job as the playwright is to write the play and then entrust it to the company to make the story and the characters come alive.  I will see that happen tonight with this play that I feel is one that is closer to my own heart than just about any other of my works produced so far.  I know it is in good hands.  The process from page to stage has been thrilling to watch as Owen, Caroline, and the cast and crew have put the production together.  Located in a storefront in historic Ybor City along the old cobblestone streets, this small-in-square-footage theatre has been thoroughly professional and taking care of every detail.

One of my duties was to write a note for the program.  I’ve seen this in other plays and I’ve wondered what I would say about the play if I had the chance to write it.  Well, now I have, and here it is.

Every one of us has moments when our life changes course. How we deal with that moment says much about who we are, where we will go, and how it will touch those we love. For me, one such moment was May 4, 1970, when four students were killed at Kent State University in Ohio during a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. I was seventeen and lived just over a hundred miles from the school. The loss hit me hard because those students were not much older than me, and at least one of them wasn’t even involved in the demonstration; he was just passing by. The deaths further divided the country over the war, wounds which have yet to heal. For me, the war changed from being an abstract series of grainy images on the nightly news into something real that I would have to confront in four months when I would turn eighteen and have to register for the draft. The choice I made on that morning in May 1970 changed my life forever.

For a long time, I thought of writing about twin brothers going their different ways, each following what they believed was their calling and what their decisions meant to the people they left behind. When the fiftieth anniversary of Kent State came in 2020, I was able to hear the Granger family of Sugar Ridge, Ohio, tell me their memories about that time and how they dealt with it. What they told me wasn’t about politics or ideology or war vs. peace. It was about how each of them learned that something as simple as being able to sit in the backyard on a summer evening and listen to a baseball game on the radio was what really mattered, and how loving one another was the most important thing of all.

If you can’t make it to the theatre, it will be available on-demand from May 12 to 26. Enjoy the show.

I’m back at the William Inge Theatre Festival, which faithful readers will know is my annual pilgrimage to honor a playwright in the town where he grew up.  This is my twenty-ninth trip here since the first one in 1991 — I missed 2002, and 2020 and 2021 were postponed — so it’s really good to be back.

Today I’m presenting a paper at the Scholars’ Conference portion of the festival.  The rest of the time will be spent hanging out with my friends, old and new.

Forty-five years ago tonight my first play was produced by the University of Minnesota.  Staged in the Experimental Theatre of the Rarig Center, it was directed by the late Stephen G. Hults.  It was my master’s thesis project.

I consider it to be my first pancake: used to test the griddle then tossed or fed to the dog.  I subsequently revised it and directed it at the University of Colorado in 1984.

This is the poster from the original production.

I was once asked if I would like to see it produced again.  My reply was concise: “Not even at gunpoint.”

The first read-through, February 6, 2022

The LAB Theater Project is in a small space — 45 seats — but with a big heart and unlimited enthusiasm, not to mention professionalism at every level. They also have the passion to make it work on every level, and I was amazed at how the reading came together with the cast and the team working with them. I was also remembering that out of small spaces and high energy comes great work: Caffe Cino in New York in the early 1960’s was little more than a storefront coffee shop, but out of it came playwrights who honed their craft while they waited tables next to actors between their shifts at whatever jobs they could find to make their way onto the stage: people such such as Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Al Pacino, Bette Midler, and many others.

The point is that the best theatre is done in small spaces where the focus is on the work, not the star power, and the audience sees the talent, passion, and effort up close.

I am honored to have “The Sugar Ridge Rag” have its world premiere at a storefront theatre in Tampa, Florida. It’s better than Broadway.

We have a cast.  The first table reading will be on Sunday, February 6 at the LAB Theater Project in Tampa.