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Well, it had to happen. For the first time, I didn’t earn more from playwriting and playwriting activities than I did the year before. This is in large part due to the 2018 production of ONCE IN MY LIFETIME: A Buffalo Football Fantasy, though even if I remove that, I’m about $300 shy of 2017, so no more excuses: it was bound to happen eventually and I was lucky to mark increases for as long as I did.

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Which isn’t to say it was a bad year! I submitted plays to 355 opportunities (often with more than one play), which is a significant drop from last year’s 498, and I can no longer say this is because of my reduced ten-minute submissions (I will no longer submit to opps that want brand new work and won’t pay for it, and there are a lot of those). It’s a reality that calls for plays are becoming fewer as they become more segmented, which means we need to be changing our marketing strategy. Of my submissions, 236 were full-length opportunities and 119 were for short plays; this may also be the biggest gap between those two as well.

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The results were still good, however. I had six readings of six different full-length plays—a far cry from last year’s 16, though last year, TEACH was on a roll that accounted for 10 of them—but one more production than last year’s four. ELEVATOR GIRL was produced twice, once at the start of the year in Chicago and once at the end of the year at Bates College in Maine (state 47!). Both were a result of NPX. FLOWERS IN THE DESERT got two more productions—one in England, one in Cape Cod—and was also published by Stage Rights. Funky Little Theater in Colorado Springs produced its second play of mine, ON THE ROOF, and I flew out with my daughter to see it. (In honor of Stonewall, Post Industrial Productions in Buffalo also did two stellar readings of it, and a song from it that I wrote was featured in the Rainbow Project in DC.)

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Also in honor of Stonewall, I curated BUA TAKES 10: Stonewall Edition for Buffalo United Artists, and a piece of ON THE ROOF was in that as well. I also had 28 productions of short plays (which represents a 24 percent rate of production on those 119 submissions), including nine more of “You Haven’t Changed A Bit,” which brings the total productions of that play to 53, the most of any of my short plays. This is down from last year’s 55 ten-minute play productions, but given that I haven’t written a new short in more than two years (which means submitting to fewer opportunities), that’s not too bad, especially because I also made about $500 on them and had a couple published. I also had a bunch of monologues published. MEET ME AT THE GATES, MARCUS JAMES was also published by YouthPLAYS.

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On the prize front, TEACH won the Guilford Technical Community College’s New Play Initiative and will be produced there in the spring. I picked up my third Emanuel Fried Award for Outstanding New Play at the Artie Awards for ONCE IN MY LIFETIME: A Buffalo Football Fantasy. I made a major breakthrough on AMERICAN DEAL, thanks to the online writing group I started and, as the year ends, it’s a semifinalist for the Thomas Wolfe Competition. TEACH continues to get noticed; it had a workshop production with Athena Plays in Progress in Denver—a wonderful festival—and is currently an O’Neill semifinalist.

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In addition to AMERICAN DEAL getting a little attention, HEARTS OF STONE not only semi’ed for Bay Area Playwrights but had a reading at 5^th Wall in Charleston and was also offered a residency. It’s also a current finalist for Santa Barbara PlayFest. And CHRISTMAS 2.0 was a B Street Comedies semi. It feels good when the less topical/sexy of my plays get a little attention!

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I started submitting my 2016 Kilroys List (among many other things) play, BRILLIANT WORKS OF ART, again as a new work, and it immediately started getting traction, most notably being read at the Kennedy Center Page to Stage Festival and also as one of five invitees to the Detroit New Works Festival. It’s also a current finalist for the Lance Hewitt Reading Series (notification season starts earlier every year!), and has a three-reading development cycle with a New York company. And it’s not over yet, so don’t give up on those unproduced plays! BRILLIANT WORKS OF ART, along with TEACH and ELEVATOR GIRL, are currently the top three recommended full-length plays on the New Play Exchange (NPX); ELEVATOR GIRL stands at number one, currently with 43 recommendations.

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I traveled a little less (which is OKAY), making just 15 trips as opposed to last year’s 18, and my daughter joined me on two—one to Los Angeles and one to Colorado, which was so much fun, because she’s a perfect travel companion who forces me to do things besides stay in my hotel room and work. And I’ve already got trips scheduled this year for January (Miami), February (New York), March (France!!), and July (TBA).

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On the writing front, I started a couple new plays, and finished FOUR DOORS DOWN (and got to do a great Cape Cod retreat to develop it) and BEST LAID PLAN(t)S (the latter kind of jumped the queue ahead of a bunch of other stuff), and PAST MIDNIGHT: A Visit with Larry and Viv. I also wrote a pilot for ONCE IN MY LIFETIME, which got shopped around all year but went nowhere (on the plus side, I learned very quickly how to write a pilot!). So while I didn’t meet my exact playwriting goals for 2019, I did write the same number of things; some titles just took the place of others. Oh, and I also wrote two trivia books that essentially ate my entire month of June are available on Amazon, where they’ve already got a slew of great reviews.

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I continued to serve the Dramatists Guild on Council (and am up for reelection in February; please vote!), Plays in Progress faculty, and on four committees—Award, Best Practices, Education and, after I reported a theater for a decade of violation—Copyright Advocacy. I also furthered my playwriting education by seeing more than 120 shows in Buffalo, on Broadway, and at the Shaw Festival.

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Last year at this time, I had no idea what the next year was bringing. This year, I know quite a bit. LITTLE WOMEN…NOW gets its world premiere at Road Less Traveled Productions in November 2020 and we’re still trying to make that a rolling world premiere, so if you know another theater that might be interested, let me know! (I have an upcoming reading at  Miami’s Zoetic Stage.) BRILLIANTS WORKS OF ART has New York opp, and I also have the HEARTS OF STONE residency as well as development on PAST MIDNIGHT with the commissioning theater. BEST LAID PLAN(t)S also has production interest for the fall and I have another kind-of commission due by March. So even though I don’t feel like my big opp submissions this year were the strongest plays I’ve ever written (TEACH is going to be a tough act to follow), I have things to do. I still need to finish the two plays I started when BEST LAID PLAN(t)S jumped in, and there are two other adaptations begging for attention. And, we’re planning to move, so it looks like I’m going to be plenty busy.

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How was your year?

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(don’t forget to check out my new website by clicking on the home page!)

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