For more than a decade, my year in review was dedicated to talking about submissions and how they paid off. Those days are gone. As I finish this, I have made just 136 submissions for the whole year, down just seven from 2023–so we must be leveling off–but a quarter of the fat years of mid the mid-2010s, and less than half of where we were in 2021. The real hit came in 2022, mostly likely as COVID finally made its effects known. I summarized this all rather neatly in my 2023 year in review, so I won’t go over old ground. This was more a year of creating opportunity for myself, a trend I think will continue.

So what did this year look like? I’ve never talked to more playwrights who feel discouraged, tired, hopeless. Theaters, too. Playwright Franky D. Gonzalez summed it up well in this guest post for Audrey Cefaly’s Substack, and I don’t think I can do it better than he did. There’s a been a palpable shift and we’re all feeling it.

The year felt slow. I’d moved in October 2023 so a lot of it was taken up with contractors and furniture shopping and settling in. I didn’t get back into a good writing groove until early fall. In the meantime, I did have two major productions—both in Buffalo. TEACH—after more than twenty readings, two fully staged workshops, and a 2020 aborted college production as the result of a contest win—finally got a production at Buffalo State University after students saw a reading and championed it be shoehorned into the season. It was an incredible production that confirmed the play was done, an assessment that TRW agreed with by accepting it for publication. It remains one of the top ten recommended full-length plays on the New Play Exchange.



TEACH at Buffalo State University


Following TEACH, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES—after having been produced at myriad high schools and middle schools—finally got its professional world premiere at Theatre of Youth! It was wonderful to see the show play to full houses of school children! The show, along with my one-act LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW–continues to get productions across the county, which never isn’t exciting. I also had two ten-minute productions from the few ten-minute play submissions I made, both “Jack Pork,” which I found interesting. And readings of MABEL TALKS, BEST LAID PLAN(t)S (which also got an O’Neill semi nod), CHRISTMAS 2.0, and MADNESS MOST DISCREET Larry and Viv’s Last Visit—which gets another reading in 2025 in Denver.


ANNE OF GREEN GABLES at Theatre of Youth

The year also saw two more publications—LITTLE WOMEN… NOW by Stage Partners and THE WAY IT IS by Original Works Publishing, which had first expressed interest in it years ago, but wanted it to have a few more productions under its belt. I also had a disappointing experience where a prominent Texas Christian college student directors wanted to direct LITTLE WOMEN… NOW and put me in conversations with faculty who were excited to have me come down and talk to students, conduct a workshop, etc. as well as about the 90-minute version they asked me to execute. And then they read the play and fed me some bullshit about how it was never actually decided, and the student director was on board with their decision (I never heard from her again…). But hey—there’s a 90-minute version if you’re interested. I also had scenes and monologues published in several anthologies.

A slower year also meant fewer opportunities to travel for writing business, but not none. I went to New York City twice–once for the National New Play Network Showcase in April–and I signed all my plays at the Drama Bookshop (there are even more there now!)–and again in November for Elizabeth Coplan’s fully realized Grief Dialogues, which was everything we hoped it would be; my short play “Life Lines” has been part of Grief Dialogues since its inception a decade ago and was included in the immersive experience.



I also had time to plan some of my own travel–a full family week in a gorgeous spot in the Finger Lakes and a trip to Northern California to visit in-laws and let my sons see Oakland Coliseum before it closed. And my family joined and completed the Western New York Hiking Challenge! With theater travel on the decline, I need to do more of this!



Here’s the most exciting news of 2024: I wrote two plays, the first since summer 2021. The first is a solo show I’ve been wanting to write for a particular actor for more than ten years. I don’t want to say more about what I’m hoping will be done with it, but we had a reading of it December 17 with one of my writers’ groups and it looks promising. The second play is another youth adaptation that I’ve been wanting to get to for a while; I’ll be seeking some development partners on that soon. I also adapted THE WAY IT IS into a screenplay after two theaters said they thought it would make a good film and egged on by a deadline for single location screenplays. I’ll be submitting that in 2025.

THE WIVES CLUB became DEATH IN THE CUL-DE-SAC became DEADLY WIVES CLUB and was put off a season for filming but finally dropped July 11. I had a watch party, and it was great fun to see the screenplay come to life. It’s such a different experience letting a script go and knowing the director will have their way with it. The good news is that they barely touched the dialogue; the bad is that they cut a lot of scenes that resulted in a much broader story than I’d written. It was still a fun experience and I’m still pitching to write more of them because it’s fun and it pays!




I start rehearsal next week for BRILLANT WORKS OF ART, my long-standing, Kilroys List, award-winning, top ten recommended full-length on NPX, thisclose play, which is finally getting a first production! It’s been such a journey, I even wrote this blog post about it. The cast is outstanding, and I can’t wait to see this on its feet after nearly a decade! I feel like I’m on a mission to get each of my plays produced at least once! Others, I’ve pushed toward publishing because they’ve been floating around so long that I just want them to be fixed somewhere. 



So… while it was a slower year—financially as well, with this year’s writing-related earnings (including teaching) being about a quarter of 2023’s, which was mostly the movie—it wasn’t completely fallow, and that’s okay. It’s hard to complain about two major productions, lots of school productions, a movie airing, three publications, two plays written, and a film company still looking to develop another feature with me. I have writing projects I can finally get to now that the two that I’d needed to write are done. I was worried after so long that I’d kind of lost the writing groove, but it’s back with a vengeance—and yet with a calmer approach that feels right.

How was your year?