I didn't set out to self produce my own play. At least, not one I wrote. My original self production idea was limited to acting. I'd had a good time doing Don Nigro's Ravenscroft at The Little Theatre Off Broadway in Grove City, Ohio, and wanted to explore the John Ruffing character a bit more.
The program I put together would have included six of Nigro's short plays, five monologues, Creatures Lurking in the Churchyard, Lagoon, Just Out the Corner of Her Eye, Broadway Macabre, and Mermaid, and a one act play, The Rooky Wood. I'd get to play Ruffing in Creatures Lurking in the Churchyard, The Rooky Wood, and Mermaid, aging from 36 to 75 over the course of the combined show. The other three monologues would provide solo showcases for the other two Rooky Wood cast members and one other actress. They would also give me time to redo my makeup, and by placing Just Out the Corner of Her Eye between Lagoon and The Rooky Wood, give the actress who would play Meridith in Lagoon time to change into her Edwardian costume for The Rooky Wood. Everyone would get a chance to show off a little.
The problem was that Samuel French had issued these six little plays as parts of three different collections. Nigro was willing to have them all lumped together and licensed as if the six were a single work. That makes perfect sense, considering the combined running time was barely two hours. He also suggested the name "Creatures" as a collective title, which is how my production company ended up as the Creatures Plays Corporation.
The title was the only part Samuel French would go along with. The author had approved titling the show that way, and it was obvious that the usual practice of printing the title of each play on a separate line, with the author's name on the next line, would make for a rather clunky looking program cover or poster, so they were fine with that contract modification. But they wouldn't go along with the collective pricing idea. There were three collections involved, and each would have to be licensed separately.
This was getting expensive. I wanted to do a collection of monologues, which put together still amounted to a straight play, but I was looking at the sort of royalties you'd pay for a musical.
We're all familiar with the warning printed in every published script: don't rent a theater before you have a signed contract for the rights to the play. Good advice, and I had followed it. But I had reserved a theater. That's something you generally do need to do before securing the rights, because you need to know the performance dates to get the license. A community theater that owns its own building knows when it will be available. If you're renting a commercial space, you have to reserve it. The show would be presented at The Abbey Theater of Dublin (Ohio), and it was busy enough that I needed to reserve several months in advance in order to get three consecutive weekends.
I could still cancel when I'd reached the point where I knew I wasn't going to be able to do what I'd originally wanted. I'd have been out the $200 deposit, but that would be all.
Did I want to do that? It was obvious the original plan wasn't going to work. The royalties would just be too high, and I couldn't exactly guarantee I'd attract enough of an audience to get the money back.
So I started reading other plays. Lots of other plays. But none of them seemed to have a really good part for someone my age. There are more parts for older actors than older actresses, but there really aren't that many good parts for either.
I started wondering if I should just write something myself. I had time. Probably two or three months before I'd either have to start casting and rehearsing or just drop the whole thing, so I sat down and started writing.
In a remarkably short time I'd produced the first version of Coming Out. I sent this to several friends, and a few interested strangers, for comments and suggestions. It turned out that no one was what you'd call wildly enthusiastic about it. After re-reading it a few times, even I wasn't that enthusiatic about it. The gist seemed to be, "You've got a show here, but I really don't like any of these people."
The original plot was something like this. Dad is a Baptist minister on the day of his retirement. Now that he's retired, he can stop pretending and admit that he stopped believing in God ten years ago, and that much of what he's been preaching for that time was just what he figured the congregation wanted to hear. He kept preaching while he built up his retirement account, not because he believed it. His oldest son, also a minister, does believe this stuff. When his younger son shows up with his roommate, and tells everyone they're moving to New York to get married, the older son explodes, Dad spends a lot of time apologizing for all the homophobic sermons, and there's a lot of yelling. Then it turns out Dad slipped up one day and got the church secretary knocked up. Meanwhile, the oldest son turns out to be a wife beater, and he probably got his infant son killed by attempting faith healing instead of just calling a doctor. The secretary doesn't want to cause problems, but Mom figured it out anyway.
A big issue here is obviously that Dad has been pulling a con on his congregation for the last ten years, which doesn't make him particularly likable. He's hardly alone in this. A surprising number of ministers are secretly atheists. But people still disliked him. The only one they liked was George, the gay son, perhaps because he was the only one they could really root for. All in all, it was a very serious play.
It was obvious some changes had to be made.
Bob, the father, got a new job. Instead of a Baptist minister he became a philosophy professor. He was still an atheist, but now it fit in nicely with his profession. He also became British. Susan, the mother, was promoted from housewife to English Literature professor. Susan's parents were dead now, but Bob's father was still living at 97, and while he never appeared on stage, dialogue established that he had been a theoretical physics professor, was also an atheist, and sixth in a line of barons dating back to the time of George III. Bob was a younger son, so he'd never have inherited the title even if he hadn't been naturalized as an American in 1982. Having him a resident of the United States for the last 38 years also provided a pretty good excuse if the accent wasn't always absolutely correct, and contributed to the humor by Bob's conscious preference for "racy" British slang when he could just as easily use an Americanism that would pass muster.
Instead of Bob's retirement, the family is gathering to celebrate the parents' 40th wedding anniversary. They also come on in pairs, rather than everyone being on stage from the start, which gives Bob and Susan some time alone. This gives the audience a chance to learn a little more about them before the problems start, including establishing that they have a more-or-less "open" marriage, and a running joke that Bob "dresses like Doctor Who." (Actually, he dresses like me, and like Bob, I was wearing tweeds and bow ties long before Matt Smith got the part.) Instead of the heavy drama of the original version, the play had evolved into a dark comedy.
James, the eldest son, remained a preacher, with a 6,000 family church in Texas, and a daily television ministry. James' wife, Karen, started as his contemporary in age, but eventually became quite a bit younger, 26 to James' 37. That was prompted by cast availability, but it turned out to work better. It meant they'd been married a much shorter time, and by having Karen come from an abusive foster home, it also went some way to explaining why she put up with James. The physical abuse, and the faith healing death of their son, remained from the original version. So did the homophobic mania upon learning that his younger brother was gay (something that everyone else in the family had obviously figured out years ago). There are, to be sure, some indications that James may not be as unalterably heterosexual as he'd like to believe, either, but he's a Bible literalist and any such thoughts have to be stomped into the ground and utterly suppressed.
His father thinks that if George wants to marry Eric he should go right ahead and do so, but Bob is an atheist, so he isn't worried about spending an eternity he doesn't believe will exist being tortured in a place he's equally sure is imaginary. James, so far as Bob can tell, is just a well-meaning, but very annoying fanatic. He wouldn't want him running things, but he doesn't initially consider him personally dangerous. He'll learn.
The pregnant secretary was also retained, but now there was an actual affair, not a one-time weakness. Susan was also a bit quicker to see what had happened. This revelation upsets the children a lot more than it bothers Bob and Susan. After all, we'd established fairly early that both of them fooled around when the chance presented itself, and the affairs didn't seem to diminish the obvious love between them. Susan gets a little angry, but mostly she just drinks more and gives Carol a hard time. After finding out that her mother has had as many affairs as her father, Ellen briefly wonders if they're all Bob's children, and Susan states with absolute certainty that they are. James, of course, rants about everyone going to hell, what with being horrible sodomites, adulterers, and fornicators. James being James, he's also completely bewildered when his battered wife decides she's had enough and announces she's going to divorce him. At the end Bob, Susan, and Carol all find out some secrets about each other, and ultimately we're left with Bob and Susan wondering how they're going to explain the solution they've come up with to the two children who are still there (James stormed off after his father called him a "self righteous, obnoxious, unimaginative little fundamentalist prick"), and decide the best answer is probably that Susan will have another drink and Bob will have "the whole bloody bottle."
So, with some re-writing, I had a much better play. Now it was time to cast it.
I knew I was going to be on stage most of the time, so I made sure I had an associate director who would be able to keep everyone, including me, in line.
Announcements were made, and we put together a cast. Ashley Collins was the first cast, as daughter Ellen, and I was glad to get her. She'd played Dolly, the maid, in Ravenscroft, so if nothing else I knew she'd remember her lines and deliver them with perfect timing. Jim LeVally signed on to play James without even reading the script, and I was damned glad to get him, too. Bob and Susan are technically the leads, but James and Karen are the real stand out parts. Over the next week or so we filled all the roles.
Then the fun began. The actor who was going to play Ellen's husband got sick and had to drop out after only a couple rehearsals. Then the actress who was going to play Susan found herself faced with potential conflicts that might, or might not, have her leaving the country during the run. There was no way of knowing, so she was out too. My first choice for Karen had her work schedule changed, so she was out as well. There was a similar problem with the actress playing the secretary, Carol. (Hint for directors: Be wary of casting nannies in your shows, their working schedules are sometimes unpredictable.) And, just to make things perfect, the actor who was going to play George, the gay son, also ended up unable to do it because of his changed work schedule. This sort of thing isn't usually a problem with a professional show, obviously, but easily can be when people aren't getting paid. Making a living takes precedence.
So there I was, a couple weeks into rehearsals, and I'm down to Bob (me), James, Ellen, and George's boyfriend Eric (Will Smith), with Susan, Karen, George, Mark, and Carol now needing to be recast. Just for fun, the associate director also bailed about this time.
So I had to find a lot of new people. Ashley suggested Jai Furlong for George, and when we got him in to read he was perfect. Brenda Newsom came in as Susan, and Martha Kathryn Smith agreed to do Karen (two more Ravenscroft veterans, Brenda had played the housekeeper, Mrs French and Martha had been the governess and prime murder suspect, Marcy). This was when Karen's age dropped from 37 to 26, which was still a good bit older than Martha, but within the range she could play convincingly. Then Grace Rinehart came in as Carol. We went quite a while before finding a new Mark, and at one point I seriously considered just writing him out of the show (the published script includes alternate lines for that eventuality). He didn't say very much anyway. Eventually we found Chris Wharton for that part, and Ashley could stop carrying around a throw pillow that she could place on the couch to indicate where he should be sitting during rehearsals.
I'd allowed a longer than normal rehearsal period, just in case I needed to make script changes, and it came in handy during the cast shuffling. In the middle of all this Colleen Dunne came aboard as director, after she noticed a Facebook post mentioning the available job. By this time I'd come to the conclusion that I'd just as soon not do any of the directing if I was going to be acting in this thing, so she became the sole director. Colleen was young, and had only assistant directed to that point, but she'd been acting since she was a child and it was instantly obvious she'd been paying attention. She got people moving around more, and suggested some cuts and other changes that definitely improved the show. The woman belongs on Broadway, and take your pick as to acting or directing, because she's brilliant at both.
I suppose this brings up a popular current topic on some other blogs. Is it legitimate for directors to make changes to plays? Colleen suggested some, and mostly they were made. But here's the thing. There's a huge difference between a director suggesting changes to a play that's never been done before, and directors arbitrarily making changes to something that's already been published. When Colleen suggested changes, she was suggesting them to the author, and I could approve or disapprove of them. Most of the time I agreed with her. She rarely suggested specific line changes, by the way. It was more along the lines of, "You might want to think about shortening this scene, because it's dragging a little." One ten minute, two-character scene was cut nearly in half by that suggestion, and it worked better after it was cut, even if I did lose a good bit of a favorite rant. Bob was supposed to be a college professor, but sometimes he tended to talk a little too much like one. All of those changes made it into the published script, along with a few ad libs from the actors when I thought they worked better than what I'd originally written. One that didn't was changing one word that the actor had trouble pronouncing for another that came out easier, but that was an accommodation to a particular actor and the next may not have a problem with the word.
Now, while we were rehearsing, we were also trying to raise some additional money. I had enough to produce the show on my own, but I still wanted to take Max Bialystock's advice about never putting your own money into a show. An Indiegogo campaign was set up, and promptly went nowhere. A website was set up for the show, at www.ComingOutThePlay.com, and it was, and is, a rather nice site, but didn't get much traffic. (I also own ComingOutMovie.com, just in case.) One reason for trying to raise a good deal of extra cash was that I wanted a DVD of the production, and to get the quality I really wanted, which involved having a professional crew with three cameras shoot the preview, I was looking at somewhere in the area of $10,000. That didn't include actually making the DVDs, which would have been another couple grand.
In some ways we got away pretty cheap. The management at my apartment complex let us use the community room to rehearse, so that was one major expense eliminated. The theater, obviously, we had to pay for, but they found us all the furniture we needed in their stock, so we didn't have to buy or rent that. If we'd wanted to build a set they also had flats we could use. As it happened, we just used the furniture to define the playing area, playing against black drapery backdrops. The closest we came to building a set was a free standing railing for a few scenes set on the front porch. The Abbey Theater is a black box, but all the seats are in front of the stage. From the stage, it looks a lot like a television studio. The biggest effect of this was that, without a proscenium, most of the entrances were made from the audience left auditorium entrance.
There was also a little issue with publicity. I didn't have a huge advertising budget to work with, particularly since the Indiegogo campaign never really took off. There are always lots of community bulletin boards you can post to, but you have to wonder how many people really read them. The biggest expenditure was running an ad in the Columbus Dispatch for four weeks.
What we really wanted was to get an article in the theater section, but that never happened. It seems that thirty year old musicals are more interesting than new plays. Especially if the musical is the fourth local production in the last three months. I did get a note saying the photo captions weren't formatted correctly, and this is how they should be done. Apparently I was supposed to be familiar with the local style guide, because the captions as originally provided would have been fine with most papers.
We opened on October 4, 2013, after a preview the night before. I learned a few things over the next three weekends. The most obvious was that we really needed that newspaper article, or review, or whatever. It certainly didn't seem like anyone was reading the ads, which weren't huge, but were certainly big enough to be noticed. Apparently no one did, though, because of the nine performances the only one that got enough people into the audience to cover expenses was the last one. We might have done some business if we could have run a couple more weeks, but the theater wasn't going to be available, and I wasn't really willing to risk the money. Whether any of the actors would have stuck around is also an open question.
Another issue proved to be the theater's location. The Abbey Theater is located in the Dublin Recreation Center, and has an address on Post Road. Some years back, Post Road had been eliminated where it ran through Coffman Park, leaving a stub that included the entrance to the Recreation Center. About a week before we opened, that stub was closed for road work. You could still get to the Rec Center by coming through the park, but it wasn't as obvious, and no GPS would ever lead you in that way unless you were already at the park entrance. Friends of mine from Cleveland said they'd spent about 45 minutes driving around, completely lost, until they finally stopped at the Police Station and got directions. I can't help wondering how many people who'd decided to come see the show as walk ins just gave up and went home. There were detour signs, but they said "Rec Center," and I have to presume that not everyone knew that's where the theater was located.
According to my records, I lost about $8,000 on the show. In the long run, that's probably not important. It's a good show, and there will be other productions, so I should make that up on royalties eventually. We never managed the pro-shot DVD, but we did record the show, so the cast at least has their copies. The sound isn't very good, and it's frequently far too grainy, particularly in the close-ups, as all the camera movement was added in post production. It isn't anything I could sell. You can watch it on YouTube, though, at least for now. As I said, the video is frequently grainy and the sound is pretty bad, but it might be good enough to tell you if you want to produce it on your own stage. It also suffers from the tiny audiences who managed to find the theater, so there are a lot of places where a larger audience would likely be laughing that don't get much of reaction on the video.
The show was nominated for Best Original Play in the 2013 BroadwayWorld.com Columbus Awards (and not by me, or I'd have nominated myself for playwright while I was at it). As the nominees consisted of two plays and a musical, I can't say I was too surprised when the musical won. There's a good reason straight plays and musicals don't normally compete against each other. Coming Out was fairly firmly in second when the voting ended, at least. I'll settle for that.
Would I do it again? I suppose I would, but only if I could be sure I wasn't using my own money. Bialystock was right about that one.
Recent Comments