The other I got an e-mail telling me that my play has been accepted into the New Works Festival at Foothill College! I am so thrilled you can hardly imagine. I’m going to have a play produced this year! (Considering one of my goals for the year has been, “Get my work out in front of people,” I’d say I can make a small check next to that entry in the ledger.)

The New Works Festival (here’s the info about last year’s show) presents an evening of 6 to 8 10-15 minute plays. Rehearsals start in June and the show is produced sometime in August.

Needless to say, as the time approaches, I will be putting up banners all over the place for anyone who might be interested in attending what I think will be a fine evening of theater. I’ve seen most of the plays that are in the show — the best thing about the Playwriting class is that every week the writers bring in pages and actors get up in front of the class to act them out, which brilliant and useful when you want to see what works and what doesn’t — and these plays are great (if I don’t mind saying so myself, which apparently I don’t).

Now the actual work of getting my play into the best shape it can be begins! Woooooo!

I’ve been taking the Playwriting course at Foothill College. It’s a great class — if you’re in the area and have the slightest interest in playwriting, I highly suggest taking it. There are some damned talented people in that class; plus, you get actors reading your words, which is the best way possible to learn how to write plays.

At least, I’m hoping it is. Because at the moment, I’m almost completely baffled.

Early in the quarter I turned in a 10 page scene that I had thought wasn’t great, but it was okay. Until it was acted out, and I realized it was a)talky, b)annoying, c)boring. I am not harshing on myself — it was bad. And I’d had no idea of how bad until the actors read my words. I was so scarred from this experience I didn’t hand anything in until a couple of weeks later, and I got a much better reaction, with laughs and good feedback. I figured I should develop this scene a little bit. But while I was working on that, I brought in a scene I’d been working on and was at a loss for what to do with. It was almost straight political polemic, with characters basically stating their cases. While reading it over, I thought I knew what the problems were and maybe a few ways of correcting them, but I didn’t have time to scrap it and start over or even massage what I already had: I wanted to bring something in that night and at least get a reading of how bad it was.

Bad? It was hilarious.

In a good way.

The teacher said I can’t give props to the actors, because they can only work with what’s on the page in front of them, so clearly I had created whatever was there. But the scene played out not only funnier than I had imagined but funnier that I could have imagined. I had thought it was, I dunno, New Soviet Realism or something and instead it’s…well, not.

So here’s my problem: when I write fiction, I usually have a pretty good internal judge of whether it works or not, whether it’s well-written or not. (Whether it’s any good or not I’m still working on.) But I can tell whether a scene is funny, whether it’s doing its job.

With playwriting, I am at a complete loss. I have no idea how what I’ve written is going to translate to the stage. You’d think I would, given that whole Masters degree in Screenwriting thing and all, but in the past few weeks I’ve seen more of my stuff acted out than I did in 2 years at USC, and no, that’s not a compliment to USC.

I’m hoping I’m going to tackle this learning curve in a hurry. Because I feel completely upended when I go to class with a scene in hand.