Monday, November 28, 2011

getting high with Native Americans



The NYCPlaywrights November Play of the Month theme was "native Americans" and we got a tiny percentage of submissions that we got for October (the supernatural) or December (winter holidays) - this is due to the specificity of the subject and the fact that the vast majority of plays submitted for the Play of the Month are 10-minute plays that the playwright happened to have lying around. There are far fewer plays about native Americans lying around in playwrights' hard drives.

And then there are the plays that were clearly not about the theme but were retro-fitted, like with an off-hand reference to native Americans, for the purpose of the theme.

The entire point of having a theme is to prevent playwrights from submitting the same plays month after month. And it would be nice if a playwright was inspired by the theme once in awhile to write a new play. That was the case of the winning play of the month for November, Nancy Brewka-Clark's HIGH ON EMMA SAFFORD.

I got a big kick out of the video recording - Abe Lebovic and Carolyn Paine are adorable in their roles - they've played a couple before, in my THE SLASH last February.

I didn't have tobacco or weed so I made them smoke the only thing I had handy that could be smoked - catnip. I've heard you can get high from catnip and while we didn't do all that many takes, I certainly felt something - although it might have been a panic attack. But my cat went nuts. Usually he's pretty shy around visitors but he was all over the actors while we were trying to video-record. Eventually I had to lock him in my bedroom so we could finish up. Oh Mr. Fuzz!

I don't know if the Play of the Month project is partly responsible or not, but the NYCPlaywrights hit rate has really gone up in the past year - we are about to get 5,000 unique visitors for the month of November. Just a few months ago I thought 3K visitors was impressive. Now if only everybody would start clicking the damn links I'd have a serious income source.