New Play Festival

Kitchen Dog is one of the rare theater companies that has a new play competition - and a festival afterwards to celebrate the winners with readings and a main stage production.  Very successful.  Each year we get more and more submittals: at this point it's hundreds of scripts.  The whole company reads in the first round, helping to short-list to a more manageable number of manuscripts for further consideration.

It's been very interesting, reading my share.  (A very small sample this year, I feel guilty, just too many other deadlines.)  Good plays can be very good, bad ones pretty amazingly bad.  Actually, I learn a lot as a writer from the not so great ones...  I've closed several scripts over the last few years thinking, hmmmm, that thing I was trying on page 3?  Bad idea.  But that prize goes to the one that left me thinking, "Wow! What a libel suit that'd be!"

The Horton Foote Festival

Dallas / Fort Worth is starting a unique celebration of our home-grown Texas playwright, Horton Foote.

This multi-city, multi-group festival is exciting - theaters, cinemas, KERA, Arts & Letters Live, the arts magnet high school - all presenting Horton Foote's work.  I'm privileged to play a small role in all this, designing The Traveling Lady set for WaterTower Theatre's production.  (A big plus is that it is directed by a long time collaborator of Foote's.)  A lovely play.

Mr. Foote may be the most famous man nobody's ever heard of.  

He wrote 70 plays plus distinguished film scripts (including that jewel To Kill a Mockingbird!) and, oh, you know, a Pulitzer.  But he must have been a not-a-back-slapper kind of person... like his plays...  gentle, shrewd, well-observed, real-people drama.  Not much blood (I think it's wild that WaterTower is following the violent Lieutenant of Inishmore with the subtle Lady).  Stuff happens, of course - The Traveling Lady has more or less a prison break and chase, abandonment, theft, breach of trust, all that dramatic stuff - but it's at human scale and characters have recognizable real-human reactions.  You think - "I know that lady.  I know how she feels."

This is the second of Foote's plays I've gotten to design.  I find the effect of his work cumulative... seeping into my own world, helping me see other people a little more kindly - but more accurately.  Maybe I'm a little wiser?  Maybe we all need more Horton Foote more of the time?  

The Traveling Lady - Horton Foote, WaterTower Theatre, Addison TX