Greetings from Alaska, Constant Reader! I am back at the Valdez Theatre Conference, where my new play Before Vinson is being presented. (On Tuesday, June 13, at 2:45pm Alaska time, to be precise. There’s a live-stream if you’re curious! And it’s on NPX if you want to tell me how great it is.) I’m writing this from my hotel room in Anchorage, during my overnight stay before the bus ride to Valdez. (It’s a long ride. There’s mountains and glaciers and stuff.) I’ve squared away everything at my day job, so this is effectively a working vacation for me, and this is the one free night I’ll have during that vacation when I have no particular obligations to the conference. So it’s party time for me, right?
Oh good heavens, no.
And it’s not just that I’m exhausted after a seven hour flight. (Although I am.) No, in these comparatively few hours I have before the next leg of my journey, I have preparation to do. Some of it is as an actor, a role I’ll be serving in for some of my fellow playwrights at the conference. I’ve got a monologue I need to be sure is memorized. And I brought some books along as research material for an upcoming project – a little light reading for travelling. But mostly, the prep work I have to do is for Before Vinson.
You know, the play I already wrote. Which has already been accepted to the conference. Hence my being here.
Before Vinson is a legal drama and a period piece. I did a ton of research on it, and a large part of what I’m hoping to get out of this conference is to see whether I did enough research, or (the likelier issue with a script of mine) put in so much stuff that it’s hard to follow, or (miracle of miracles) managed to get the balance right. But in order to facilitate the conversation, I need to go back through the script and remind myself exactly what I put in the darn thing. It’s been half a year since I finished the draft, after all – my memory is a little fuzzy on the finer points of the 1940s Supreme Court cases I kept referencing.
In other words, I have homework to do. On my vacation. Oh well.
Such is life.
And since I have this homework to do, I’ll be cutting this week’s post short. There’s only so much time I can devote to an extra credit assignment, after all.