Playwrights, unless they are lucky enough to be part of a theatre cooperative of some sort, usually write their plays in splendid and sometimes painful isolation. They pace around the room, declaiming lines out loud and kicking wadded-up sheets of early drafts out of the way.
When the play is ready, the playwright tries to get a production for it. They may submit it to a competition, or send it "cold" to a producing theatre. If they are connected to a theatre company, they can walk it in the door and ask if the gang would be interested in reading through this new thing.
A play that gets a production goes into rehearsal (where it may change quite a bit in response to actors pointing out lines they can't say with a straight face), and then before an audience. Then there is the tension and the joy of seeing how the audience reacts to one's beloved script.
But after that, for many plays, there is...silence. Unless the playwright is an astute marketer, it is hard to get the attention that might bring about a second production, and a third one.
One of Moose House's first books was A Dash of Currie, a collection of short plays that Annapolis Royal's Wayne Currie has built up over the years as submissions to the King's Shorts Festival of One-Act Plays. Now the Annapolis District Drama Group is mounting a performance of seven of those plays from our book:
We are delighted that the plays have moved from page to stage, then into print form, and now both back onto the stage and potentially into your hands (if you buy a copy of the book). Producers with other theatre companies near and far may also be leafing through the book at this very moment, deciding whether they have found their next show.
Moose House will be bringing out several new collections of plays in the coming months:
Antigonish's Pam Calabrese MacLean has been an important member of the Nova Scotia theatre scene for years. We are proud to be publishing her collection, Sofa, scripts with parts that will get older women actors off the couch and into the spotlight:
It will be available in our online store soon.
Moose House editor Andrew Wetmore has been writing plays for decades. He was also the first coordinator of Dramatists' Co-op, a project of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia to improve the quality and increase the visibility of locally-written plays. Two of his collections of short plays, Shakescenes and Just Add Actors, are available for pre-order now:
In 2022 we plan to add more collections of scripts to the theatre shelf in our catalog. See ya at the show!
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