1. ELLIE is a recent play you’ve submitted to the The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. What is it about?
ELLIE presents two older men—brothers—whose love-hate relationship comes to a head while they are mourning the death of one of their wives. That, however, is only the plot, not what it’s about. It’s about how men kill the thing they love.
2. How did you develop ELLIE and is this your developmental approach in other plays you have written?
Two professional actor friends challenged me to write a play for them. At first I laughed it off; I don’t do requests. But then I came up with an idea and saw how these two could bring it off, so I wrote the play. Then I brought in a professional director and we had private readings and then organized a public reading. I’d never developed a play with a personally assembled team like this but I was very pleased both with the result and the process. I may well do it again since I’m lucky to know some very talented theatre people.
3. When do you know that an idea for a play has ‘legs”?
When the characters need to live so much they won’t leave me alone until I let them.
4. Tell us about yourself.
I was one of the founding members of the Washington Playwrights Unit—the first playwright group in DC—back in the early 1980s. I had some critical success but then got remarried, started a family, and had to make a living, so I took a brief, 30-year break from playwriting. But I always knew I’d go back to writing plays and in 2016 I did. Since then I’ve written 13 plays of various lengths.
5. What are you working on now?
I’m polishing the script of the full-length play I recently finished. It’s been a real challenge because it’s in verse but also needs to work as dialog.
6. What is coming up next for you?
A short play will be coming out soon in one of those “Best Ten-Minute Plays” anthologies. I’m also thinking about turning CRUSADE—which BPF produced last year—into a film script. If I don’t do that next I have another play in mind where again the characters won’t shut up and leave me in peace.