1. CHARM CITY is a recent play you’ve submitted to The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. What is it about?
CHARM CITY is a shortie, a little piece that came to me while I was looking up something on UNESCO, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten. It’s about a conflict of cultures that occurs when a resident of Charm City—that would be Baltimore, of course—seeks UNESCO designation for her hometown. Happily, I got lucky with this one because not long after I wrote it, Urban Stages in New York held an “Acronym Plays Competition.” With “UNESCO” as an acronym, it was an easy one to submit. It wasn’t staged but it was one of their Judges Picks and they put it on their website. It’s still there. Very nice of them, indeed.
2. Where do you get your ideas from? How do you know an idea has legs?
Ideas come from everywhere and everything. They’re not always great, they don’t always have legs, but once an idea presents itself, it’s pretty much a given that I’m going to put something down. Michael Hollinger, a talented guy who wrote Under The Skin, among other things, says he starts a file on every idea and he uses an agrarian approach…cultivate an idea, give it time, and then harvest only the hardy. Some plays just don’t get to be “hardy” and you have to recognize that at some point, I suppose, in order not to go completely mad. Though I do find it difficult to give up on a play…
3. What is your general approach to developing a play?
I begin by writing the scene I want to write. That’s my strategy.
If I’m lucky, one of the characters who appears on the page becomes so bloody compelling to me that I cannot let her/him reside only in my computer. I become bound and determined to take them to the broader world, even if the broader world has no use for them. Do I get stuck sometimes? Yup. But I so love the creation process and find it so much fun that I can’t do it any other way.
4. Tell us about yourself.
Writing was always a given. It got me through countless courses at school and I figured I’d be a journalist. Then I discovered I loved the microphone and the mike loved me. My career in radio news lasted more than four decades, working in Baltimore, San Jose, Boston, New York, and DC, although the writing was always going on in the background. I was working early mornings at WTOP in Washington when my car was rammed by a hit-and-run driver on the Capital Beltway. After I landed in the hospital, I realized I was never going to finish a play I had started if I didn’t carve out more time. We had four kids by then and it was busy. So I quit the radio job, finished the script, my first full-length, and it was accepted by the esteemed Baltimore Playwrights Festival and produced. That play is now published and has had more than forty productions across the US, Canada, Mexico and the U.K. I later went back to radio part-time and continued to write, but I owe so very much to the BPF for that boost twenty-one years ago.
5. What are you working on now?
Two things: turning a full-length play I wrote a while back into a musical and finishing a full-length comedy.
6. What is coming up next for you?
Awaiting the publications of my first screenplay in an anthology and a short play on the pandemic in another anthology of comedies.