Watching the Sausage Get Made with NewsWrights United

Nine out of every ten public play readings are exercises in vanity.  Despite what we may earnestly espouse about “works-in-progress” or “rough first drafts” we playwrights tend to avoid sharing our work in anything other than what we judge to be the highest states of perfection. I am more guilty of perpetrating this soft con than most, because arrogant ass that I am I tend to think of my plays as perfect even when they manifestly are not.  The reason playwrights deceive the audiences of play readings like this— not to mention the theatres that host them —and quite often ourselves as well— is simple: we do not usually want your helpful feedback, no matter how earnestly we plead to the contrary.  We just want to showcase our plays and convince theaters to produce them.  Alas, at that latter goal we nearly never succeed.

NewsWrights United will be doing something completely different at 7pm this Sunday night Oct. 24 at North Seattle Community College’s Stage One.  We don’t need to convince anyone to produce the second edition of A Living Newspaper, titled The New New News.  We will be producing it ourselves in February 2011 with the generous financial support of 4Culture, Vulcan and individual donors like yourself.  (You can click and pledge on our handy upside down donation fedora if you care to give us an early boost. )

The proto-script we will be reading Sunday night is a big hot mess, full of great local stories about the current crisis in journalism, but also riddled with yawning narrative gaps, inconsistencies and dramaturgic sacred cows begging to be sacrificed.  We actually do need your feedback and suggestions for how to make the play better.  If you join us Sunday night, instead of hearing a polished, polite and, frankly, boring “audition reading” you will be participating in a process much more akin to the 10 a.m. “front page meeting” at a major newspaper like The Seattle Times when the editorial staff first starts to choose and shape the major stories they will be covering in the next day’s edition.

Like theatre is supposed to be but almost never is at, say,  Seattle’s Big Houses, this reading of The New New News: A Living Newspaper will be messy, ardent, relevant, and fun.   But perfect?  Not so much.

 

Comments

[Holly Arsenault]

That sausage guy has sexy guns.

[Paul Mullin]

That's me, Holly.

(In the spirit of full disclosure.)

[Holly Arsenault]

That's some noble honesty, right there. I tell ya.

[Paul Mullin]

I'm lying of course. All my noblest honestly is built on lies.