Ben Crowder

So, my “Crime & Punishment & Teletubbies: The Musical” play not only got booed offstage two pages before it was over, but it also won first place. :) (Meaning, it was the worst, most awful play. But ironically it was a compliment of a sort. Kind of. :P) Anyway, it was fun to see it win, even if it was initially mortifying when people started shouting “Get off the stage!” before the actors finished saying all of my deliciously funny lines. I mean, I had Johnny Depp and Barney the Purple Dinosaur entering one page later. Seriously, folks. ;)

Now I just need to try to remember how to write good plays…

For those of you in the area, we’ve got our first Bad Play Project show tonight. I wrote one of the plays (“Crime & Punishment & Teletubbies: The Musical”) and am directing another one (“Waiting for Godot Baggins”). You can check out all the details over at New Play Project’s site. Can’t make it? No worries — I’ve posted the script to C&P&T:TM for your reading agony (er, pleasure). Keep in mind that this is meant to be awful. Hopefully it succeeds. ;)

Just got back from closing night of my show. While it wasn’t perfect (more on that in a second), I’m happy with how it turned out. Of all my plays, this one (“To Love and to Cherish”) had some of my favorite lines. That’s probably because it’s more personal than my previous plays have been, more from the gut and less from the head.

That said, I wrote the script in an hour with hardly any planning beforehand (I got the idea in the shower, got out, dried off, and promptly sat down and wrote it all out right then) and never actually revised it (contrast that with my last play, “Tree of Blood,” which I rewrote 15 or 16 times). And I only went to one rehearsal. (Rehearsals are usually where I see what needs to be rewritten, thus their importance.) As a result, there were some things I didn’t get to change about the play that I now wish I could have (tightening it up a bit, giving the characters a named homeland and culture instead of the ambiguous one they had, reword a few lines here and there), but that’s just life. :)

Oh, and I’m happy to announce that this is the first time I didn’t place in the top three! (My last three plays all got third place.) This sounds kind of weird, I realize, and you might think I’m asking for sympathy or pity or something, but I’m not. I’ve been hoping that my winning streak would end because I was starting to take it for granted, and that assumption is a quick recipe for laziness in writing and complacency. I needed to know that a third-place finish was not guaranteed, so that I keep striving for excellence in my craft and all that.

Speaking of which, I’ll keep writing plays, but I plan to switch gears here and focus much more heavily on fiction (short stories and novels).

FYI, my new play, “To Love and to Cherish,” opens tomorrow night. It’s a short 10–15 minute piece about arranged marriages (sadly, there isn’t much autobiographical about this one :P) (though in retrospect, my last play was about a cursed tree that made people lose their wits (and their lives), so maybe I don’t do the autobiographical thing very well ;)). It’s part of a set of seven short plays called Games We Play (about love and relationships) and is produced by New Play Project at the old Provo Theatre Company building at 105 E. 100 N. in Provo. Here are the performance dates:

• Friday, Dec 5 @ 7:30pm
• Saturday, Dec 6 @ 2:30pm
• Saturday, Dec 6 @ 7:30pm
• Monday, Dec 8 @ 7:30pm
• Friday, Dec 12 @ 7:30pm
• Saturday, Dec 13 @ 2:30pm
• Saturday, Dec 13 @ 7:30pm
• Monday, Dec 15 @ 7:30pm

The show runs a little over two hours long, with a ten-minute intermission dissecting the first three plays from the last four. (Mine’s second to last, though it could possibly change, seeing as we’ve still got tech/dress rehearsal for it tonight.)

Anyway, tickets are $6 ($5 for students/seniors/educators, and $4 on Mondays with groups of 5 or more). If you’re in the area, you should come see it. :)

If you’re in the area and interested in acting, come to auditions next week! As I mentioned a couple posts ago, New Play Project (the theatre company I work with) is hosting a set of plays on relationships called Games We Play, and my new play “To Love and to Cherish” (about arranged marriages) is one of the six or seven plays in the show. And the show will run the first weekend in December — the 5th, 6th, and 8th (a Monday). Anyway, if you’re interested, here’s when auditions are:

Tuesday, October 28, 7:00–9:00pm @ F430 HFAC (BYU campus) Wednesday, October 29, 7:00–9:00pm @ F430 HFAC (BYU campus) Thursday, October 30, 7:00–9:00pm @ UVU campus (room TBA)

If you’d like to get involved in the production in another capacity, by the way, feel free to email me. There’s plenty of room for volunteering. :)

For the past while I’ve been working on the New Play Project site redesign, and today it finally went live:

Nice to get it out of the birth canal. :P

In other news, my play “To Love and to Cherish” (about arranged marriages) got accepted for the next NPP set of plays, Games We Play. More details forthcoming.

I forgot to include the info on the play I’m directing! The show is produced by New Play Project and is called Fire & Rain. It includes six short plays, the first of which was the one I worked on — Ben Phelan’s The Sword Without, and Terror Within. Showtimes:

Monday, Oct 13 @ 7:30pm Friday, Oct 17 @ 7:30pm Saturday, Oct 18 @ 2:30pm Saturday, Oct 18 @ 7:30pm Monday, Oct 20 @ 7:30pm

Tickets are $6/person ($5 for students/seniors, and if you come to a Monday performance as an FHE group with 5 or more people, it’s $4/person). You can buy tickets online (at www.newplayproject.org) or in person at the box office. And last but not least, the theater’s at 105 E. 100 N. in Provo (the old Provo Theater Company building).

I love theatre. :)

[tags]New Play Project[/tags]

We’re in the middle of the run of Long Ago & Far Away, and it’s going quite well. (Last night’s Tree of Blood performance was head and shoulders above the last four performances, in fact. And Repeating History is proving to be one of the audience favorites.) Three more shows — two today and one Monday.

Monday also happens to be the submission deadline for the next set of New Play Project plays, Fire and Rain. Originally I’d hoped to submit four plays, but now it’s looking like it’ll be two, with a small chance that I’ll finish a third one in time. The first is called Sixteen Stones and is about the brother of Jared, taking place around Ether 2–3. I’ve got ten pages written so far and just have to write the middle scene and it’ll be done (done as in first draft done, which is about all I can hope for considering my time constraints). The second is tentatively titled Missing and is about a wheelchair-bound mother whose three-year-old daughter goes missing in the woods. And the third is a comedy about four missionaries, called Scrambled Eggs. (I’ve got two or three pages of it written so far.)

Other than that, I’ve got a rather big project coming up in the near future, and I think within a week or two I’ll be able to announce it. This is the one that’s been consuming a lot of my time for the past month and a half. It’s the one I’m most excited about, too.

Oh, I’ll also be starting up a new blog in the next month or two — whenever I find time to design it — and as a result this blog will change slightly, repurposing itself to fit into the new scheme of things. More on that once the new blog’s up.

Over the past month, I’ve been revising Tree of Blood a lot. (Ten or eleven times, to be exact.) After several revisions I realized that I’d written myself into several plot knots, primarily because I’d been adding in all sorts of backstory without stepping out to make sure it still made sense as a whole. And so I stopped myself. I wrote an outline for the whole play, then went back and rewrote it from scratch, and after a few tweaks here and there, it’s noticeably better. Still creepy, but without all the confusing holes in the plot. :) We’re in the middle of rehearsals at the moment and will be performing in a mere two weeks. Egads!

And I’m not assistant directing anymore, by the way. I’m directing. Yup, I don’t have all that much experience under my belt (assistant directing a single forty-five minute play and writing four of my own plays, plus watching lots of plays and movies over the course of my life :P), but I’m now the director of James Goldberg’s play Repeating History. It’s a good training-wheel play, since it’s only three pages long. But it’s got its own challenges, too — the bulk of the play is effectively a Powerpoint presentation, for example. There’s only one character (well, there’s sort of a second character, but she only has two lines and she’s not onstage). And the play has a lot of historical allusions that most people probably aren’t going to get, because we’ve all forgotten almost everything we learned in U.S. History.

In other news, I’ve got a few new projects lining up. First, I really want to get back into writing novels, so I’ve decided to aim at 1,000 words a day (which, as I learned from my NaNoWriMo experience, should be a piece of cake) and I’ve started outlining the one I’ll focus on for the next few months.

Second, almost every time I watch a movie I want to start writing screenplays, so I’ve decided to finally start doing it. I’ll probably start out with short films because, well, they’re shorter. :) And they’re similar to short plays, which I’ve got a decent amount of experience with.

Third, I’m writing some TV scripts for a demo for this new television channel that’ll be starting up soon. I don’t know how much I can talk about it yet — probably more than this, but I’ll play it safe for now — but it’ll be fun. And regardless of the fate of the channel, it’ll be a really good learning experience. Besides, who ever thought I’d be writing for TV? Not me. :)

And last but not least, I need to start blogging on here more often. Monthly isn’t going to cut it. I’m also itching to redesign the site, but that’ll have to wait for a bit. (I’m currently redesigning the New Play Project site. And have been for a while; hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend.)

Unbindery’s on hold for now.

[Cross-posted from Top of the Mountains.]

This morning I found out that Tree of Blood did indeed get accepted. :) It’ll be produced as part of New Play Project’s Long Ago and Far Away show (seven short plays) on July 25–26, 28, August 1–2, 4. Times will most likely be 7:30 pm with 2:30 pm matinees on the Saturdays, but I’ll have more solid details later. Auditions are tentatively scheduled for June 24–25 on BYU campus (and anyone can try out). More on that later as well.

Oh, and I’m going to be assistant directing again. I’d thought about passing on that, since it is a bit of a time commitment, but I need my theatre fix. :P And it’s a lot of fun to be more involved with the show — playwrights do participate, but not nearly as much as directors.

I’m going to try really hard to start writing plays for the next show (Fire and Rain, religious plays) in advance, so that I can submit six or seven. Why? Mainly the OCD. :P No, really, I have tons of ideas for plays — a flood of them — and the more I write, the better I’ll get. And deadlines make me write. It’s not the submitting that matters so much to me (though it feels good to send in a flurry of scripts), it’s the writing. And the getting better bit. :)