Nicholas Thurkettle

Excellent news today. The three 10-minute plays I wrote recently were all picked by student directors for the Alumni Play Festival happening at Bradley in April. I have no idea if this means the plays were well-liked, or that the others who were asked to submit plays just didn’t come through to the same extent. (You will notice that, as usual, I just can’t take a compliment.)

The last time I visited Bradley was almost seven years ago. The school has always wanted me to come back, and I’ve always wanted to go, but between money, time, and needing a good enough reason to commit the first two things, it never quite happened. Now, to get to see a few scripts of mine on their feet, and talk with this generation of theatre students, and reminisce, and hopefully even coax a few fellow alums down from Chicago for some ol’ times kinds of fun…that all adds up pretty nicely.

And if I happen to pop into a couple of classes to say a few words, and if they happen to cough up a small check, that would make it add up even better. Good luck to that in today’s economy, but I’ll hope.

Last night I polished up two 10-minute plays. One of them I wrote in a flurry of creativity back in September; the other I wrote nearly seven years ago as a wedding present for a dear friend in one of the many penniless phases of my adult life. The first was relatively simple – its fundamentals were strong, I just needed to clean up a few places in the dialogue where my central idea went cross-eyed.

The second was more difficult. Certainly that many years provides more than adequate emotional distance for re-writing; unfortunately it created more than a little inertia. As in – “the play has existed for this long like this, why should it not stay like that?” This also grows out of the undeniable truth that I was a far worse writer back then, and the script was weak and limp in more than one place. Too many places to salvage in one night? Very possible.

But I have become nothing if not deft. Once I identified the most egregious problem, there was no hesitation; I knew exactly what to scalpel out and replace, and didn’t miss the excised material in the slightest. It is not great now, no, it was not going to be that; but it is…presentable.

Tonight was all the time I had left to generate a third script for tomorrow’s deadline. I came home with an idea and a half-page of scrawled notes. Now after a couple of hours of work/procrastination, I have a half a script. It feels like good stuff – well, it feels consistent to the oddness of my idea. The beauty of the 10-minute play is, since you have far less time in which to wear out your welcome, you can pursue peculiar impulses in bite-sized form. Just throw it up there and see if it plays.

But I think this is all I’ve got for tonight, and I can go to bed satisfied. I think I can make this deliverable with enough time. I might just have to sneak in a few moments to finish tomorrow morning.