Three weeks and counting until I drive up for the 2017 Wyoming Theater Festival! I am super excited for this year's festival for a bunch of reasons, not the least being that the line-up of workshop productions sound pretty fantastic:
- Hollywood Nebraska by Kenneth Jones,
- Another Roll of the Dice a new musical by Mark Saltzman, based on stories of Damon Runyon and songs by Frank Loesser
- The Resolute by Gabrielle Sinclair
AND there will be three readings of new plays by Roundabout Theatre Company playwrights! I'll sadly only be catching one of the readings, but I hope to meet and greet with all of the Roundabout artists I can.
Plus hikes, friends, and new friends! So much to be excited about. But there's one thing I'm especially overjoyed for and that's that I get to work on theater with one of my closest friends, Chris Reed!
If you're a fan of Son's of Anarchy, you'll know him better as Filthy Phil. We met as baby actors fresh out of high school at the Mesa College Theater Company, and he ended up falling in love and marrying my best friend. These days Chris is my go-to first reader; he gives amazing and thoughtful feedback. And more often than not, the first reading of any of my plays is done over Facetime or Skype with the two of us playing all the parts like crazy people. Since I started writing plays I have wanted Chris to act in one of mine for reals, AND NOW IT'S HAPPENING! Chris is flying out here to Salt Lake, and the two of us are driving up together to the Wyoming Theater Festival for a week of new plays and the first public reading of Let's Fix Andy, the new full-length play that I wrote for Chris to play the title role in. It's so exciting to have this wild plan and then to have it work out the way you wanted it to all along.
So yay for new theater, and old friends. Yay for road trips! And yay for getting the chance to develop art with someone who happens to be one of your favorite people on the planet.