So this marks the final installment of Serial Play. The drafting ended a little sooner than I thought it would, and I want to emphasize that I in no way think that this play is finished. First draft is out of me, and now the revision process begins. Hoping to do an edit and then have some actors read it for me in the next couple of weeks to fuel the next draft. Thanks to those of you who've read along. If you're interested in hearing the reading, let me know!
Last night I was watching the news before going to bed, and I saw an excerpt of a new ISIS propaganda video that apparently has several versions produced in different languages, including English. There was a section of the video that flashed through the last three or four American presidents, calling them awful names, then landed on a graphic that featured the letters "LGBT" and the word "sodomites" with a voiceover saying something about America being a land of sodomites. In the moment I dismissed it as gibberish, but the images and language kept coming back to me as I tried to fall asleep.
When I was a graduate student at UMASS-Amherst, I had a dramaturgy professor named Harley Erdman. He had arrived at UMASS the year before I started, so he was also relatively new to the department when I started in September 1995.
Harley became an important part of my graduate school experience, and I'm happy to say that he continues to be an artistic and academic mentor for me.
