Earlier this month, a play I wrote was performed in a festival which was a two-week competition. Each night, about ten plays competed and were evaluated by two or three judges who selected one or two plays from the evening to move onto the final round, and the winners of the finals would then be published in a compilation. I had participated in this festival two times before and my plays were not selected as semi-finalists or deemed “winners” either time, but I had a strong feeling that the third time was going to be my charm. I felt thrilled and blessed to be working on a play I was so proud of with a phenomenal, insightful, brilliant director who totally “got” my play and was doing these fabulously subtle and nuanced things with it, and two extremely talented actors who could both easily be stars. To add to my giddy excitement, we were all getting this over-the-top positive feedback from people who had seen a rehearsal, and everything was falling so magically into place. As a playwright, it can be a frustrating, scary, and/or intimidating loss of control to work with others on something so close to my heart, but this entire process felt like a dream collaboration, and for me, exemplified all the best possibilities that working together to create a piece of theatre can be.
The night of our performance, I dressed up and wore eye shadow, the house was packed with friends and family, and afterwards, I went to the after-party I had planned to celebrate our accomplishment. I was told that the night’s winner would receive a call between midnight and 1:00am, so when I returned home a little after 11:00pm feeling very satisfied about my play and in the after-glow of my after-party, I busied myself arranging my flowers and checking email. A little after midnight I crawled into bed and proceeded to roll over every 5 to 7 minutes to check my cell phone for the time, and to see if I had missed any calls that had mysteriously and inexplicably gone straight to voicemail. By 12:38am I was starting to feel like that girl who is home alone on a Saturday night, lying awake, waiting for the emotionally unavailable man who she is madly in love with and who may or may not be out on a date with another woman, to call. At 1:04am I drifted off into sleep thinking that it would only be a few minutes until I would be awakened by the loud ringing of my phone...
