Our First Reading!

We survived the first reading of our play, Inextricable, by members of the Burning Coal Theater Playwriting and Director's Lab last night!

The company read through 15 pages of our script, and then gave us some interesting feedback afterwards. It wasn't what we were expecting, which was very cool, but it helped spark a conversation between us about the vision we have for the play and why we wrote it the way we did. It's very difficult for anyone to grasp the themes and character development in this play without reading the whole thing, because the meat of it all doesn't hit you until you're halfway through it. So, while we enjoyed the reading and will consider a few of the things they had to say, we also know that some of the structural changes they suggested aren't possible to make without fundamentally altering the story.

So, that's the mixed blessing of asking for feedback -- you can work with some of the suggestions, but not others. They will be choosing 3-4 plays to develop over the next 6 months, and if ours is lucky enough to be chosen, we'll ask them to read the whole play before agreeing to work on it with them. We just feel that strongly that they need to understand how the story develops before making judgements about the structure of the entire piece.

So, now it's back to tweaking dialogue and peddling it to a few more places. The UNC Playwriting Lab has put it on their September schedule for a read-through, after the students return to campus. That is exciting! And, a friend's brother who acts and writes in Brooklyn has expressed an interest in peddling it for us in New York, so we'll try our hand at that also. Stay tuned! :)