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TOMMCCORMACKPLAYS.COM On this site are three playscripts. Here's why I'm making them available online. My first play, ENDPAPERS, ran for five months in New York with quotable reviews and the largest total audience of any Off-Broadway play that year. (Reviews are excerpted on this site.) ENDPAPERS has been published, and portions appear in various anthologies. There are limits to what that proves; still, the experience left me the confidence, with only two or three hundred days of doubt, to work simultaneously on these three scripts over the years since. The sensibility of a writer at work can be an inner wrestling mat where the partisans of expeditious storytelling brawl with those of voice and view. I revised repeatedly, listening to comments from dramaturges, other playwrights, gifted actors, and audiences at a number of readings. After this prolonged development, I've now reached the precarious truce of feeling that these three scripts are nearly ready. If the agent and the producer I had during ENDPAPERS were still living I'd hand the scripts to them. But they're not, and I admit I shy away from starting again at square one -- networking, making contacts, trying one-by-one to captivate a new agent, producer, or company. Instead, I'm posting the scripts on this website, where a reader may see something that feels right for a theater professional he knows, and call it to his or her attention. With luck, the professional will be an actor, director, agent, or producer who has a fondness for plays of a sort that these years usually originate on London's stages before coming to America's. Pitching myself with such lines is harmful to my teeth, so I'll stop here. It's futile anyway: If it's ever true that something must "speak for itself", it applies to scripts. Besides, if hereafter there are productions, the script may be the same but they'll all be different "plays", and each will speak in its own way. Tom McCormack Later note: The original "About the Plays" folder on this site had three play-descriptions that were almost as facts-only as a police blotter. I wrote those descriptions, and they were light on asserting "meanings" or "themes" because I think pronouncements like that restrict a work's apparent scope and hobble viewers' imaginations. Talk of its "meaning" tends to suggest the play is merely a useful ladder leading up to the real value: a non-fiction lesson. For me, the real value of a play -- or movie, opera, symphony, dance -- is in the multi-rung ladder itself, the story and its effects at each rung, including the view from the top. If the rungs can evoke tensions, laughter, gasps, rills of deep assent, a playwright should leave it to the viewers to conjure their own meanings and themes -- and they will be as various as the viewers' histories and receiving apparatuses. There is, in the end, no "the" meaning of any work of art. For all that, those original descriptions have now been replaced by new ones written by George Weinberg. George, a long-time friend and polymathic scholar, said a modest posture on a website is as misplaced as it would be in a print ad. I said I was stuck with that posture because when a writer brags about his own work he usually seems to me foolish and repelling. So we came up with a compromise of great cunning. I reprint his descriptions here, and thus hide behind his name while publishing on my own site compliments about my own scripts. It is apt that, despite the thoughtful, ruminative introduction you've been reading, the first script posted on this site is a farce. |