My First Time: The Reading

This is not my friend's kitchen table, but you could definitely do a reading at it. Photo from the Creative Commons, by flickr user b0jangles.

So I’ve been talking about wanting to start producing for a little while.  But I’ve been thinking about it longer.  A couple of years longer, in fact.  But after I posted about wanting to, the most interesting thing happened – people came out of the woodwork to say they were interested in what I wanted to do and wanted to be a part of it.  With all that momentum and support I decided I had to do something about it. I grabbed one of the scripts I’ve been holding onto for years and shared it with a friend who has considerably more producing experience.

I asked her to read it and suggested that maybe it was something we could co-produce so that I could get my feet wet without taking the full financial brunt of producing. Plus, I wanted to know that someone else liked the play and that I wasn’t crazy for considering it.  It was only a couple days later that I got the tweet, “We need to chat soon.”

She liked the script.  She laughed when she read it.  Now what?

We decided we needed to hear it – hear actors breathe some life into the characters because on the page its a bit of a tough read. So we made some calls to actor friends, “Will you come read a play with us? We’ll provide drinks and baking?”

Last Friday night seven of us gathered around my friend’s kitchen table with scripts, beer/wine, & cupcakes and read the play. And we laughed. And laughed.  And laughed. They liked it.  Mostly. We talked about the play – the themes, our responses to it, what it would need technically to work, and the someone asked the big question.  Where does it go from here? What’s next?