All through this process, I kept thinking to myself,  Baby steps, Jimmy-boy. Baby steps.

I am the impatient type and I absolutely HATE dotting all of my “I”s and crossing all of my “T”s. I want something when I want it, and I don’t like to wait and be an adult about it.

I wanted the play published right now! . . .  But I didn’t want to present it to a publisher before it was ready, and have the thing rejected. 

SSSOOOOooooOOOO, I shoved my thumb in my mouth and went on to the next step: I presented the script to a few of my friends who are on the governing board  of a prominent, local theater group with which I have been working as a director and an actor for almost twenty years, The Windham Theatre Guild of Willimantic, CT. They all read it, and one of them offered to champion the play in front of The Guild’s board of directors.

After the presentation, the board voted to allow Blessed Event to be staged as a dramatic reading on the stage of The Burton Leavitt Theater in downtown Willimantic . . . on a freaking Thursday night.

Now, for the Great Unwashed out there, a dramatic reading of a script is simply this: a bunch of actors sit around on a stage and read the different roles of a play in front of a live audience. There is also another person on the stage who reads the stage directions out loud so that the audience can imagine at least a bit of the action that would be taking place if the reading was a full-fledged production. The actors put passion into their words, but there are no sets or props or costumes or actions. Just  the actors’voices and the audience’s imagination.

The actors were all hand-picked by yours truly. (Most of them were the same ones who played the roles in the first public reading of the script at The Main Street Café a few months earlier.)

We had two rehearsals on the stage of The Burton Leavitt Theater.

Then the night of reading was upon us and, in spite of very limited publicity and the fact that it was a Thursday night, there was a paying audience of somewhere around fifty people.

As the actors did their wonderful things up on the stage, I stood in the back of the theater and watched the audience’s reactions. They laughed. They cried. And I was absolutely amazed to find that they were totally absorbed in the show, even though there were no sets, no props and no action! Their eyes were completely glued to the stage, in spite of the fact the stage only contained 10 people sitting on stools with scripts in hand, reading their parts as passionately as they possibly could. (It really pays to have such talented and dedicated friends! These wonderful people put their hearts and souls into this performance simply because they knew how important it was to me!)

The main premise of the show’s plot is that it is the last day of life for an eighty-year-old patriarch of French-Canadian family who is living in Connecticut.  His children all gather in his home on a death watch to say their good-byes and to reminisce about memories with their father.

As I watched and listened, I remember being really impressed with the show. I found myself thinking, WOW! This is REALLY good! Who the hell wrote this??!!

(That may sound VERY conceited to you, but it was the truth.  I was amazed at the power of the show; it was as if it was written by somebody else, and it was the first time that I was experiencing it. At times, the whole event seemed surrealistic to me.)

After the reading, I fielded a few questions from the audience and took a few comments from them. The next evening, I got a phone call at home from a friend of mine who had attended the reading.  He was in tears and sobbing almost uncontrollably as he told me what a wonderful show it was, and how it touched him so very deeply!

I hung up the phone and thought, My God! My words did THAT??

Then, I sat down and spent the next two weeks rewriting the script yet again, incorporating many of the audience’s comments and many of my own observations from the reading.

After the success of the staged dramatic reading, The Windham Theatre Guild decided to go out on a limb, and produce the show as a full-fledged stage production for three performances .  Once again, they were willing to take a chance on this unpublished, unknown local playwright and finance his show for three show dates in March, 2012.

(To Be Continued…)