UW Whitewater Theatre/Dance Department

At Western Michigan University today for a workshop of Ghostbears! as part of their Activate Midwest series. I arrived last night and had a chance to see the evening reading of yesterday’s playwright. This morning, we started with a cold reading, discussion with the student actors, and lunch and discussion with the grown-ups. Then back to the hotel room to write while the iron was hot.

Then I emailed the revised script in, and we had an evening reading of the new version in front of the rest of the acting and playwrighting students taking part in the program. It was generally agreed the work I’d done in the afternoon really pushed the play forward, and I feel pretty good about the next series of revisions.

Here’s a photo of the the students in the York theatre as we got going for the evening’s read:

The Write Now! conference has been pretty amazing. Suzan Zader, TYA legend was there, and I got to have some one on one time with her to talk about “Three Excellent Cows.” What an amazing woman, and I really wish I’d known about her and her work years ago. Oh, and Liz Lerman was here for a session. Wow. Wow. Here’s a pic of fellow workshop participants Reina Hardy, Mark Costello and Bill D’Agostino with Suzan.

Here we all are, filing into the IRT’s Upper Theatre for the evenings process discussion with all four teams.

Afterwards, it was photo time — here are all the teams. The woman in the yellow sweater is Dorothy Webb, the founder of the workshop that eventually became WriteNow! I am now officially a Dorothy Webb Award winning playwright.

Oh yeah, there’s David Saar and James Still and Emily Tarquin and Katie Rasor and Dwayne Hartford and Talleri McRae and Kristen Boers and Mark Costello and Reina Hardy and Wendy Bable and Robert Richards and Henry Godinez and Jenny Millinger and Janet Allen and did I leave anyone out?

And what makes Dorothy even more fabulous — I got a chance to chat with her at the reception following, where I learned that she too was a designer, and had trained at SIU (Carbondale) in the days of Mordecai Gorelik and Darwin Reid Payne. She told me how Darwin Reid Payne had a scumbling technique that involved students using their bare feet to swirl and blend the paint. I cannot tell you how wonderful that brief chat was.