What are you doing this Monday evening? I’ll tell you what you should be doing… You should come on over the San Francisco and check out the developmental reading of my full length play MY SISTER’S BABY! It’s a comedy about sisters and babies and you will laugh and enjoy yourself, I promise. Plus, I need you feedback! That’s what developmental readings are all about, so come and contribute your two scents. Here are all the details:

The Playwright’s Center of San Francisco presents a developmental reading of:

MY SISTER’S BABY a new play by Rachel Bublitz

Sisters are always there for each other: borrowing clothes, giving advice, bearing their sister’s children … wait, what?

Margaret is devastated that she can’t have children. When Julia, her younger sister, gets pregnant accidentally, Margaret makes it her life’s mission to convince Julia to have the baby for her.

Margaret………….Livia Demarchi

Henry……………..Galen Murphy-Hoffman

Julia………………..Alysha English

Elijah………………Adam Roy

Studio 250 965 Mission, Fl. 2 San Francisco 7:30 p.m. $5-10 SL; members free

More questions? Email me or check out the Facebook event. Hope you can make it out, and feel free to bring a friend! I’m bringing beer, crackers, humus, and home made banana bread to thank all the folks who make it out!

Here we go… Coming up on finishing the binge for this month. It was harder than I thought. This was the first time I’ve kept up with it, I can’t wait to try again this coming March. If you didn’t know, playwrightbinge happens ever March and September.

I sent #29 (TERRIBLE PEOPLE) off to Phoenix Stage Company. They are looking for one-act plays (30 minutes max), previous productions are alright as long as they were limited, and you can email or snail mail your plays. One play per playwright, and the deadline is December 15th.

And finally, submission 30 was emailed off to Big Head Productions…. They got my short play MY BODY. They’re looking for scripts that range from 5-15 minutes and take place in an office. The deadline is October 15th, and you can email your script.

Oy vey! I’m glad that’s over!

The awesome folks over at Theatre Pub are bringing us Love in the Time of Zombies by local playwright Kirk Shimano. I’m excited, are you excited? Here are all the gritty details:

October 15, 16, 22, 29, 30, 2012

Cafe Royale, 800 Post St. San Francisco, CA 94109

7pm: Pop-up Kitchen (Mon: BBQ, Tues: Sushi) (YES, not only do you get to see awesome theatre, you get awesome food! The pop-up bbq I had last time was killer!)

8pm: Performance

Cost: Free, $5 Suggested Donation

Claire Rice is directing. This is going to be a show that you will not want to miss. Be there, and get to Cafe Royale early, it tends to fill up.

Oh! And I submitted play #27 to The City Theatre. I sent them NAP TIME. They are looking for 10 minute scripts, you can email them and the deadline is October 31st.

Play #28 (GARBAGE DISPOSAL, one of my 31 plays from August, first time submitting it!) was sent over to Lakeshore Player’s. They are also looking for 10 minute plays, with little offensive language (I had a hard time finding a play to submit!). You can email your scripts, but they want a blind copy and a not blind copy. The deadline is November 1st.

2 down, 2 to go!

10 submissions left to make with 6 days left to go… I had a busy morning though! Let me tell ya….

I submitted to the New Harmony Project MY SISTER’S BABY for submission number 21. They want full length plays, and you can upload it directly to their website (easy-peasy). The deadline is coming up though on October 1st.

Submission 22 went to Castillo Theatre. I sent them MY BODY (in the future I’ll never name a play something that creates so many ridiculous sentences). They want political plays of any length. It must be snail-mailed, and they need supporting material;including synopsis, character breakdown, bio, and political statement (please check the website and make sure I included all that they’re looking for!). The deadline is also October 1st.

Longwood University is looking for 10 minute plays for their annual 0 to 60: 10 Minute Play Festival. Submission 23 was MY BODY (I know, ha, ha, ha). The scripts must be mailed, and the deadline is October 15th.

MY BODY (submission 24) was also sent in to Actors Theatre of Louisville for their National Ten Minute Play Contest. The scripts must be mailed, be ten pages or less, and the characters must range in age from 18-28. They only accept the first 500 scripts, so get yours in soon! The deadline is November 1st.

And finally submissions 25 and 26 (MY BODY and NAP TIME) were mailed (mail only!) off to Universal Theatre. They’re looking for either 10 minute plays or monologues that are at most 4 pages. Deadline is November 15th.

Only 4 left to go! I think I might make it after all.

I just submitted OY OY OY, MERRY CHRISTMAS! to Unity Stage Company. They’re looking for unsentimental, comedic, plays about Christmas ranging from 1-12 minutes. The deadline is the 29th of October.

Only ten more to go, and less than I week to go! Will I survive the binge and meet the challenge of submitting 30 plays in the month of September? Stay tuned to find out!

Yesterday was FRUSTRATION, the benefit for Play Cafe. I directed one of the pieces, and an excerpt from TERRIBLE PEOPLE was featured as well. I learned a few things from my experience over the weekend that I like to share…

First off, I stayed for most of the rehearsals, and I wasn’t needed at all. In fact, I was probably in the way (as people without tasks in theatre often are) a lot of the time. I should have come in during the rehearsals for the pieces I was involved in and caught up on sleep the rest of the time. And secondly, I didn’t work out on either day! Look, I know… You’re thinking I’m some deranged health nut. I’m not, I swear. I just notice a tremendous difference in my attitude, my thinking ability, and my endurance from days I do nothing to days I go to the gym. I miss days from time to time, but rarely two days in a row. I was so busy being un-useful at the rehearsals all day I couldn’t fit in hitting up the Y. Big mistake, I was so wiped and drained yesterday I nearly fell asleep on the ride home (I wasn’t driving, thankfully). So, now I know.

Oh! And I also have a bit of news. There’s this exciting new project called Ten Minute Play Workshop and they’ll be workshopping my play GHOST STORY mid-October. It’s pretty cool, it’ll be done over the internet and they’ll post the 20-30 minute workshop to their website! GHOST STORY is set for October 17th, and I’ll post a link to the video when it is up.

That is all, you can now return to your lives. Thank you.

My glorious plan is proving more complicated than I had thought. I figured if I wrote a ton of plays in August (31 plays to be exact…) I’d have a ton to submit in September, and binge would be a snap. This has not been the case. I’m still playing catch up. Submissions take huge chunks of my time, if not all of my writing time up… And so, if I’m in the middle of rewriting (which I have been with both MY SISTER’S BABY and TERRIBLE PEOPLE) I just can’t do it. But this weekend I’m trying to catch up to… Let’s see I should be on submission 22, hmmm…. Well, here we go:

Submissions 10, 11, and 12 all went to Love Creek Productions. They are looking for scripts less than 25 pages with good roles for females for month readings. They accept multiple submissions from the same author. I believe it’s an ongoing thing, you can message them on Facebook for more details. I submitted, HOW TERRY GROSS DESTROYED MY LIFE, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE, and GHOST STORY. I really wanted to submit TERRIBLE PEOPLE, but it was 5 pages over… And I don’t want to be that playwright. Oh, and it’s snail mail only.

Submission number 13 was sent off to Theatre Three. They’re looking for scripts ranging from 5-40 minutes, and I sent them TERRIBLE PEOPLE. It’s snail mail only, and the deadline is…. September 30th! Get your scripts in folks.

Submission 14 was for PlayPenn. I submitted MY SISTER’S BABY. They want full length scripts, and the deadline is also September 30th. You can submit your script through their website.

Submissions 15 and 16 were for BOA… I heard they take more than one script and so I sent them two more! I sent over NAP TIME and MY BODY. If you haven’t heard the news, they’ve extended the deadline until December 15th! And they want plays that are between 5 and 30 pages long.

MadLab got submissions 17 and 18… TERRIBLE PEOPLE and MY BODY. They want scripts between 5-45 minutes for THEATRE ROULETTE. And their deadline is November 1st.

And last but not least The Disreputables got GHOST STORY coming in at submission 19 (nearly caught up!). It’s for their reading series called: “black&blue.” They’re accepting scripts until November 15th, and want them to be between 1 and 20 pages.

How are your submissions going this months? Seeing spots? I’m kinda seeing spots right now… That means it time to stop I think. Happy submitting everyone!

PS

Going to FRUSTRATION tomorrow? You can see (and hear!) the first ten pages of TERRIBLE PEOPLE! Today at rehearsals the actors were sad that they didn’t get to preform the entire script… That’s how funny it is! You’ll be sad if you miss this staged reading, so do yourself a favor and come by Live Oak Theatre tomorrow at 3pm. Did I mention how free it is? It’s completely free!

Five days ago I started rewriting MY SISTER’S BABY (which there is a reading for coming up on October 1st at 7:30, click here for all the details)… I got some notes from the literary committee at PCSF and I wanted to try and fix as many of those problems before the reading as I could. So, rewriting. I moved scenes and rewrote almost all of the second half of the play…. There’s a completely different, happy (and funnier) ending now…. And the play has lost 30 pages! It went from a beefy 104 to a lean, mean 74 in just five days. I guess I’ll find out on the 1st if it’s working or not.

I really hope that you can make it out for the reading. I’m looking for feedback, and for that I need you!

FRUSTRATION, a benefit show for Play Cafe

Yep! It’s coming up! If you forgot the line up, let me refresh your memory….

TERRIBLE PEOPLE by Rachel Bublitz

THE RITUAL by Rhoda Curtis

THE TROUBLE AT TABLE 23 by Charles Lerrigo

TWO BEDS by Tracy Held Potter

THE BORDERLAND by Bret Rohmer

BACKSLIDING by Earl T. Roske

DON’T LOOK by Lynn Snyder

and

MARRY ME, MOMMY by Ron Weaver

If you know and love me you’ll have TWO reasons to come out for the show… Not only will TERRIBLE PEOPLE scene #2 be read (super funny play by the way), but I’ll be directing the piece from my work wife Tracy Held Potter!

I’m not going to lie… I’m a little nervous. The last piece I directed was… Oh… Crap! It was seven years ago. I think it’s like riding a bike, or at least I’m hoping it is, but regaurdless I’m going to dive in and take it on! This will be a good warm up for me too… In case you didn’t know, I’ll be directing All Terrain Theatre’s show WOMEN IN SOLIDARITY WITH CATS this coming April. Yeah, a warm up will be good.

Okay, you have the information! Come out for the very FREE show this Sunday, and if we knock your socks off… Which I’m pretty sure we will… Feel free to donate to Play Cafe! A very worthy cause.

Thanks and see you Sunday!

Endings are hard, maybe the hardest part of writing… At least for me. So far I’ve written one play that when it came down to finishing it I immediately knew how to impact-fully wrap it up and tie it with a bow. I love the ending of that play, love, love, love. Sadly, for reasons other than the ending, I’m not so sure it’ll ever see the light of day. Alas.

But today (and yesterday, and Monday), I’ve been hacking away at MY SISTER’S BABY and trying to wrap things up. The play, which mostly goes along quirky and cheerful originally ended in a super dark, sad, horrible place. The arc of the play was also all messed up and so I took it apart and put it back together again. But the ending! Oh the ending. I kept going for it, and no matter what I did the terrible things kept happening. And not that I think terrible things shouldn’t happen in plays, but I just don’t feel these terrible things were meant for this play.

One idea kept coming up, I draw and doodle when I’m stuck. I kept drawing the same word over and over… I’d tell you the word, but it would kind of ruin the ending, so I’ll leave you in suspense. My point, is that I kept ignoring it, kept dismissing it for being silly. I saw a wise and brilliant friend today (you know who you are) and she pointed out that there’s a whole lot of silly things in this play and why not end in this way? Sometimes you need a friend to point out the obvious. If you don’t have a friend that you can discuss your work with, I highly recommend getting one.

Now there is an ending! Woo-hoo! And I actually really like the message that it gives. It’s a message of family, and one that even though a family might not be traditional, that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. I dig it. Anyway, if you absolutely must know the ending (come on, you know you want to!) then I will see you at the developmental reading of MY SISTER’S BABY on October 1st at 7:30!