Colleen Hughes '04

It’s been a crazy week. Not only were the readings of my classmates running every night, but classes are also winding down, which as every college student knows means that there are final projects all over the place. I know I’m only in two classes, but when you add a full-time job on top of that, craziness abounds.

My reading last week went really well. My director was wonderful and enthusiastic about the play, and the cast was absolutely spot-on; to the point where if it were ever produced I’d love to see those exact actors in the roles. The audience was full of familiar faces—my classmates and family, some coworkers and friends, and my friend and fellow HC alum Christine Radice ’95, whom I met one summer in college when I worked at her company and discovered that she was an HC grad. But there were also people I didn’t know there, which was really cool because it was the first time ever that total strangers heard my work. I got some helpful feedback from the talkback session, as well as a lot of positive comments. I was so nervous, but it was a really good night. I’ve gotten so much more comfortable with hearing my work read out loud over the years. When my undergrad thesis had a staged reading at Holy Cross, I was shaking the entire time and had to keep fighting the urge to block my ears because hearing my words out loud was so scary and painful. But last week, I was actually able to settle in and enjoy the actors’ performances instead of obsessing over every word. It’s still not easy to hear my work performed, but I’ve at least become a lot more used to it.

The article based on the interview I mentioned previously also came out in the Somerville News this past week. It took me a good two or three days after receiving the link to feel brave enough to click on it and read it. It was such a nice article though. I’m going to have to pick up the print issue and save it. It’s the first time I made one of the local papers for something other than the Somerville Recreation activities I used to take part in as a kid or making the honor roll in high school.

I’ve been going to my classmates’ readings every night this week. The final one is tonight. I’ve really been impressed by every one of them, even though it’s all been work I’ve seen in progress throughout the year. The plays have all really come together in these latest revisions. I’ve just been a little worn out from going into the theater every night (even though it’s definitely worth it). Tuesday was a particularly long day. Class met for an extra-long time (12–6) and then my classmate Genevieve’s reading was at 7:00. Our class was so long because we started performing the one-acts from everyone’s “evening of theater” final project. The one-acts range from about a half-hour to an hour, so performing and then discussing all of them will take awhile. My evening of theater revolves around the “scenes from an office” theme I mentioned in an earlier entry. I decided to use my ten-minute play about the disgruntled Disney employee, and so far I’ve also written a short one-act (currently 25 minutes, but once I revise it will be more like 30–40) that’s also a crazy comedy about the minutia of office life. I have three more ten-minute plays to write by Monday, so I’ll be busy this weekend. Tuesday we ended up getting through two one-hour plays and then my office play. We’re meeting next Monday instead of Tuesday from 12–6 to go through the remaining final projects, and then I’m going to the reading that night too because the play is written by someone from last year’s playwriting class. So I’ll have a lot of writing to do this weekend followed by another marathon day at the theater on Monday. But the semester is almost over, and then I’ll have a couple weeks of a much more normal schedule before summer classes start. Right now, I’m just looking forward to the fact that tomorrow is Saturday and I don’t have to wake up and start work at 8 in the morning.

My reading is tonight! I gave myself a headache from worrying so much about it. But I tried to relax as much as possible yesterday. Thursday’s class was cancelled because BU was running on a Monday schedule—they get Patriots’ Day off because they’re right in Red Sox/marathon territory, and since there’s so many Monday holidays, they rotate which day of the week gets a Monday schedule to make up for it. So I worked a half day yesterday and then ended up going out for a late lunch at Friendly’s with my mother, who’s a teacher and home this week on April vacation. But the headache still kicked in last night and hasn’t faded yet.

I met with my director after class on Tuesday. We talked for over an hour, and he had a lot of great ideas and seemed really excited about working on the play. Then my final “reading draft” of the play was due on Wednesday so that copies could be printed and given to the actors, so I did some last-minute revisions on Tuesday night. In just a few hours, I’ll be heading into my theater for some all-day fun with my play. From 1:30–3:00, it’s just me and my director having one more meeting to go over everything and get ourselves on the same page before the actors come in. Then the actors will arrive at 3:00, and we have a three-hour rehearsal before the reading. The director wants to have them read through the script once and read through at least some of it with some basic movement and blocking. Then the reading itself begins at 7:00, and I have a talkback with the audience afterwards. They’ll get to share their opinions on the show with me, and I’ll get to ask them questions about how they felt about certain parts too. The reading should help me figure out how to revise for the next draft.

Yes, that means this is (hopefully!) not the end of the line for this play. It is my MFA thesis, but the first reading is really just another step in the revision process. Thinking of it that way, knowing it doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect tonight, helps me not to be as stressed. I have to think of tonight as a revision and learning opportunity rather than as the night that my play has to be perfect because people will see it. My director thinks it is in great shape for a first reading, so I am excited amid all the nerves.

I took a picture of the front of the theater advertising our Ground Floor Reading Series. My play is kicking off the series, and the first week is the readings of the thesis plays of all my classmates. The second week is staged readings by local playwrights, including an alum of the program from last year. So I’ll be spending a lot of time at the theater in the coming days. But I’ll make sure to write again after my reading and tell all of you how it went. For now, it’s time to shut down my computer and try to get my headache to subside before I leave for the theater.

My staged reading is now seven days away. It all came up on me so fast. I have to send in a final “reading draft” to the theater by Wednesday, and then next Friday night I’ll be sitting in the back of the audience trying not to have a meltdown as my play is read aloud in front of people other than my classmates for the very first time.

I got my director a few days ago! I’m paired up with Ben Evett, who is the founding artistic director of the Actors’ Shakespeare Project in Boston. I’m really excited to work with him. And my reading is on Shakespeare’s birthday too, so it’s fitting in that sense (yes, I’m a nerd who knows when Shakespeare’s birthday is). I sent the director my script last night, but I still need to make revisions. Yesterday was my final workshop of the piece, and I brought in the ending and an earlier scene that I had reworked to remove a blackout between it and the previous scene. The workshop was so helpful. My professor let the actors improvise in one of the new parts I’d added, asking them to make it sound more like sibling teasing rather than a regular conversation, and it was great. I hadn’t wanted the scene to sound too sentimental, and they gave me some great ideas for tweaking it. I also feel like I know now what needs to happen to the ending. I had been so lost, and I finally was able to see all the signs in the rest of the script pointing me to one place where the main character needs to go. Now I just need to write that part. Easier said than done, yes, but at least I feel like I have a roadmap of sorts now.

I also got a really exciting email earlier this week. The arts director for the Somerville News (one of our local papers) wants to interview me about my play and my reading because of the connections it has to the city (it takes place in Somerville, it’s about a Somerville family, and Somerville is also where I grew up). I’m going to meet with him on Saturday morning. I’m nervous. But it would be awesome if the interview brings in a few more people to my reading.

All of this news doesn’t even begin to illustrate how busy this week was. Last weekend was spent putting together my presentation about Samuel Beckett for Tuesday’s class and working on revisions to my play alongside it. I couldn’t sleep well Monday night, and I feel like I froze up at the start of my presentation on Tuesday and had a few moments of panic before I settled into it. The presentation led to a good class discussion though. One thing about Beckett is that he was highly protective of his work, so his estate won’t allow his plays to be produced if they deviate too much from the stage directions as they are written (if a director wants to modernize the setting, for example). This led to a spirited discussion about the collaborative nature of theater and whether it is right or wrong to exert so much control over the script.

I was also beyond busy at work this week. Our upcoming issue of the journal I work on was due at the printer on Thursday (which was also the day of my workshop, so my revisions had to be done by then too). Somehow I managed to copyedit like crazy during the day and still have the energy to work on my play at night after work. I have another rough week ahead of me leading up to Friday’s reading, and then the entire week following Friday will be busy because I’ll be going to the theater every night to cheer on my classmates as their readings go up. I’ll try to blog again before my reading if I can manage coherent thoughts amid the flurry of nerves.

I have Full House on the background while I’m writing this. If you read my earlier entry where I also mentioned the Tanner clan, you’d know that this means I am once again completely stressed out and am avoiding thinking about my play. My staged reading is two weeks from today. Yeah. I typed that sentence and then just stared at it for a few seconds and let it sink in.

Class was cancelled on Thursday, which was supposed to be the day of my final workshop for my full-length. On Thursday and Friday, our theater was hosting the Young Playwrights Festival, which is a really fun program they do for high school students. The theater sends local playwrights to hold writing workshops at various high schools in Greater Boston, and then this week the students got to come to our theater and see their works performed by local actors. My cousin had a play in the festival on Thursday. Our class was cancelled because all of our usual actors who come in and read for us were working at the festival. So my final workshop is going to be next Thursday. The good part of getting my workshop pushed back a week is that it gave me the opportunity to get dinner with one of my friends on Wednesday night. It had hit 90 degrees in Boston that day and I really wanted to be able to get outside and take advantage of summer-in-April. We went to Redbones, a barbecue restaurant in Davis Square, Somerville, a short walk from where I grew up. I know I probably should have stayed home and done some writing, but I knew the warm weather wasn’t going to last, and I couldn’t pass up the chance to experience it.

And I also this week realized once and for all that it is not humanly possible for me to graduate in September. I think I mentioned before that I’d have to take three classes this summer in order to do that, and I had been holding out on finalizing my schedule until I heard whether one of the theater professors was going to be offering a class. She ended up not offering it, so that left three potential classes to take during the first summer session. Two of them have overlapping times. So basically if I wanted to take two courses that session, I’d have to be in class from 2:00–5:30 Monday through Thursday, plus I’d have an hour-long commute each way. This would involve working until about 9:30 at night after class and then beginning my homework after that. I don’t think I can handle that. So I’ll just be taking one class in the first summer session. And there’s only one English class available in the second summer session. That one meets every day from 12:30–2:00, meaning that I’d have to start work at 7:30 a.m. before class every day and then work again from 3:00–6:00 after class each day, but I’m going to have to deal with that. At least it’s only for about six weeks. I’ll have to take my third and final elective in the fall. My top three choices are American Drama, Beckett and Irish Modernism, and then a Dramaturgy class over at the College of Fine Arts. Right now I’m leaning toward Beckett, but I’m not 100% sure yet.

Oh! Have I mentioned the postcard I got from the Holy Cross Theatre Department? The spring show Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen, composed by music professor Shirish Korde and directed by theatre professor Lynn Kremer, is coming to the Tsai Performance Center at BU after the Holy Cross performances. Unfortunately, it will be at BU April 23, which is the night of my reading, and April 24, which is the night of my classmate Anna’s reading. So I won’t be able to take advantage of the “Holy Cross comes to BU” experience.

I think I’m going to try to see my professor’s new play From Orchids to Octopi this weekend. It’s at the same theater where I recently saw the show written by a BU grad from last year. It only runs through May 2, so there’s never really going to be an ideal work-free time to see the show, and I figure I might as well go sooner rather than later. This weekend will be a rough one though. My presentation on Beckett is due this Tuesday, and I of course have my final workshop this Thursday. Fun times ahead.

Last week when I was writing my blog it was snowing. This week, it’s sunny and warm and going to get into the 60s (and possibly going to reach 80 this weekend). And in between that we had another round of flood-level rains. This is why I hate March and April. And also because it’s a really busy time of year. My next (and last!) workshop day for my full-length is next week. We don’t have enough class periods left before our readings to go through another rotation of workshops, so this is my last chance to hear anything out loud before the reading. I can still email things to my professor and get feedback that way, but I want to take advantage of this last workshop to hear some troublesome spots out loud.

At work, I had one more 2009 “carryover” vacation day that had to be used by the end of March, so on Wednesday (the 31^st), I decided to use it and take the day off as a “writing day.” It was nice to spend some normally unavailable time with my script. Unfortunately, most of that time was spent reading over what I already have and then wracking my brain over how to fix the ending. I need to figure out what changes in each of the characters in the scene before the ending and what they’ve learned. It’s been so frustrating. There were times Wednesday when I just wanted to take what I’d written, write in “and then their house burns down. Blackout. End of play” and have that be the end of it. Obviously, that’s not going to work. And I’d never actually do that. I just have to keep pushing through it until I get somewhere. Seeing my classmates go through their last workshop sessions has been encouraging because I can see how far they’ve been able to come since their previous workshop and know that I can get to that level with mine.

My Thursday class this week had a special guest—my brother Connor! He’s a sophomore at Stonehill, and he’s the only one out of my three brothers who shares my interest in writing. He came home on Wednesday for Easter break, so I asked my professor and the two classmates whose plays were being workshopped if would be OK if he sat in on class. He seemed to really enjoy it. It was a good class for him to visit because he got to see a workshop of a nearly finished piece and then a workshop of a brand-new piece. One classmate brought in three different scenes from her full-length that she’s been working on all year, so at this point she’s focusing on fine-tuning the details and getting really in-depth with the relationship between the two characters these scenes focus on. I didn’t have a chance to tell Connor in advance that those scenes had already been through several rounds of revision, so at first he was a little intimidated thinking that we came in on day 1 with work that was that polished and then got really intense levels of feedback. My other classmate brought in the second act of a new play that was being read aloud for the first time, so then Connor got to experience what a workshop on brand-new material is like and how the feedback differs when something is just starting to be developed. With new work, there’s a lot more general comments about things like “did you buy this concept?” or “was this character working for you?” Once something is at the stage (ha) where it’s been revised and revised again, the feedback is more about dissecting the individual beats of a scene and tightening everything up.

So, I have a busy week ahead of me in preparation for my workshop next Thursday. I have to get the ending revised. Rest assured that there will be no burning down of the characters’ house. I hope everyone reading this has a wonderful Easter weekend. And if any new prospective students happen to see this, congrats on your acceptance! And good luck as you reach your final decisions. It seriously feels like I just went through that process myself—it’s hard to believe it was ten years ago. Wow, that makes me feel old.