Ain't nothin' like a good meeting

NVTA is a local organization of community theaters and among the things that NVTA does is their annual one-act festival. I personally love one-act festivals because of the whole "could be fabulous, could suck" potential for each show. Some scripts are original and some are published.

Published - in this case - means that the rights to the script are held by a publishing house - Samuel French or Dramatists, to name two. Original means that the playwright still holds the rights. It's not actually that simple but 'twill serve for the purposes of this discussion. Some original scripts are very, very good. Some published ones are pretty bad. And vice-versa.

Anyway, I am representing Silver Spring Stage by directing Perfectly Good Airplanes, an original script by the same author (Steve) who wrote the one-act that I directed at Silver Spring last year, 21 Pairs of Sneakers. I've got two lovely actors (Ted and Ali) playing a father and his estranged daughter, Ira is my AD, and David is my stage manager.

I never envy producers and I certainly never envy the producers of a one-act festival, who are basically juggling 15 shows over two or three weekends. So to keep everyone at least roughly on the same page, the festival chair and the technical folks from the Reston Community Center (or, more formally, the CenterStage theatre at the Reston Community Center) held a meeting so that we could all know what to expect and what to do.

As with any meeting of this sort ("How many of you are first timers?"), there was a mix of information - new, old, boring, interesting, helpful, lame. Every participating company is strongly encouraged to send at least one person to the meeting because procedures can change from year to year, so there was a pretty decent turnout. As an added incentive, the list of time slots for each show is announced at the meeting, so if you want to know when your play will be performed and when your tech is, come to the meeting.

All of which means that some people are desperately scribbing stuff down and some people are putting in their time until they find out the two pieces of information they want and can head home.

David has stage managed shows for NVTA before, so I was taking a few notes, listening to the useful stuff, trying to decrypt David's notes (funny, I used to be able to read his handwriting), and discreetly waving to folks I knew. All-in-all pretty low key.

The meeting was saved from being too boring by Mary-Anne and Scott. As always happens at these things, someone will bring up a hypothetical and answering it will involve further hypotheticals. Eventually the discussion will completely leave the realm of the concrete and exist solely in the realm of conjecture. And there is always at least one person in attendance who finds these little flights of fantasy to be unproductive at best.

So Mary-Anne was talking about time management strategies if it looks as though a show will run over its 60 allotted minutes. And Scott - who is not the most laid back individual in the entire universe - finally lost patience with hearing about something that might or might not happen several weeks from now. Like a Mamet play, Scott's remarks are often short and to the fu--- (um), to the point. (Thank you, David Ives.) So he leans in and politely barks "How long is your show?" (And Scott actually can bark politely. It's an amazing skill and I envy him it.) "What?" "How - long - is - your - show?!" "Oh. About 35 minutes." "Then why are we having this discussion?!"

Not a laugh riot or anything, but it amused me because it was really only a matter of time. It was gonna happen. And it had the collateral benefit of startling anyone in any danger of drifting off.

By the way, if you've read this far, Perfectly Good Airplanes will be in the second slot of the matinee on Saturday, June 18th. Y'all come.