READING
The Face of Contrition will receive a reading at the 17th Annual Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights' Festival in Athens, Ohio, Saturday, June 4th at 4:00pm, in the Forum Theater. To learn more about the festival and the twelve plays being presented, please visit ohioplaywriting.org. Here's the program blurb about my latest full-length play:

THE FACE OF CONTRITION
Written & Directed by Jeremy Sony
A ratings-starved news pundit on the brink of cancellation, James is coping with the death of his wife and co-host, Alison. He's wants to break the last story they worked on together, but the pressure to produce ratings and stay on the air without Alison's help is greater than he realized. Loyalties are put to the fire when a congressional scandal erupts within James' inner-circle. Squaring off against his daughter, the media, and even his dead wife, how far will James go to make his deadline and ensure his wife's final story will be told?

SCREENING
Separation Anxiety will screen Saturday, June 4th at 7:00pm in North Hollywood, CA, at the Theatre Tribe Film Festival. Located at 5267 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, tickets are $10. Please check out the Facebook event from Separation Anxiety actor Tyler Seiple for more information.

That was the quote from my Managing Director when introducing my 48-hour play at the dress for CAUGHT IN THE ACT...AGAIN! at Theatre Daedalus last weekend. It might be true, but it still tickled me a bit because it wasn't what I had expected. But then, neither was the weekend.

First, as promised, we'll talk about zombies. When I mentioned this in my last posting, it was more in an effort to broach the topic of the wonderful AMC show, The Walking Dead. And we'll get to that... eventually... but I want to touch briefly on a weekend of new theatre that happened at Daedalus where I just happened to write (in a sinfully short amount of time) a 10-minute play about survival in a zombie apocalypse. This play, called SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, was one of six productions that were done as staged readings for last weekend's Daedalus benefit show. 

Thanks to these beautiful shots by Skye Public Relations (courtesy of Theatre Daedalus), you can catch a glimpse of this new short play of mine. I've been tossing around the idea of writing a zombie apocalypse play since last May when I was in Alaska. Maybe it was the remoteness of Valdez, or the weeks of playing Left4Dead that preceded that particular trip, but whatever the muse, the spark ignited that weekend and has been smoldering in my brain ever since. I did not, at all, plan to write this for the festival. "Like anything worth writing," as Kay Eiffel (played by the delightful Emma Thompson) says in Stranger Than Fiction, "it came inexplicably and without method." And now, it's inside me.

It's pulling at parts of my synapses, pushing against the insides of my fingertips trying to force its way into a deeper and lengthier version of itself. And, honestly, that's fine with me. I loved it. Do love it. The characters were rich and delicious in my head and while they only got out to play for ten minuscule moments, they left a mark. For me at least. It helps that I had some terrific actors who embraced the tough emotions I sent their way. Can't be easy to go from zero to gut-wrenching-kick-you-in-the-crotch-heartbroken in six minutes flat. But they did. They went there. And I knew that this play was just the beginning. Something bigger, something... bloodier. More intimate though. About people, humanity, and all that stuff that comes with facing down death in the aftermath of life. 

That's what I love about these quick play festivals and writing prompts (from 48-hour fests like this to my weekly Madness plays at school): they give me fodder. They give me flashes of inspiration that either teach me something about my writing or pave the path to a larger creative world. Sometimes, I have a play just sitting around in my brain, waiting. And sometimes, one of those plays pulls out a baseball bat and smashes through.

That, is pretty frakking exciting. That's about all I'm gonna say on this play. Working on this new thing where I don't talk out my plays. I write them out. Neat trick, right? I thought so. 

Speaking of writing out a play.... I think THE FACE OF CONTRITION needs my attention. We're 13 days from my next workshop reading. Lots to do in 13 days. Lots. 
 

Maybe it's the kickstart of Daylight Savings Time, or maybe it's the Coca-Cola from Mexico I had earlier, but either way you swing it, I'm up WAY past any semblance of a bedtime. Which isn't bothersome (it will be tomorrow when I'm trying to get work done I should have been doing already), and happily allowed me to be online, on Twitter, to see Zachary Quinto post the phrase "9 plays in 7 days" in this tweet. And that got my brain churning over next quarter's play fest here at OU. I'll do ya a few better, Mr. Quinto. Twelve plays in four days. A mix of readings, stagings, and studio productions from the Graduate playwrights of Ohio University's professional playwriting program. It seems a world away at this point, as I hunker down for five intense days of project deadlines and finals, but the Seabury Quinn, Jr. Playwrights Festival will be upon us soon and I'm stoked about it.

So stoked that I will bid thee good night so that I might slumber a bit before getting up to work on more revisions of my new draft. More on THE FACE OF CONTRITION later --- for now, I need to write it out, lest I talk it out.

Oh, and next time, let's talk about zombies. Not even kidding.