The People Didn't Know It Was A Play Yet

ACT I

We were in the Wells Public Library, mid-conversation about climate change, when the room got interrupted.

Not by an alarm or an announcement — by an actor. A PowerPlay intervention, dropped into the middle of a very ordinary Thursday, and suddenly a room full of people learning about warming oceans was also, without quite realizing it, watching a piece of theatre happen to them.

I was in it. It was thrilling in the specific way stealth theatre-making always is — the audience doesn't know they've become one yet. But their bodies certainly begin to react. And our client, Wells Reserve at Laudholm got exactly the kind of arts-based learning outcome that they hoped for.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to: if you want to understand how people actually move, hesitate, resist, and surprise themselves, there's no better classroom than watching a room not know it's in a play. It's the best writing education I know that doesn't involve sitting down to write.

Which, funnily enough, brings me to what I have been sitting down to do.

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Act II

I've been watching sunsets on purpose for a while now, and more pointedly lately. Not admiring them but watching them, the way you'd watch a scene you were trying to understand the mechanics of.

There's a discipline to it that I didn't expect. A sunset is, technically, just light losing an argument with the atmosphere — and if you sit with that for long enough, you start to notice it's also just... a practice of watching something end well. Slowly, on schedule, without drama, and then doing it again tomorrow.

Did you know! On the moon, there are no sunsets. No atmosphere means no scattering — the light just switches off, hard-edged, no gradient at all. Everything we call a sunset, the whole slow amber unraveling, only exists because we happen to live under thirty miles of air getting in the light's way.

I've started treating it as training. For writing, for endings, for the parts of a play — or a life — that don't resolve so much as they set. It's kept me steadier than I expected it to.

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Act III

Which is what I want to invite you into.

This September, I'm running Write Your Play With Me — a multi-level playwriting course for writers at any stage, built around weekly prompts and guidance, and one live session a week to write alongside others:

• Zoom, Monday nights (7pm EST) — for writers not local to the Seacoast NH/ME area
• In person, based at or near Chases Garage in York, Maine, Sunday afternoons (2pm EST)

$250, or pay-what-you-can starting at $50. The multi-level format is intentional — new writers and experienced ones in the same room make the work richer for everyone, not despite the mix but because of it. I will be writing a new play along with you too. We'll end the month with actors giving your pages a cold reading, out loud, in front of you.

I need ten writers to make this run. If that's you or if it's someone you know who's been meaning to write the thing they keep almost writing, sign-ups are open.

And if you want to see where all this sunset-watching has been headed: Scattering will have a reading on September 30th, 6:00 PM, location TBD — come watch the light do what it does while the words do too.

More from this theatre-led creative studio in August!

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