Re-Reading

Yesterday I ran off six copies of the revised Can't Live Without You, hole-punched them, and bound them in preparation for my trip to the William Inge Theatre Festival. It occurred to me that even though I'd added about three pages of dialogue, gotten rid of some outdated references (Hertz doesn't rent Ford Contours anymore), and done some other tweaking that I've been wanting to do since the last time I'd read it, I hadn't actually read the whole play since...well, since May 2002 when I finished the final first draft.

So I sat down and read it. And guess what... it works. There were no glaring errors or typos, the new sections fit in seamlessly, and the characters still sound like they did when I first met them almost four years ago. I even laughed at some of the lines that I'd forgotten I'd written. (Believe it or not, I have a tin ear when it comes to knowing what will get a laugh. Many times I've written a line that I think is on a par with Neil Simon and the audience sits there stone-faced, only to have them stop the show on a line that I didn't think was funny enough to get a titter.)

The best part is that this little exercise that I undertook in December 2001 to break a writer's block in the novel stands on its own -- you don't have to read Bobby Cramer to know what's going on in the play. (Good thing, too; it's still being written.) With any luck I'm going to find some people out there who are going to read it and like it enough to want to put on a staged reading of it or even consider producing it.