Back Story: The play’s the thing

The Coots Repertory Company is gearing up for the 10-minute Play Festival in two weeks. It’s great to be back in rehearsal again. I learned so much about playwriting from rehearsing my first play. This time around I was ready for the lessons. For example, after two weeks of rehearsing my new play, “Eddie’s Ark,” I finally listened to that little voice over my shoulder about a line that just wasn’t working.

“Stop!” I said. “I hate that line.” So I fixed it and we picked up where we had left off.

That was just one of about a dozen changes I have made since we started. Sometimes, you have to hear the character say the line, before you know for sure whether it’s going to work. Imagine a musical composer writing a solo for bassoon that is impossible for even the finest bassoonist to play. Once he hears the orchestra play his piece for the first time and hears the musician having trouble with his part, he knows he either has to rewrite it or give it to another instrument.

There are a lot of parallels between rehearsing a play and rehearsing a musical work. There will be times in Community Band when we will be struggling with a new piece that I think, we should give up on this one right now. But, we will continue to work at it and, after a few weeks, it starts to sound like something, and by concert time we’ve got it down pretty good. Sometimes at the beginning of rehearsal, I wonder if my guys are ever going to get their lines. There will be periods of rapid improvement and then we will hit a plateau. This time around, I have the confidence of knowing that we will get it right in the end.

We have been running through the play three times a day, three days a week for the past couple weeks. Yesterday, we hit one of those plateaus. That means it’s time to relax a bit and cut back on the rehearsal schedule before we burn ourselves out. So, this week we will work on only two days.

We have a remarkable work ethic for a bunch of old coots. Or maybe we are just having too much fun. We laugh an awful lot.

The Coots Repertory Company consists of actors Ron Siemer, Jerry Buck and Walter Rhodes. The 10-minute Play Festival will take place at the First Presbyterian Church on Thursday, Oct. 27 and be repeated on Friday, Oct. 28, both at 8:00 p.m. There will be a total of six plays, which have been written by five local playwrights: Carol Allin, Anthony Fife, Shirley Mullins, Kay Rimers (2) and me. We are asking for a donation of $5.00 at the door to help establish a fund to restart community theater in Yellow Springs.

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