It's My Blog And I'll Self Promote If I Want To

Occurred to me that, hey, I'm affiliated with a little theater company here in Richmond Vee-A and that, heck, for the benefit of my billion-eyed audience that reads this here blog, that I'd promote my own show. Well. Not my own show, I didn't write it or anything quite so serious, but I'm in the thing; and it's more like a staged reading--well--it is a staged reading in point of fact--and I have three scenes in a two hour show and--so--come see the dang thing if you're in town and around.

If you go to the Firehouse Theatre link on the right, you'll see the set up, and what I'm promoting here, really, is the Fourth Annual Festival of New American Plays. This time out, the Firehouse received more than 200 scripts from throughout the country and a panel of readers and theater professionals whittled this down to the two we're presenting, from January 26 to January 29. The audience votes on their favorite play--so they are encouraged to see both--and the winning playwright wins money-and so does the second one, though half--and a potential of possible production at the Firehouse.

The show I'm in, Last Semester, by David Starkey and directed by Kerrigan Sullivan is about a contrarian college professor who in the final semester of his teaching career is busted down from upper level classes in Romantic Poetry to teach Freshman Composition. He decides that since he doesn't want to teach the class, he won't, and if anybody takes it, he'll fail them. It's sort of About Schmidt meets The Groves of Academe.

I play Dean Evans, his boss, who is trying to enforce the rules and prevent trouble. The role of Professor Schilling is played by stage veteran Hutch Hutchinson, who was in a play I wrote and produced at the Firehouse, titled The Persistence of Memory. That was about how in 1966 Richmond almost commissioned Salvador Dalí to create a sculpture for our Monument Avenue. Then Hutch played historian and novelist Clifford Dowdey, who was on the commission that formed to choose what kind of new statue would be appropriate for one of the world's great urban boulevards that features statues of Confederate generals and political leaders, and, lately, athlete, author and activist, Arthur Ashe. The 1966 statue was to honor Southern women. Strange, but to this day, there is no statue on Monument honoring a woman.

The other show is Tiger By The Tail, by Frawley Becker and directed by Roi Boyd is about a L.A. therapist who falls in love with an inmate in a Florida prison via written correspondence.

Shows are at 7 p.m., admission is three bucks per night, for five bucks to see both shows. If you read a play for us, you get in free, and if you're an ID carrying student, you pay nothing, too.

So there. Come see us at the Firehouse. By the way, if you are a potential underwriter for cultural type events in the Richmond region, well-- two words: Branding Opportunity. Think: Humana Festival in Louisville. This could be you.

By the way, the goofy Jimmy Olsen cover was sent by me mate down in Sydney, the one and only Ashley Russell, who is an ink stained wretch like me.

OK. Now it's time for all good actors to crawl into the Great American Sleep Machine.

More later.