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The last year has been devastating for many industries, and live theatre is among the hardest hit. Although theatre groups, drama classes and production companies have put on a brave face and tried to pivot by switching to online performances, one has to admit it just isn’t the same. Strangely, I still received royalties in 2020 for my published plays, but perhaps that had something to do with the fact that companies purchased scripts early enough in the year in the hopes of a return to business as usual. I’m not expecting my 2021 royalties to be all that great. I have several plays that aren’t published yet that I had planned to submit in 2020 to various publishing houses, but the timing is off, obviously, so I haven’t bothered. I’m wondering if I should wait until at least 2022.
On the up side, I had some very encouraging communication with something called the ‘PLEDGE’ Project. It’s a project co-sponsored by the Univeristy of Toronto and The Playwright’s Guild of Canada designed to catalogue and promote plays written by women playwrights. They asked for permission to include my plays and so all nine published plays, plus one that has never been published, are in their database and featured. (You can see each link below.)
The only good thing out of theater’s closing is the discovery of “Audio Theater”; radio plays, if you will. I got to play Scrooge for a nice production of “A Christmas Carol” – all recorded via Zoom and then played on our local NPR station and made available on the internet. We also resurrected “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and did some older, short plays that lent themselves to audio. Check it all out here: http://narrationbygeorge.com/audio-theater/
This is very cool, George. (And nice to hear from you! It’s been a while!)
There’s a Shakespeare in the park company here that took to doing performances outside long term care homes here.
What a great idea!