TomFlannery.com

Some mornings I wake up and say “I’m a songwriter who writes plays” and some mornings I wake up and say “I’m a playwright who writes songs”.

Most mornings I don’t want to wake up at all. But it’s writing that gets me out of bed.

If songwriting gets the edge it’s only because I’ve been doing it longer. I wrote my first decent song in the mid 90s. I wrote my first decent play in the year 2000.

My latest play is called “Maybe it’s True”, and I think it’s by far the best I’ve ever written. In the play are 2 songs. It took me over 10 years to figure out that 2+2 = 4. But what the hell. Learning is hard.

Most of my plays are structured as monologues. But I’ve written your normal people in a room together babbling all at once kind too. Mostly one-act comedies that have lots of curses in them. Many of the plays I’ve posted have been produced. Some have had multiple productions with different casts. Some have been performed fairly regularly by the same actor over a period of years. One was performed in NYC on W 36th Street, which sounds a lot more impressive than it really is when you factor in all the empty chairs that attended. But still, it looks good on a resume as long as nobody asks for pesky details.

Some have never been performed at all, for a variety of reasons, but not because I don’t think they’re good enough. Others may not think they’re good enough…but what do they know? I suspect some of these plays may simply be too damn depressing and/or foul-mouthed for such genteel times as these. Everybody wants happy endings, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna tack one on just ’cause some “how-to” book says so. Life blows sometimes. Theater should imitate life, not pretend everybody on the stage eventually finds their way back to fucking Sesame Street.

Or they could just not be good enough.

But I don’t want to think on that. I’ll let you be the judge.

In a bit…

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