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My good friend Peter Roth did something quite exceptional yesterday, well, he had probably been working on it and thinking about it for a bit longer, nevertheless, yesterday evening he convened the first meeting of the Manhattan Project.

By his own description:

Between 1942 and 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer gathered the most brilliant minds of the age at Los Alamos, New Mexico to create something magnificent and terrifying. The Manhattan Project – Cleveland Lab seeks to do the same for the Cleveland stage.

Based on the Theatre Lab model taught at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and inspired by The Brooklyn Generator in New York, The Manhattan Project wants to introduce Cleveland actors and playwrights to each other by organizing a monthly production of brand new 10-minute plays.

Participating artists will meet early in the month and will be broken into teams, each with one playwright. The playwright will then be given a writing prompt to write a new 10-minute play based on the prompt and including all the team’s actors. The rest of the evening the team members will get to know each other and get a feel for each other’s skills and voices.

The teams will reconvene later in the month to perform these plays for each other.

These 10-minute plays are not an end in themselves. Through these small collaborations we hope to build relationships between the two most vulnerable artists in theatre; the actors who put themselves on stage and the playwrights who pour themselves onto the page. Perhaps these 10-minute plays will grow into longer works or maybe these collaborations will become partnerships on larger projects.

I am pleased that Peter invited me and that I am one of six inaugural writers. Upwards of twenty people showed up last night and all were enthusiastic. This is an exciting project and will only grow with time.

If you want to participate, please RSVP at TrinityCrater@gmail.com.

The first performance will be Monday, May 6, at 8:00pm at Mahall’s on Madison Avenue, which is a kick-ass venue with a good beer selection.

Rock-on, Peter!

Picked up Final Draft and now I feel sort of spoiled. The grind of manually managing all the character names, centering, parenthetical aspects, stage directions, continueds, etc, through Word and tabs settings wore me down. And then you get those that want it “Samuel French” with character names centered and those that want it in the “Acting Edition” or published format with the space saving left-aligned character names–and the hassle of formatting and re-formatting your script ad infinitum. So, yeah, Final Draft.

Of course, I knew there would be more features, but I didn’t expect some of them. For instance, you can assign voices to your characters and have the script read to you! Sure, it’s a computerized voice and they all sound pretty much the same, and there’s no intonation, etc.; but it’s still pretty fucking cool. There’s a ton of templates: stage play templates from Dramatists Guild, telescript formats with examples from a slew of television shows, three camera setups, query letter templates, treatment templates, etc. The built in “elements” and formatting tools are nice, a quick key stroke and your text is aligned properly and one key tap of an existing character’s name and… up it pops from the list. You can format your script’s scene headings as index cards, hell you can even type on the index cards directly the scene headings and so outline your screen play. You can somewhat automate treatment creation with the scene view option, as well as outline creation. It handles the always tricky problem of script revision–so you can freeze the script and then any changes to a page that exceed the page length are added to A/B pages, as are changes to scenes or scene arrangement. In the index card view you can grab scenes and slide them around to wherever you want them. You can print your drafts and revisions in different colors. You can register your script directly from the program. It has collaboration tools, a split view, name database, built in reference tools, and tutorials, which I’m working my way through now.

There’s a contest that Final Draft offers. The deadline is June 15, so now I’ve got my deadline. I have three or so screenplay ideas and I just picked out the one that most inspires me and that is most developed. I’ll hit that deadline and be done with my first screenplay. Then, working with Illiterite Theatre we’ll start the television script productions…