Scene4 Magazine | the readers blog

Michael Bettencourt great article! It's great when people take a chance and bring your work to life. I'd like to read your Emma Goldman piece or better yet see it. Is there a link to this mysterious risk-taking playwrights forum?
Conan Moats
read Michael Bettencourt's article

Your comments about what it feels like to be an "unknown playwright" hit home. I've been lucky to have three of my plays done here in Denver, Colorado, but two of them are readings, and the group that is working on "new scripts" here is now committed to doing only readings, and it is very unsatisfying to me as the author. I know what it sounds like; I want to see what it LOOKS like! The feedback that one gets from a reading is valuable, but a play is so much more than the sound of a script; it's what motivates the characters to do the role, it's what the real sounds and sights are. I must get together with this group in Tennessee to see if they are remotely interested. Thank you for being on my side of the fence, even if we're often standing in something in this particular field that we're, well, standing in. Thank you.
Gary Webster
read Michael Bettencourt's article

I think that it is generous to give the examples of the writing in progress rather than an abstract set of illusions. This is very satisfying it its detail.
Grace Cavalieri
read Karren Alenier's article

Frida lives! And so does your review!
Mary Ann Whitney
read Renate Stendhal's article

I've been tired of teenagers and their problems for a long time since "teenagers" first appeared and I'm a lot older than Lia Beachy so I remember when children became adults and the transitions they made were called "rites of passage" and they were dragged into adulthood kicking and screaming as they had been for time immemorial and nobody gave a damn about this false and phony waystation called adolescence which never really existed until the movies. It's the hustlers and snake-oil sellers that created this creature and the billion-dollar market that rose alongside them. If "20 is now 10", as you say, and "14 going on 35" is the focus of it all, then let's make "50 is now 20" and "30 going on 60" and be done with it. Yes, adolescence is a trying time, for all of us and especially for those who are barraged with it and wouldn't know a pimple from a pisspot, or care.
Great bundle of commentaries, Lia.
Steve Rinstein
read Lia Beachy's article