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Where are they now? by Don Corathers, Dramatics magazine November 2002 |
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| AMONG THE MORE satisfying things we get to do as editors are the duties connected with Thespian Playworks, this magazine's student playwriting program that's now in its tenth year. Over the years we've met and worked with about three dozen very smart and talented young writers, and from time to time we find ourselves wondering what they're up to now. All except for two of them, anyway. That would be the Rand boys, Doug and Jon, who won't go away long enough for us to have time to get any wondering done. Doug's play The Idiot and the Oddity was a finalist in the very first year of Playworks, 1994. His brother Jon brought Hard Candy to the 1998 workshops. Now the brothers are partners in a burgeoning web-based play publishing outfit called Playscripts, Inc., which grew out of a website Jon created from his University of Pennsylvania dorm room to promote Hard Candy. Although in paper form the script had received an indifferent response from conventional publishing houses, on the Internet it attracted enough attention to get more than a hundred productions in its first year. Last year it ranked third in our annual survey of the most-produced short plays in U.S. high schools. Playscripts is where you'll find, among many other titles, several Thespian Playworks finalist scripts from recent years. What makes Playscripts, Inc. different is the playscripts.com website, where prospective producers can search the online catalog and read long excerpts from any play they're considering, instead of having to order reading copies on the basis of a brief catalog listing. For diehard traditionalists, the company has just published its first paper catalog. The press release announcing the publication of the catalog illustrates how far the Rand brothers have come since we got to know them sitting around in workshop rehearsals. It celebrates publication of their one-hundredth title, which happens to be a play by David Henry Hwang. Just as impressive, it contains evidence that formidable theatrical personages will return the Rands' calls. "In the great tradition of American invention," legendary producer and director Harold Prince is quoted in the release, "Doug and Jon Rand have invented a better mousetrap. I think Playscripts is a wonderful idea and another good way to get plays to producers and theatre companies." We think so too. More news... |
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