Online communal effort helps get plays off the ground
Playwright creates 'Binges' to share ideas
CAMBRIDGE -- Patrick Gabridge is a struggling playwright (is there any other kind?), with a savvy sense of marketing and a desire to share his knowledge to help other playwrights succeed.
Gabridge (GAY-bridge) is leading a 30-day online networking/marketing support group for playwrights, ending Friday. Every day or two, he posts a challenge to some 40 others who are part of a
Some challenges are simple: Make a list of goals. Others are more complex: Make a list of all the directors you've worked with. Rate them according to their ability to get new plays done, their pull, their ability to communicate (especially long-distance), etc. Rank them. Contact one a day.
Gabridge got the idea about a year ago from a website called flylady.net. ''She sends you these tasks every day that help you keep your house clean and live a more organized life," Gabridge says. ''I thought, hey, maybe this would work for being better at doing marketing and networking for playwrights. If we had a daily task, people might be more likely to do it."
Raised in the Midwest and upstate New York, Gabridge has a mild-mannered presence. He's not shy, he says, but says other playwrights can be. He knows how much easier it is to endlessly fine-tune a script than to send it out or take a director to lunch, the kind of networking that can be personally scary but is necessary for getting page to stage. Consequently a lot of plays end up languishing in drawers or on hard drives.
''Like a lot of people, I'd struggle," Gabridge says outside the Cambridge Public Library. He spends several mornings a week in the reference room, doing research or writing on a yellow pad. Even though he is astonishingly organized -- with every play, every theater, responses, productions listed in a database -- he identifies with those who are not.
''Playwrights are little islands unto themselves and miss a lot unless they intentionally go out to network," he says.
The networking/marketing Binge follows the recently concluded monthlong playwriting Binge, which he also started, and it runs along the same lines: Writers send out a play a day (the same one or a variety) for 30 days. Plus, they e-mail the group about each submission, giving the address of the theater or contest, and any requirements. And, of course, they crow about any productions that ensue.
The Binge aims to create a sense of community. The group will tell their peers that this theater is amateurish, that director is hot. If a playwright can't travel to another city to see the production of his or her play, other Bingers who live in that city will attend and report back. Aside from the information, contacts, and encouragement, the group provides the best kind of peer pressure: seeing other people get their plays done because they've taken the footsteps.
Gabridge started the first playwrighting Binge in spring 2002 after he heard a National Public Radio story about a town that went on a group diet. Impressed by their communal support, he thought the concept could be applied to playwrighting -- not a diet, but a binge. He started with an e-mail list of 15 playwrights. As more joined from around the country and as far away as New Zealand, England, and Wales, he moved it to the Yahoo groups site. Now he holds them twice a year, in fall and spring.
The 37-year-old Gabridge has been writing plays since 1987, when he was studying computer science at MIT. When his first plays started getting produced, he switched to filmmaking and other writing. He recently e-mailed the group to say he'd just passed a big milestone: the 1,000th script that he's sent out. (That includes 600 rejections and 136 acceptances.)
So far this year, he's sent out 98 play scripts to theaters, 25 query letters about plays, and another 25 queries about other kinds of writing: novels, nonfiction books, and movie scripts. He just got an offer -- which came as a result of networking -- from a small publishing company to publish his first novel, ''Tornado Siren."
He figures he's written 30 short plays as well as eight full-length ones and had a total of 120 staged readings or productions. One play was a finalist for the prestigious Heideman Award, given by the Actors Theatre of Louisville's National 10-Minute Play Contest. This year alone, he had plays done in eight states and Washington, D.C.
Locally, Centastage produced Gabridge's ''The X-Mas Files" in 2001. The Rough & Tumble Theatre will produce ''Pieces of Whitey" at the Boston Center for the Arts in June.
This year, Gabridge has had 11 productions from plays sent out on Binges, up from six or seven last year. He figures that if he has had 15 to 20 plays produced from Binges, the total number for all Bingers ''has to be in the hundreds."
Monica Bauera Binger in Lynn, has seen her playwriting life open up in ways she never imagined when she started her first Binge in the spring.
Bingers supported her when she was nervous about working with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company director Steven Maler, who was going to direct her 10-minute play, ''The Most Important Thing, " for the Boston Theater Marathon last May.
''Playwrights from Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York wrote me with good, sound advice," Bauer says. ''I was able to work well with Steve without showing too much insecurity, and polish the play while working as a team with him and the actors." The resulting production led her to Boston University's graduate playwriting program, where she is now studying. And her one-woman show, ''The Diet Monologues," recently ran at Boston's Old South Church.
''People always say, 'If a play is good, it'll get done,' " Gabridge concludes. ''Give me a break! Lots of great plays never get done. Talent is important, but it's a fraction -- I don't know what fraction -- of what's needed to succeed."
The networking Binge ends Friday. For more information, visit yahoo.com, and sign on as a group member of playwrightbinge.
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com 