Retired Old Men Eating Out

Imagine this.
You invite people to a beautiful, historic space with plush chairs, great sight lines, professional sound and lighting and ask them to listen to a wide variety of stories told by a talented team of writers, actors and directors whose only goal is to inspire and entertain.

There are no screens. No ear buds. No algorithms and no cell phones.
Instead, you’re asked to lean in and pay attention–all at the same time, together.
That’s the magic of theatre and when it comes together, when the actors are clicking and the storytellers are doing their job you get swept away by the experience. And when it’s over, you have something to talk about, something to think about. You will have laughed, you may have cried but you will depart feeling human again, part of a community that enjoys the immense pleasure and value of storytelling.
That’s theatre. And that’s what the Playwrights Festival at the Delray Beach Playhouse delivers year after year.

The 7th annual Playwrights Festival recently wrapped on a scorching hot Sunday afternoon.
A sold out weekend ended with my play The Romeo’s closing the festival.

Afterwards, the playwrights gather on stage for a talkback. The audience asks questions, share their thoughts and for a few golden moments we get to shine.
It’s a heckuva feeling my friends.

But then you get to walk through the theater greeting audience members, actors and stagehands because nobody really wants to let go just yet.
For the performers and playwrights the nervous tension has been released.
There’s a feeling of “we did it” permeating the air. It’s not easy to get up on a stage and try to transport an audience for 10-15 minutes—the length of the plays featured by the festival.
It’s not easy to write dialogue either, unless you’re Nora Ephron or Neil Simon.

Most of us mortals sit staring at blank screens trying to wrestle an idea into something coherent through trial and a whole lot of errors.
To see that work come to life through the talents of gifted actors shaped by visionary directors is a feeling that is indescribable. It’s worth the labor. Every time.
But there’s risk involved. Delicious risk because you never know if what you’ve written is any good until you hear it out loud or as theater people say “on its feet.”

I wrote “The Romeos” after a weekend family reunion where my brother in law Paul talked about “retired old men eating out.” Get it. Romeo’s.
At the time, I didn’t know it was a thing. All I knew, was that it was a great concept for a play. So I got to work. Now that I have a little experience and have met several actors I find myself writing with those actors in mind.

For the Romeos I imagined my friends Shelly Pittleman and Peter Salzer in two of the lead roles.
I saw Shelly as Frank, a widowed plumber grieving the loss of his wife Marie. And I saw Peter as Morty, a health conscious accountant.
We needed a third character so I created Sid, a retired English teacher and poetry aficionado who is also a romantic and a bit of a ladies man.
I put them in a diner on 441 and imagined that they met weekly in the same booth where they were ably waited on by Jessica, a younger waitress with aspirations and wisdom forged by hard won experience.

If I am to be honest, this one came easy. A first draft was done in about an hour. I saw the characters clearly. I had the set up, and I think I knew what life lessons I was hoping to convey in a quick s few pages.
Now all I needed was for it to be funny and touching. No problem.

Yeah right.

The truth is sometimes writing comes easy, it just flows and sometimes, most of the time, it’s a slog of self doubt. You search in vain for magic and you wrestle with a feeling that it’s lacking that certain something you just can’t put your finger on.

For me, and other writers I’ve spoken to, we live for those flow moments when the words just appear from some mysterious place. But we also relish the struggle because we have faith that the struggle will make us better. When you struggle and solve the riddle it’s a great feeling. It’s also a great feeling when the characters cooperate and write for you.

The Romeos was the latter feeling for me. I heard Peter and Shelly. And when we cast Gary Eggers as Sid and Kathleen Shelton as Jessica they slid into the characters I imagined.
I can see myself writing with them in mind in the future.

The next step is to turn your script over to a talented director in this case the remarkable Matthew Schenk.
Matt and the cast made it sing.
And then, it’s over.
It’s performed and it vanishes.

That’s the cruelty and the grace of live theater. It’s not a movie. You can’t rewind it. You can’t stream it at midnight in your pajamas. You were either there or you weren’t. And if you were there– if you were in that room on that Sunday afternoon, then you own something that no one can take from you and no one else will ever have. Your version. Your experience. The way that particular line landed in your particular chest on that particular afternoon.

A film is a recording. A book is an object. A play is a séance.
You summon something into the room. It lives for a few minutes. Then it goes back to wherever it came from. And you sit there in the dark after the lights go down and you think: “was that real”?
It was real. It was a Sunday afternoon in Delray beach and it was real.

I’ve written a number of plays now. Some of them have been produced, some of them live in drawers, some of them are still becoming whatever they’re gonna become. But I will tell you this; nothing, nothing compares to sitting in a theater and hearing an audience laughing at the line you wrote alone on your phone at two in the morning. Nothing compares to the actor who finds something in the words you didn’t know was there, a pause you didn’t write, a gesture you didn’t imagine, a take that elevates a line and creates a magical moment.
Once you turn a play over to a creative team, it’s not your play anymore. It becomes our play and that’s my favorite part because the team takes the writing to places you never imagine.

The Playwrights Festival does something that almost nobody does anymore. It bets on new work. It bets on the unknown. It says; we don’t know if this piece is going to work, but we’re gonna put it in a room with real actors and a real audience and find out together. That’s not programming. That’s faith.
And as festival co-creator Marianne Regan reminds audiences, this work matters because we are creating the theater of tomorrow. We are building the canon in our own humble but sincere way.
We are also building community.
The festival sells out. In the middle of summer, the so-called slow season.
But there’s clearly a hunger for stories and live performance. There’s clearly a desire to get together and experience something live and in person with our friends and neighbors.
If I could, I’d live in that world.
It is hard to leave it.
I noticed that people linger. They want to talk to the actors and playwrights and each other. That’s so beautiful.
But eventually we leave, the curtain goes down, the lights go off. The actors go back to their lives.
That’s theater.
You build a world. You fill it with people. You let strangers into it for a few minutes and then you strike it, pack it up and carry it home where nobody can see it but you know it’s there.
The Romeos lived for one afternoon in Delray beach.
The imaginary booth is gone. The props are in a box somewhere.
Frank and Morty and Sid and Jessica are back in the script, where they live, waiting for the next time someone gives them a room, a light, and an audience.