ANDREW BISS

‘The Craft’ was announced the ‘Best of the Decade’ winner on September 6th, 2018 at the Minnesota Shorts Play Festival in Mankato, Minnesota, which restaged their best reviewed shows from the last nine years of producing the festival. The play also garnered best actress and best actor awards for its talented cast of Callie Sonnek and Zach Bolland. Hearty congratulations to all! Director Chad Brancamp, with Callie Sonnek and Zach Bolland.

A Practical Guide to Becoming a Playwright is officially released! It’s been a real labor of love sharing what I’ve learned over the past two decades or so and I truly hope it proves to be a valuable tool for any aspiring or early-stage playwrights who pick up a copy. Inside you’ll find straightforward, practical guidance on honing your craft and steering your plays toward successful productions. While many playwriting books focus solely on stagecraft, this one also examines the nuts and bolts of getting your plays produced. After all, writing a play is one thing, but it won't have fulfilled its purpose until it's been brought to life on a stage. Examining everything from structure, dialogue, and creating well-rounded characters, to formatting, writing synopses and preparing your plays for submission, A Practical Guide to Becoming a Playwright offers a comprehensive explanation of the often challenging process of writing plays and getting them into the hands of producer...

I’ve been dreaming a lot this week. In the literal sense, that is, not the aspirational one (although I may have indulged in a bit of that, too). Now, there are few more groan inducing things in life than hearing someone else jabber on about the dream they had the night before. It comes just above being forced to wade through other people’s holiday snaps, and right below having to hear someone subject you to tales of the latest cute thing their toddler (or cat) learned to do last week. Don’t worry, I shan’t be relating any of my dreams here (even if I could still remember them). However, what struck me as quite bizarre about one of them was the incredible amount of literary detail it had. I was reading from some strange book (just telling this bit, I promise), and it was full of curious, quite frightening admonitions that were fascinating to read. I remember thinking at the time (in my semi-conscious state) that if I could just remember them when I woke up I could put them to great use...

I recently finished reading Albee’s “A Delicate Balance.” It’s one of those plays that I’ve always meant to read but somehow never got around to. Anyway, finally I did. As I understand it, this was the play that turned his ascendant star on a downward trajectory that would lead to many years in the wilderness in the eyes of the critics. After the raw, brutal brilliance of “Woolf” it’s not hard to see why this play was the cause of some disappointment, and indeed head scratching. It did, however, win the Pulitzer that year…though, as so often happens with Academy Awards, I think this may have been in part something of an atonement for past misjudgments – i.e. “Woolf” not getting it. However, I found the play to be quite affecting for the most part, and at times rather harrowing. I'm certain that any play he’d written after the huge critical and commercial success of “Woolf” would inevitably have been seen as something of a letdown. Consequently, I don’t think this play has been giv...