How I Decided to Write Their Town

...And Why You Should Care

I wrote the first draft of my play Their Town in late 2004, after reading and re-reading a lot of classic American drama, including Thornton Wilder's Our Town. In the past, I had written fiction and nonfiction exclusively, and was just starting to dip into playwriting.

Doing some online research on Wilder's play, I learned that Our Town is produced on some stage in this country every single day of the year. It struck me as ironic that the most-produced play in the U.S. - considered so quintessentially "American" that many of the productions are in high schools and small-town theaters - was written by a closeted gay man. (More on Wilder in another post.)

At the same time that I was re-reading Our Town, the straight mayors of San Francisco and New Paltz, N.Y., were making headlines on same-sex marriage rights; the clerk of Sandoval County, N.M., began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples; and Massachusetts became the first state to extend marriage rights to gay people. There were numerous news stories about how (heterosexual) town clerks suddenly had to deal with unforeseen problems - like creating gender-free marriage licenses, readying their offices for a possible barrage of marriage license requests, or having to follow a law they personally didn't agree with. The situation seemed ripe for drama. I wrote the play first as a one-act of about 20 pages, called "Our Town 2," but my very smart peer writing group, SPEC (short for "Screenwriters and Playwrights Eat and Critique"), said it needed to be much longer. And that's how Their Town was born.

Three years ago, I remember feeling an urgency to finish the play and get it "out there," thinking that the topic of same-sex marriage would be stale in a short time. But here we are in 2007, and marriage rights are still a hot-button issue. Massachusetts remains the only state to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples.

This blog will chronicle the path of Their Town as it moves closer to its first production in June 2007 at the Pittsburgh Pride Theater Festival, a program of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company.