"Dryad of Suburbia" in Shortlived 2016 next weekend

"Dryad of Suburbia" poster by Cody Rishell.

I'm pleased to announce that my 10-minute play "The Dryad of Suburbia," originally commissioned by the San Francisco Olympians Festival in 2014, will receive a full production as part of PianoFight's Shortlived competition next weekend!

What should loving but stressed-out modern parents Tom and Heidi do when their young daughter starts claiming that she has a mystical connection to the oak tree in the yard? It's not easy to be a tree spirit in a suburban neighborhood that's blighted by both conformity and drought.

The world premiere of "The Dryad of Suburbia" is directed by James Nelson, featuring actors Leah Shesky and Raymond Hobbs. We had a dynamite first rehearsal last Monday (Leah and Ray even started improvising in character) and I look forward to seeing the finished product on Thursday, March 17.

Shortlived is the nation's largest audience-judged theater festival. As a newbie playwright in S.F., I attended nearly every round of the 2010 edition of Shortlived, met several great people who are still in my life today, and finally developed an intuitive sense of what makes for a good short play. (I have thoroughly romanticized this period of my life and wrote about it for the Theater Pub blog last year.) So I am excited to finally have a script of my own in the festival and a shot at the prize! I'm also glad that "The Dryad of Suburbia" isn't just sitting in a drawer anymore. It caused me a lot of stress while I was writing it -- I had to scrap my original idea for a dryad-themed play and write this one at the last minute -- but it got a great reception at the staged reading in 2014 and now it will have a future life.

There are 4 performances of "The Dryad of Suburbia," March 17 through 19 at 8 PM, plus March 19 at 5. Tickets here. Facebook event here. Come one, come all -- and vote early and vote often for "Dryad"!