My New Play: Play Writing Tips and Theater Publicity Secrets.

Theater Publicity Secret #52

Here is a powerful theater publicity secret: You don't have to re-invent the wheel, you just have to use it!

News releases, pitch letters, letters to the editor, local radio interviews, local TV stories, local weeklies, magazines and newsletters. These are all powerful publicity tools that can target your theater going audience--IF you use them.

Yes, your publicity efforts need to be easy, fun and effective or you'll never do them, but you also need to do them or they will never become easy, you won't have any fun, nobody will know about your new play and nobody will buy tickets. So, don't re-invent publicity, just do it!

Busy? How to Get Things Done

Are you a busy theater director, producer or actor? Is your plate so far past full that when you try to eat, people think you're getting ready to do the dishes? Do you wish you had more arms than an octopus and more legs than a centipede?  If you are here is one tip that can jump start your productivity:

There is a right way to do things, and there is a way to get things done.

I first heard this quote as a bit of dialog in the family movie The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. It's a kids movie  with a very simple plot. Of course, kids movies, and plays, are great places to hide a bit of wisdom the audience can use for years to come.

My standard operating procedure is to beat a subject to death, over analyze and consider it till I don't have any energy left to get any work done. A few months back, before seeing the film, I started to wonder how much I could accomplish if I tried to find the most direct, simplest, easiest, fastest way to get things done TODAY! Sure enough, I started to find ways to get things done. Since then, I ...

• Found an open source script formating program (and saved $180.00)
• Finished writing Big Love--A Musical Romp for Adults Only
• Met with the artistic director of a local community theater
• Contacted an entertainment/copyright lawyer about drawing up a win-win new play production contract
• Found a super simple way to dream up and write down the music for my show, and
• Found a new drug to help reduce my Periodic Paralysis symptoms so I don't crash so often.

Finding the easy way works. Sometimes ya just gotta git-r-done! But some of you knew that already.