John Donald O’Shea, Playwright
Episode 66: John Donald O’Shea, Playwright
Don O’Shea has had quite the life leading up to his current role as playwright. Learn about his journey from law to playwriting. It is never too late to start writing!
Show Notes
- The One Technique you Need to be a 21st Century Drama Teacher
- Don O’Shea’s website
- Don O’Shea’s Theatrefolk plays
- The First Herald Angel
- The Revolting Cheerleaders
- Little Nell and the Mortgage Foreclosure
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Episode Transcript
Welcome to TFP, the Theatrefolk podcast. I am Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Hello, I hope you’re well. Thanks for listening.
Before we get going I have to mention the FREE, that’s right FREE drama teacher training we’re offering this week Saturday November 9th at 12 noon EST called The One Technique you need to be a 21st century Drama Teacher. OK. That’s a mouthful but the title says it all – 21st century skills are becoming necessary for today’s teacher but what if you don’t have time to become a technology expert? And how could you ever keep up with students who eat, sleep and breathe technology? And what do drama and technology have in common anyway? Are we all gonna sit in front of our computers and do improv games? So this training is just for you. I’m going to show you what you need to be tech-savvy in the classroom with specific exercises for drama teachers and I promise this workshop is 100% technobabble free. All you need is access to the internet.
Go to 21drama.com. That’s the number 21. 21drama.com and registar for this free training now. You do not want to miss out.
So today we have an interview with another one of our authors. John Donald O’Shea who goes by Don. And Don has three plays with us, a classic melodrama with a modern twist called Little Nell and the Mortgage Foreclosure, a full out modern melodrama called The Revolting Cheerleaders and a lovely gem of a Christmas play called The First Herald Angel. Don has had such an interesting journey along his playwriting path of which the takeaway is it’s never too late to start writing, and everyone can find that doorway into their creative side. OK. So take it away Don!
Lindsay: Hello everybody, I am here with one of our playwrights. I have Donald O’Shea. Now, you go by Don, is that right?
Don: Yes I do, and I think I was one of your first playwrights.
Lindsay: I think you were, too. We’ve got three of your plays. We have Little Nell and the Mortgage Foreclosure; The Revolting Cheerleaders, which is one of my favorite titles; and The First Herald Angel.
Don: I think you’re correct.
Lindsay: Oh, good. It always embarrasses me when I get names of titles [laughs] of other people’s works wrong. [Laughs]
Don: [Laughs] Because you were my first publisher, I always sent my plays to you first. Whether you use them or not is up to you, but I’ve always respected the fact that you were the first guy to put me on the map and I like to send my stuff to you first. So that’s kind of how I operate.
Lindsay: That’s awesome. Okay, well, that’s the first thing I want to talk to you about, is before you started writing plays, you had a pretty different life.
Don: I had a very different life.
Lindsay: Tell everybody what was your job. What did you do…?
Don: Well, I started out as a young assistant state’s attorney. I graduated from that – I became the city attorney of Moline, Illinois, and about four years later in 1974 I was elected a circuit judge, and I did that for 26 years. In Illinois, you don’t run for reelection on a partisan ballot – you run on a retention ballot, and I was retained four times. You have to run every six years.
Lindsay: Right.
Don: So that’s what I did.
Lindsay: So where does playwriting fit into this?
Don: It all came about when I was a member of the Board of Directors of the Quad City Music Guild. They in those days produced three musicals each summer and were looking for a way to raise some extra funds. And we had been doing a winter show and the returns on that were diminishing, and I one night said in a board meeting, “You know, we’re spending thousands of hours on these offseason shows and making 2000 dollars. Why don’t we try some mini-shows? We’d probably do better.”
And one of the women on the board suggested that I come up with the right mini-show, and I went to the library and looked for a melodrama, couldn’t find any, discovered at that time that the libraries threw out their old books, so I decided to write one. And I wrote what ultimately became the first part of Little Nell and the Mortgage Foreclosure. I ultimately added two other sections to it to make it the play that you now see. The great thing about theatre, it’s all creativity, and that’s what I think is fun about it.
Lindsay: Now, you’ve had a long history with theatre. I saw in your bio that you’ve been involved with community theatre since the sixties.
Don: Yeah, in ’67 I did my first role at the Quad City Music Guild. I had never been involved in theatre in high school or college, and I came down and began working in the state’s attorney’s office, and the state’s attorney’s wife knew that I sang and she said, “You ought to go out and audition at the Music Guild.” And I did and that first summer I had two roles, probably the best summer I ever had out there, right? I ended up Bud Frump in How to Succeed in Business and Lun Tha in King and I, and that got it started and I’ve been going ever since.
Lindsay: So what do you think…what was the bug that caught you? What was it about theatre that really spoke to you?
Don: Well, I love the old operettas. When I used to study in law school in my room, many times I would have the Reader’s Digest Treasury of Operetta on softly in the background. And I just liked Naughty Marietta and Vagabond King and Merry Widow and many of the other old operettas, and I always wanted to do those things, and I guess the closest I ever got was doing the more modern pieces of the Music Guild.
Lindsay: Right. So Little Nell was your first play. When did you write that?
Don: I think it was in the 90’s.
Lindsay: [Laughs]
Don: It’sso long ago. You know, I actually wrote it probably 10 years before you saw it…
Lindsay: Oh.
Don: …because we did it fora couple of years as a little one-act 15-minute play, and then we did it so often that I figured I had to write some more stuff so that when, say, people called us up we could perform for them again. And that’s how I began writing more and more plays, and that’s how I developed the second and the third segments of Little Nell. So that’s how it came.
Lindsay: Even though it was quite long ago, do you have any memories of what it was like to move through the writing process that very first time?
Don: I don’t think it’s ever changed very much for me. I’ve always kind of begun the process with an idea. It might be I want to write a bit of autobiography. It might be I want to write a biography or write about an event, or maybe somebody tells me a joke that I would like to expand into a full-length play or a story. And that’s kind of it’s always gone. I get this germ of an idea, I sit down, and then I try to bring in some characters and I start writing.
Lindsay: Do you write with pen and paper first?
Don: No.
Lindsay: Oh, you do start in a computer?
Don: Yeah, I do because it’s so much easier to make changes.
Lindsay: Right. That’s awesome. I always have to start with pen and paper, and then I know when I get tired of the writing I’m like, “Okay, now I’m ready to move on to a computer.”
Don: How can you work with a pen and paper? It seems that you would have to be crossing out and rewriting and using different sheets of paper? To me, the advantage of the computer is if I don’t like something I can delete it and away Igo again.
Lindsay: You know what? It’s always my initial output where things are just sort of coming out of my head.
Don: Okay.
Lindsay: I don’t know why. Pen and paper just…that’s what works for me. I think it’s awesome if you can just get onto the computer in the get-go. You’re totally right. Once it’s in the computer though, I very rarely stray away from that. I always sort of do reworks exclusively on the computer.
Don: Yeah, that’s true with me too.
Lindsay: So once you have something, do you have a trusted reader that you give it to or do you bring it right to your community group? Or what’s the next step for you?
Don: Well, when I write something, I just sent you something which you’ll be reading in a while.
Lindsay: Yeah…
Don: Everything has been on my desktop for probably three, four months in various forms, and I write a little bit and then I go back and revise it a little bit, then I add something and I delete something. And I keep puttering with it for a period of a couple, three, four months, and then eventually I do very much like to take it to one of the theatre groups I work with. Presently I’m directing theatre for the junior high at Jordan Catholic in Rock Island. In the spring I’ll do the same thing at Seton Catholic in Moline. This fall I also am going to use one of my pieces at Aleman High School, which is a Catholic high school in Rock Island, and we’re going to use probably a few of the pieces I’ve previously written at Edison Junior High in Rock Island.
So yeah, I test drive them either at the junior high level or at the high school level. And then you’ll find out regardless of how hard you work to make your writing perfect that you’ll leave the “y” off an occasional “they.” You just have misspellings and typos, and by the time I send them to you guys I like to think I’ve kind of eliminated most of those little-bitty glitches.
Lindsay: Right, and also that since you’ve got it on its feet, you know, you’ve heard what it sounds like with working with the kids, you know what it looks like – that’s always the best thing because that’s what theatre is, right? It’s live.
Don: What happens too often is a kid is bungle a line and it’ll be funny.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Don: And you’ll inch theline to the way he bungled it. Or a kid will get a bright idea, “Can we try this?” Yeah, put it in, see what happens. And you like it and you delete something else and you put in what the child or the student gave you, and suddenly you’ve got a better piece of work.
Lindsay: What do you like about working with students?
Don: The ability to teach.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Don: I am a superb teacher.
Lindsay: [Laughs] Awesome.
Don: Of all the theatre directors I’ve ever worked with, I teach the kids more than anybody else I’ve ever seen.
Lindsay: Why?
Don: I teach how to use their voices. I teach them how to use their bodies, their hands, their facial expressions. This is where I excel, and the younger they are the better I can work with them. It’s very hard for me to work, say, at the Quad City Music Guild directing when I direct there, because all the actors you meet at the stage there feel they know more than you do. So you kind of let them do their own thing and you just basically shape slightly around the periphery. And by and large they do know as much or more than you do, but when you’re working with sixth graders who are coming on the stage for the first time, that’s where you could shape them right off the bat. “It’s customary, my friend, to face forward when you’re delivering your lines.” They have to be loud enough so the audience could hear you and so on.
Lindsay: What’s your favorite thing that you like to teach like sixth graders? What’s your favorite thing when you…you’ve got a new group coming in, what do you like to teach them right off the bat?
Don: I like to teach them to use their voices. I try and tell young actors that there are four things you can do to make your voice more interesting. First, you get louder or softer. Secondly, you can go faster or slower. Thirdly, you could change the pitch of your voice. You could take it down or up. And fourthly and the most important thing is you have to interject the emotion into your voice – the laughter, the anger, the mocking, whatever. And once they begin to catch on to that and begin to realize that they want to change their expression—almost from sentence to sentence and sometimes from clause to clause—that’s where they learn to act.
And the great thing about doing your own plays is you know how it should sound because you hear it in your own mind as you write it, and then you should be able to communicate that. It’s not enough, of course, when you’re working with a young actor to say, “Oh, that was awful!” If you do that, you’re a lousy director. You have to not only explain that what they’re doing isn’t working but you have to show them how to do it, and the kids that have a modicum of talent will pick up on that and within a very short time they become very proficient actors. When I directed at Seton, many of the kids there have gone on to Aleman High School, and over the four, five, six years that I’ve worked with them, many of them are as good as the adults I work with in community theatre elsewhere.
Lindsay: Yeah?
Don: They become quite proficient at what they do.
Lindsay: So what would you say would be a good piece of advice to give to a teacher who perhaps is working with some kids who don’t have a modicum of talent that they’re struggling? What would be a good piece of advice for a young director to give working with young students who just aren’t getting it?
Don: I think the most dangerous thing they can do is pick a play where the kids are basically playing themselves. That never forces the student to get behind himself and to start acting. This is why I like melodramas and farces so much. I think it forces the actor to go beyond himself to assume a character and perhaps even become a caricature. And once they get the feeling of getting beyond themselves and taking the risks, that’s when they start to act.
Lindsay: Awesome. So over the years now, so you’ve had now some exposure to theatre and a lot of theatre, what do you think now that this is sort of your life, right? Did you imagine that this would be what you would be doing when you retired?
Don: Absolutely not. I had a friend named Judy Tumbleson—I think I mentioned her in your Little Nell maybe, in the introduction—Judy was involved with a lights-on learning program at Edison Junior High in Rock Island and she decided she wanted to do some theatre for the kids, and she asked me to become involved and that’s how I got involved with the junior highs, and I’ve now been involved with three junior highs and two high schools as well as community theatre.
I still act a lot. I’ve been getting the best reviews I’ve ever gotten in my life. I just did a piece out at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre in Geneseo, Illinois, a full-length melodrama, and I got rave reviews. And I loved it. I had more fun doing that piece than anything I’ve ever done. So yeah, theatre has become a large part of my life as well as writing my op-eds for the newspapers. And you know, I’m a political op-ed writer and I write rather conservative stuff, and right now they’re taking me to task for it, which is okay.
Lindsay: Yeah, it’s not bad. It means it keeps you on your toes, right? You never get complacent.
Don: Well, I think if you’re going to avoid getting senile and getting Alzheimer’s, it’s very good to keep your mind active, and for that reason about three, three-and-a-half years ago I took up playing the cello, and I religiously practice that every day and I’m slowly but surely getting better at the cello.
You know, I was very fortunate – I worked for the State of Illinois, they provided me with a terrific pension when I retired after 26 years, and I have the time and the money to do the things I want to do. I don’t have to go to a school and say, “Hey, you’ve got to finance this production.” I can pay for it if I want to and I frequently do. The piece we’re going to do at Aleman, they won’t have any expenses whatsoever with that, and that’s largely because I’ve been fortunate in my life, the public kept me in office for 26 years and they gave me a good pension, and sometimes you have to be thankful.
Lindsay: Well, that balances one of the hardest things to be a working playwright, is to write the things that you love to do and want to do, but then try to figure out how to pay the mortgage and the bills and raise a family and so on. It really must feel very freeing to just be able to write what you want and also to get it out there and put it on its feet without worrying.
Don: It is. And anybody who’s ever been a playwright is going to deal with various companies, perhaps Theatrefolk’s, perhaps one of your competitors’ – it’s hard, especially hard when you’re a young playwright. You’ve had a little success with a company and suddenly you send up something and they turn it down, and suddenly you’re hurt and you think, “This is my best work ever. How dare they do this? What’s wrong with these people?” And of course you and Craig get buried with plays every year and you have to make choices, and then suddenly, even though you may have turned it down or Big Dogmay have turned it down, I submit it to somebody else and they take it, and I say to myself, “Aha! I was right. This is a good play.” So we have our moments of great triumph when you guys publish for us, and then we have our moments of great defeat when you send out something and you think, “This is the best thing I’ve ever read,” and nine companies turn it down, and finally the last one you send it to takes it.
And that’s what happened to me, exactly what happened to me with the play I call The Day Ma’s Boys Came to Town to Rob the Bank Again. I thought it was a terrific play and everybody turned it down. And then the very last one I knew, I send it to them and they almost grabbed it overnight – they liked it so much. So you just don’t know what’s going to happen in this business. It’s a very iffy business.
Lindsay: Well, that’s the thing, is that it’s I try to tell playwrights that there are other reasons other than the quality of the play that go into whether or not it’s a fit for our catalogue, and I think that what you just said, perseverance is really the best piece of advice to give to any playwright. First of all, you have to believe in your work…
Don: I agree with you.
Lindsay: …and you can’t give up. And we’re in an age where there aren’t just one or two or three publishing companies, there are 10 and 15 and 20 with the Internet and they are all growing in their own respectability. There are places now where people can go and have a home.
Don: Well, I think that’s right. My home is all over the place on the Internet. I think I’ve published with six or seven publishing companies at the minute. And I really would like to be like Craig Sodaro or one of these other prominent writers, Tim Kelly, who has all of his stuff with one place so people could find him more easily. For that reason I’ve created my own website, and if somebody comes to O’Sheasplays.com, then I refer them back to Theatrefolk or Big Dog or whoever else my publisher may be.
And it’s really kind of fun when you have the website and you start out getting something like 50 visitors a month, and within a couple of years you’re getting 700 a month, 800 a month. And maybe it doesn’t immediately pay off in sales, but I suspect that at some point in time, if you get enough visitors, you’re going to get more sales.
Lindsay: On that note, how has technology helped you? Is it something that it’s been hard to get into? You said before we started this was your very first Skype conversation. So how does technology…being a playwright, how do you use technology?
Don: Well, once you kind of catch on to it it’s kind of nice. I mean, you guys on your website post—I forget the names of all of them—you have so many different vehicles to promote the plays.
Lindsay: Right.
Don: Any playwright who’s got an iota of sense has to like that. He says, “Gee, they’re getting this stuff out there,” and that’s really what you want your publisher to do. It doesn’t do any good to put it in a printing catalogue anymore. The hardest thing in the world I think is to evaluate a play from a printed catalogue, one paragraph. The idea that you people at Theatrefolk had of putting perhaps a half to two-thirds of a play online so that somebody could instantly peruse it I think is a wonderful idea. And that’s what I think sells plays because the drama teacher at any particular junior high, the title might catch his name and “I Wonder what this is all about?” and suddenly it’s all there for him because you guys took the time.
The other thing I’ve always liked about Theatrefolk better than any of my other publishers is your online service where if somebody buys a script or pays a royalty I immediately get notice of it, and then I can check it out on your website just equally as easily. And that’s neat. Some of my publishers don’t do that and it’s kind of frustrating. You never know if you sold a play with them.
Lindsay: Right.
Don: Until you happen to check the Internet and you see somebody’s doing it and…
Lindsay: There you go.
Don: I like to patrol the Internet because every so often somebody will take unfair advantage.
Lindsay: That’s right. It’s always that moment when you’re like, “Oh, ha! I’ve got you!” There are very few places to hide these days. And I think that’s just going to become…the online stuff is just going to become more and more a part of our common world, and in terms of publishing it’s something that we need to address and find a way to make it work for us and for our playwrights and for you. And I think that if you’re going to be a playwright in the next five years, 10 years, it’s something that you can’t ignore, right?
Don: I don’t think you can. I think you want to get as much exposure for your work as is reasonably possible, and you guys using the social media do that for us. I think that’s very important to the playwright. As I say, if your piece just ends up being mentioned as a one-inch blurb at a written catalogue, the odds of anybody finding it I think are rather miniscule in this day and age. When you say there are 15 publishers and each have a published catalogue of 100, 200, 300 – nobody has time to go through that. So what you people do with your social networking really I think is to the advantage of the playwright.
Lindsay: Ah, you say all the nicest things.
Don: Well, I’m trying.
Lindsay: [Laughs]
Don: But I think—I think—of all the companies I have worked with, your related services are the best, and your royalties are the best. One of the reasons besides being loyal to you that I always send my plays to you first, even if you don’t use them…
Lindsay: [Laughs]
Don: …is because you pay a better royalty.
Lindsay: Good to know.
Don: Well, any playwright who is happy with 50% when you could get 70% is goofy. So you might as well go with the company that treats you the best.
Lindsay: Well, and it’s in our best interest to treat you the best. Alright, so where do you see this all going, Don O’Shea? For you as a playwright, where do you see yourself, what’s your ideal life as a playwright?
Don: Well, I would like to see just one of my plays get really popular and that I could make a lot of money out of it. But, you know, I’m getting older, and maybe one of these days this whole thing goes to my daughter. I’ve got a young daughter—not so young anymore, she’s 27—Notre Dame graduate, theatre major, trying to make her career in theatre up in Chicago. And you know, she’s around playwright, she’s around community theatre, she’s been doing some professional theatre – maybe she picks up my website and my royalty rights for my plays. So down the road I’m just hoping that one of them gets popular.
And I think if one gets popular a whole bunch will follow. I think my plays basically are crisply written. When I first started writing plays, there were a lot of paragraphs in my dialogue. Paragraphs pretty much are a thing of the past with me now. I generally write in one- or two-sentence paragraphs, very short, and keep the dialogue moving between the characters. And I find that I like this better and I think it works better for the kids. It’s easier for them to memorize.
Lindsay: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. This has been a lovely conversation. This is the first time…is this the first time that we have actually spoken?
Don: I think this is the first time I have ever spoken to you.
Lindsay: I think so.
Don: I’m not sure, maybe I’ve spoken with him once or twice. I got one publisher that calls me once in a while, but it’s pretty rare that your publisher ever calls you up and talks to you. I get a kick out of my daughter’s theatrical agents. The first couple she had never came to see one of her performances and so I used to say to her, “How the heck can these people represent you if they don’t know what you’re like, if they’ve never seen you perform?” And I really think it’s good that the publishers take a little time, even if it’s only a minute or two, and talk to their playwrights and find out a little about the people, and then maybe they find something else to plug and something that’s good for both.
Lindsay: I love that. I think that’s a really good note to end on.
So before we go let’s do some THEATREFOLK NEWS: It’s a play feature, it’s a play feature, it’s time to feature a play. Don O’Shea has three plays with us as I said at the beginning, and as we’re heading into the holiday season, which I think is crazy. It’s the beginning of November. Why are the stores already in Christmas mode? Drives me nuts. So I wanted to share with you a selection from Don’s play The First Herald Angel. On the very first Christmas Eve a shepherd comes across a child who states that she is practising to be a herald angel. The shepherd wants to believe, but his wife has a lot of doubts.
So we start with James, the shepherd. And Susanna is his wife.
JAMES: Susanna, guess what? The saviour’s to be born this night in Bethlehem! And his name will be Jesus!
SUSANNA: Really? Where did you get that?
JAMES: The angel told me.
SUSANNA: What angel?
JAMES: That one.
SUSANNA: James, you old fool, that’s nothing but a child.
JAMES: But she says that she’s an angel…
SUSANNA: If I told you I were an angel, would that make me one?
JAMES: No, my love. I would never believe that you’re an angel.
SUSANNA: Then don’t be so gullible. Would you have believed her if she said she was a bear?
JAMES: No… but I would have believed you.
SUSANNA: Then why would you believe a silly child?
JAMES: Perhaps because I want the Messiah to come. Perhaps because she seems to be sincere.
MICAH: I always tell the truth.
SUSANNA: You do, eh? Just what sort of angel are you?
MICAH: I’m a guardian angel, but I was practicing to be a herald angel.
SUSANNA: Just what does a guardian angel do?
MICAH: We guard the children of God committed to our care.
SUSANNA: I’m a child of God. Do I have a guardian angel?
MICAH: Sure. All humans do.
SUSANNA: Mine must be as worthless as my husband, or else I would not be living in a squalid cave, surrounded by bleating sheep and married to a penniless shepherd.
MICAH: We merely guard and guide. We don’t provide free housing.
I love that line.
So as you can see, there is a really nice balance between humour of the story and sincerity, a genuine sincerity of the story so I think it’s a real treat. And it would be perfect for a Christmas concert or an assembly. Go to the website, www.theatrefolk.com for The First Herald Angel, read the sample pages, buy it now. Yes, buy it in November for the Christmas season has just begun. For two months. Love it.
Lastly, where oh where can you find this podcast? We post new episodes every Wednesday at theatrefolk.com and on our facebook page and twitter. You can find us on youtube.com/theatrefolk. You can find us on the stitcher app, AND you can subscribe to TFP on itunes. All you have to do is search on the word Theatrefolk.
And that’s where we’re going to end. Take care my friends. Take care.
Music credit: “Ave” by Alex (feat. Morusque) is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
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