“The Hermit Bird” is a short play, less than one act, that I wrote in an all-night marathon at school. It won a writing contest and convinced me to write more. Eighteen years later, I’m working with Virago Theater to expand the piece into a full-length play.

Such a length of time for the development of a play is not unheard of. Tennessee Williams’s greatly underappreciated “Orpheus Descending” cooked for seventeen years from the original version to the final. And Peter Shaffer has hacked away on “Amadeus” for more than two decades running. Thornton Wilder compulsively rewrote “Our Town,” rarely letting be staged without tweaking something. And don’t get me started about Star Wars. Ultimately, I feel that if a story lives in the heart of the teller, then it has an indefinite shelf life.

So every time I sit down and try to type this thing out, I am quite sure that the story has vanished from me and I’m simply a poseur pretending to be a writer, and then I start and then the story is there and I’m quite sure it’s not me doing the telling anymore, and I’m simply a reporter telling the facts I’ve witnessed.

Anyway, whatever happens, you’ll be able to watch it at Virago in the spring of 2009.

Decent all-women plays are scarce. I wrote “The Knitting Circle” as a short bravura piece for six talented actresses. My intention was to let women conduct stage combat and operatic violence, which is, even in our supposedly enlightened age, reserved almost entirely for male actors. Additionally, I hoped that the characters and their conflicts would be more rounded than the agonizingly common slut/virgin female stereotypes.

The only really good all-female drama I have ever read is “The House of Bernarda Alba” by Federico Garc?a Lorca. (The play is readable in the original, even for us polyglot dummies who studied Spanish for only a few years.) Thus I have lifted Lorca’s structure of a tragic matriarch, torn by anti-male sentiment, grasping for control of her rebellious brood.

Here’s a lithograph of the original picture, “Une Affaire d’honneur,” by Emile Bayard, that inspired the script:

And here’s the opening tableau from the staged read:

My new short play, “The Knitting Circle,” will receive a staged read at STAGES Theatre on March 22, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. Four other short plays will be presented as well. Admission is $5.

The staged read of “The Knitting Circle” is being directed by Jenni Dillon, and it will include the following talented actresses:

Claire – Jill Cary Martin
Roxane – Jami McCoy
Eugenie – Jen Bridge
Hortense – Melanie Gable
Berthe – Jessica Lynch
Georgette – Valerie Curry

Finally!