Barbara and I were talking about Reed playwrights after watching the rebroadcast of the second episode of Treme the other night. Eric Overmyer (’73) is executive producer and writer on the series—set in the months after the flooding of New Orleans—and he’s also worked on a couple of other critically-acclaimed shows: Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire among them.
Today’s mail brings a flyer from the Reed Alumni association about Lee Blessing who graduated a couple of years before Overmyer. Profile Theater, in the Theater! Theatre space in my neighborhood is doing a staged reading of Blessing’s new work, When We Go Upon the Sea, in a couple of weeks (in addition to producing several other Blessing works this year). I cannot recommend Fortinbras enough for serious but humorful Shakespeare aficianodos.
When We Go Upon the Sea is described in the flyer as exploring “a future, in which President George W. Bush is put on trial for international war crimes.” I have to say that I find this sort of amusing because the one act play I wrote for my playwriting class twenty years ago at Reed was “Ollie North, 2000 A.D.,” with a sort of similar premise. It starred my classmate (not from playwriting) Scott Quinn as Ollie North, local cinephile D.K. Holm as The People, and Barbara as Fawn Hall. I lost my digital copy years ago but D.K. gave me a copy of the script a few years ago. I may have to dig it up and wander over to the show.