Play Publication – Changes In The Mating Strategies of White People
I am thrilled to report that my play “Changes In The Mating Strategies of White People” will be published this summer by Broadway Play Publishing. Yes, you can soon purchase it as a book or license it for a production. I wrote it almost ten years ago and it premiered in Hollywood five years ago with an amazing cast. If I had known how long it would take, I would have def gone to law school.
I began writing this play shortly after the recession, in 2010, while unemployed and single. I spent every day in a coffee shop where I struggled to write a book about salsa dancing (still struggling to write it). Turns out, writing a book is not always super fun. I wrote the play at first as a sketch for my own relief and amusement. And then it broke through me like a dam. Unlike the book, I looked forward to writing the play every day, like a favorite TV show or an old friend. It was something to come home to. I had no expectations, just the idea of men and women as utterly alien to each other and forced together in a small consistent space, like the coffee shop I sat in. When I was done I sent it to my friend, Joe Keyes, who suggested that I host a reading. One night, a dozen friends piled into my apartment to read a three hour draft about dating in Los Angeles. Only two people fell asleep.
More rewrites, apartment readings and staged readings followed until multiple people encouraged me to produce it. Everything that came after emerged from its own momentum. Even the suggestion by my friend Cicely to remount it because our culture had shifted enough to make it more timely in 2019 than it had been in 2014. Our culture will probably shift again and again, and who knows if this piece will stay relevant, considering its focus on heterosexual relationships and women helplessly drawn to men. However, while society’s acceptance of fluid genders and orientations has improved, I can’t imagine that respect for women’s bodies will reach a satisfactory place (certainly not in the world at large) or that sex will ever stop confounding humanity. Either way, I hope it’s as fun to read and perform as it was to write.
And the feeling of being published is amazing. 🙂