Wade Bradford’s Blog

NEW: As of January 25th 2010, my play Tomorrow’s Wish is now a published play! It is available in a trade paperback edition ($10), or only $3 to download. You can order the play by going to Lulu.com or Amazon.com.

And now, back to the original blog-entry (which was written before Tomorrow’s Wish was a published play.)

I have lots of unpublished manuscripts hanging around my office. But most of them are old novels or screenplays. I am very fortunate in that most of my plays have been published by either Eldridge Plays, Heuer Plays, or Playscripts or Big Dog Plays. There are a coupl plays that I wrote during my teens that are just plain horrible — so those will never see the light of day. However, there is a play of mine that I LOVE and it has yet to be published.

That play is Tomorrow’s Wish. It’s been a labor of love of mine since 2002 when I started kicking the idea around. It is currently being looked at by Eldridge Plays and Heuer Plays. But they haven’t gotten back to my yet. (Not with this current draft, anyway.) It’s about a teen named Megan (named after my niece) who dreads the idea of her eccentric cousin Juniper coming over for a visit.

In the first drafts, Juniper was a very loving, mentally handicapped 16 year old girl. And this is perhaps where the first major problem of the play arose — Juniper kept fluctuating from childlike to emotionally distraught, to surprisingly mature and well-spoken. So, trying to write a mentally disabled teen-age girl proved to be the wrong direction. But it took me a LONG time to understand that and be able to revise the work. Now Juniper is a homeschool student who lives on a secluded ranch with her grandmother. She is very bright, but not used to being around others– so she shifts from introvert to extrovert with the snap of a finger. (Oh, and she has a very special power — but that’s top secret.)

But I finally did! I’ve recently submitted the play to a couple places. So I’m hoping that Tomorrow’s Wish will someday be published and performed by talented high school students. I’ve gottena lot of terrific feedback about one of the monologues from the play (it’s available at my About.com GuideSite).

A few brave actresses have even posted performances of the monologue on YouTube.

And here’s another…

And this one is during someone’s drama class:

My good friends and editors at Heuer Plays just published my latest ten-minute play:

Macbeth Mixed Up

This is yet another comic exploitation of my idol William Shakespeare. Ah, the poor Bard. You would think if I truly admire him, I would stop robbing his grave. But there’s something about his marvelous characters that just won’t allow me to cease my lampooning. I’m afraid I may always tomb raid that great Elizabethan playwright.

“It’s a bit heavy on the eye of newt.”

If you are looking for thirty-minutes of fast-paced humor, might I recommend all three of my ten minute plays (each available at www.hitplays.com :

“Romeo Revised”

“Hopeless Hamlet”

and now

“Macbeth Mixed Up”