Mike Mariano

I spent the month of January converting most of my plays into good old HTML—the way the web works! I now realize that I didn’t mark them up well enough, though, so I’m going back through and adding divs like crazy!

But it’s one thing to add markup to my scripts; it’s another to make them look nice. I need your help.

I’d like you to take a look at two versions of Urban Myth. The first is formatted like a manuscript—the same way I format my printed plays you see in PDF on the site. The second is formatted in a style closer to those of published plays like the ones on Playscripts.

Please play around with both files: increase the text size, print them out, draw dirty pictures on them. Then tell me what you think. Both versions use CSS-generated content to create parentheses and colons, and these won’t show up in the ancient Internet Explorer. Does this make it difficult to read?

Here are the files: Update: Now that the HTML plays have been uploaded I have removed these samples.

• Urban Myth manuscript style
• Urban Myth published style

Feedback is welcome. And if you have any suggestions or style tips of your own, please tell me!

Praise for August Wilson just keeps coming—even from white people!

The play Gem of the Ocean was…amazing. I’ve never seen anything by the author, but the older black couple next to us have seen four of his plays, and thought this was the most powerful. The author, Anton August Wilson, is (was—I believe he passed away last year) a black playwright, and his plays are about black people. I have no problem with that. The story was about people, in this case black folk at the turn of the century in Pittsburg, PA, dealing with the issues of being free (that’s a poor summary, but that’s all I can do without trying to get into all the plot points). It was a difficult time for these people.

I’ve highlighted some of the choice phrases. It reads as if the authors of Black People Love Us started writing a theatre column.

Bonus Points: Less offensive, but no more intelligent, is this endorsement of Gem of the Ocean from across the pond:

The play was pretty good—it was part of a series of plays Wilson wrote about black people in different decades of the 20th century. This play was set right around the turn of the century I think and was about reconstruction and internal racism.

But any pretense of cultural respect goes away in the next paragraph.

We’re going to see a play about Jewish something or other called 2000 Years.

I can’t wait!

Hey Daniel Webster High School! What do you know about an upcoming production of The Bill Show?

According to our Playscripts Production Page, three performances of our play will occur at Webster High in Tulsa, Oklahoma between March 10 and 20. But Dean and I don’t know any more than that.

Scary rampant Googling has turned up no additional information about this production or anything about the school’s drama program. However, Dean and I did discover that Webster High looks like the high school from Back to the Future! Great Scott!

So if you know anything about the production, let us know! And if you don’t, get yourself to Tulsa and find out!