'Spare Change'

I missed out on the theater experience in my pre-university years because I didn't want to be an actor and I (stupidly) thought it was all about acting. I became immediately interested in theater during my first five minutes in college when I found out I could take a theater performance class instead of speech. In order to pass with the speech credit, everyone had to act on stage during the end-of-semester show. I played Mrs. Sappleton in my university's production of the one-act play, The Open Window. And then I was hooked.

I went on to minor in Theater Performance, while majoring in the Production arena of Television Journalism. This helped get my technical career started, if nothing else.

Fast forward through some time with ESPN, Discovery documentaries, producing my own shows at a small independently owned television station for a while, writing for various outlets, to last year. I had just moved to Korea and was looking for something to get my hands into when I saw a flyer for Picasso At the Lapin Agile, the very first production of the Gwangju Performance Project last June.

Bummed because I missed the sold-out performance of Picasso, but excited to work on the next production, I decided I wanted to become a member of the group and help where I could. I contacted the group and discovered that it was founded and run by professional (but laid-back and completely awesome) theater expats like myself. As it turns out, they needed some help with technical aspects, lighting and sound. Exactly my specialty. I worked with the GPP running tech on their next production of The Real Inspector Hound that opened in December 2011, and again on the Spring 2012 production of Ives Just Got To Dance, a series of one-acts by playwright David Ives as well as a dance piece incorporating the music of Vivaldi and James Brown.

Then a few months ago, the founders of the group decided to tap into the talent of Gwangju's expat community in a different way. They held a contest for local writers to submit their original one-act plays and gave some criteria to follow to make the production cohesive. The criteria was to write a lighthearted, 10-minute one-act play with no more than four main characters (possibly another as a small walk-on part), and to include the line, 'I said the same thing'.

Being a professional writer myself, I stick more to articles, copywriting, short stories, and editing. I wasn't sure if I could write a play. But since they were holding a few writing workshops, I figured I would go and at least get some tips for the writing I do everyday.

After spending the weekend in Gwangju partying with my friends as only Gwangjuites can do, I attended the writing workshop, and then caught the train back up to Daejeon Sunday evening. It was then that I got the idea for my play and ran with it. I put my two and a half hours on the train to good use and made some character and plot notes in my notebook. Over the next week, I finished hashing out the plot and began writing the script.

I did my pre-writing work so well that once I started typing, it came so easily and I finished my first draft of the script in one sitting. Of course it took several days, more adjustments to the script, discussions of certain elements with other writers, and sending the finished product to a few key people for notes and feedback before rewriting certain parts (again) and finally finishing the script. It took a few more days before I decided it was really finished and that it was ready to be submitted to the contest.

Fast-forward again about three more weeks, and I received an email thanking me for my submission and congratulating me that my submission had been selected to be produced and preformed in the upcoming winter 2012 show.

I couldn't be more ecstatic.

So what's the name of my play? And what's it about?

It's a lighthearted comedy called Spare Change, and is about a guy who just opened his own business called Spare Change. Customers come in wanting their loose change converted to bills, but that's not what he does - he gives spare advice to people who want to change their lives. You can imagine the confusion.

In addition to my script being selected, I was also given some invaluable feedback, for which I couldn't be more thankful. Every day is confirmation that moving my life to Korea was the absolute best thing I've ever done for myself, both personally and professionally.