Retreats Archives - Gordon Leary

Weston Playhouse Retreat, the Sequel

Retreats

There’s nothing quite like returning to a home away from home away from home!

Julia and I were thrilled to be invited back for an artists retreat last week at the Weston Playhouse, one of our very favorite places in the world where Pregnancy Pact had its world premiere in 2012. Weston welcomed our friend Susanna Gellert as the new Executive Artistic Director in 2018, and we are so happy to continue to stay connected. We had a wonderful week getting some writing done on one of our newest projects, Choreomania, in between cheese samples at the Vermont Country Store.

Thanks to Susanna and the whole staff for welcoming us back again!

SPACE on Ryder Farm

Choreomania Retreats Something Blue Writers Group

I’m back in the city after an amazingly productive and beautiful week at SPACE on Ryder Farm of writing, eating, breathing fresh air, and making friends with woolly bear caterpillars. Julia and I made some great progress on thinking through Choreomania and made a giant leap towards a second draft of Something Blue.

I spent much of the week writing in the yurt, when I wasn’t harvesting dahlias or marveling at sunrises/sunsets.

We were thrilled to spend our time at SPACE with fellow P73er Blue Beckford Burrell, Working Farm playwright Antoinette Nwandu, and Stitcher podcasters Rachel Bonds, Ash Sanders, and Ellen Winter & Chris Litter.

Thanks to Page 73 for sending us up for the week!

New Haven is for First Drafts!

REB+VoDKa+ME Retreats

Julia and I had a wonderfully productive in our two week Alumni Residency at the Yale Institute for Music Theatre, and came back to New York with a full draft of REB+VoDKa+ME! (You can see the whole thing mapped on our apartment wall in this photo…) It’s such a great feeling to have a whole draft of the show and to have been able to flesh out all the work we accomplished with R&D Group and MTF. All we need to do now is share it with the world! (And then rewrite it, of course.)

Not only did we get a draft out of it, but we also got to know some of our new very favorite writers! I’m so impressed and amazed by the work that Annie Tippe, Molly Beach Murphy, Jeanna Phillips, Brett Macias, and Christina Quintana accomplished on Cowboy Bob and GUMBO. And getting to see actors I’ve always loved like Alison Fraser, Andrea Jones-Sojola, and Trent Armand Kendall (and new favorites like Eddie Cooper and Lizan Mitchell) put their all in these new works made me giddy.

Thanks to Mark Brokaw, Kay Perdue, and the whole Institute staff for giving us this opportunity!

YIMT 2.0

News Retreats

I’m so excited to head back up to the Yale Institute for Music Theatre in New Haven this June! Six years after our amazing experience with Pregnancy Pact, Julia and I will get to spend two weeks working on REB+VoDKa+ME in their alumni residency alongside workshops of the new musicals Gumbo and Cowboy Bob.

No actors, no rehearsals, no presentations – just us and our writing for two whole weeks! (With intermittent stops at Miya’s Sushi, of course.) I can’t wait to maximize these two weeks and come out on the other end with a full draft of the show.

Thanks to the wonderful Mark Brokaw for including us again this year!

Good times at Goodspeed

Retreats

I’m feeling very lucky to be spending the week at Goodspeed in the Johnny Mercer Writing Colony working on REB + VoDKa + ME with Julia! It’s a cold and snowy week in East Haddam, CT – just the kind you want to spend bundled up and writing.

We’re halfway through the week and we’ve been productive so far – writing and researching and planning and scheming… There are six other wonderful writers/teams up here with us this week, and we’ve had the pleasure of hearing their work at our nightly sharing sessions. During the day, I’ve taken breaks by raiding the amazing Goodspeed library for rare cast recordings and demos. And the whole time I’ve been nostalgic for my old NYU classmates, remembering the week we spent here almost exactly nine years ago!

Thanks to Colony dramaturg Michael Bush, Mercer Foundation VP Jonathan Brielle, and Colony coordinators Hunter Bird and Max Schwager.

All in all, it’s been a fruitful week in a beautiful place – what could be better?

The famous East Haddam Swing Bridge, the longest truss bridge in the world, over the Connecticut River.