Hour Nine: In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning

Jake Kaufman, a senior at Neodesha High School, takes comments from Peter Ellenstein. While some of the other playwrights have reworked their scripts four and five times by this point in the night, Jake is on draft number "two and a half." With one hour on the clock, he says that his priorities in the time that remains are cutting down some of the repetition in the opening scene and clarifying the relationship between the two central characters. Hint: one of them may wear a cape.


I asked Peter whether it was difficult to avoid being overly prescriptive in the comments he is giving to the playwrights. "Not really," he replied. "It's their play. They're the ones who have to decide what happens. But it's up to me to ask a lot of questions, and to help them realize what might be confusing to an audience who doesn't know their characters as well as they do. What I'm looking for is clarity."