Friday, January 25, 2019

Rom Coms again


Well I decided to do another call for submissions on the theme of "romantic comedy" for NYCPlaywrights again. This time for the podcast.

I bitched in several blog posts about the unromantic and uncomedic nature of so many of the submissions back in December 2014. And again. And again.

This time around the thing that annoys me the most are the "meet cute" submissions. That's when two people meet and fall in love, in the present context within the real-time span of a 10-minute play. The plays are almost always ridiculously fake because they are utterly derivative. They are based on movies the author has seen and certainly not on lived experience - because people don't meet and fall in love in ten minutes. If people in real life do go off together in real life after ten minutes it's because they like how the other person looks, not thanks to pun-ridden witty badinage, and it isn't about love it's about lust. And straight women almost never, ever decide to go off with some random man they just met.

The absolute worst of the meet-cutes are the meet-cutes on a first date after connecting on an Internet dating site. In real life those are never romantic and almost always extremely uncomfortable and disappointing. 

On the up side, this time around we only have to choose one play, not eight.