Post-Mortem on "Unicorns, The Middle Class, And Other Mythical Creatures"

I've seen my show twice: on opening night, thanks to a friend's Facetime-enabled iPhone; and on closing night, from the booth, with the rest of the writers laughing at our own material (still!) and with the director providing free commentary on what hit and what missed.

From my minor experience on stage--you know, in high school--I feel like there's a 50/50 chance with closing night: it's either a finely-tuned machine; or it's the show where the cast brings out their personal, untested tweaks because they're bored or where the cast just stumbles over lines because they're thinking about their next shows.

 I will have more to say about this show after our official post-mortem with the director and the other writers; but from what I heard from the other writers, it sounds like closing night was messier than some other nights. For instance, in one of my sketches, there's a series of jokes about bad scripts, and the actors jumped to the final, longest joke. But it all still worked, I thought. (Friends were there and they seemed to like it. And, heck, we all laughed.) So even if this closing night was a little messy, it was still a lot of fun.

Especially because I got to go up after the performance and take a bow. We got diplomas and nice writing pads; and friends told me that my uncomfortable smile didn't look forced at all. So, all in all, teleconferencing in from Texas was hard; and I might be more interested in some of the other writing classes (for instance, there's a class that seems more professionally useful, like writing a tv spec); but the transition from writing sketches to putting them on was very educational. So what did I learn? More on that after I think about it.