Playwright: A New Experience - writing The Last Person on Earth

Well, I’ve never written a blog before so here we go! My name is Rachel Stahly and last term I wrote a play called “The Last Person on Earth” for a playwriting class. At the time, I was simply trying to fulfill an assignment and write a story that I liked. Our professor convinced me to submit it for the One-act festival, but I was not expecting my play to be picked. To be honest, when I found out my play would be produced as a show in front of people, I was more worried than excited. I was going to have to make a lot of changes before my play would be ready for public viewing. I work very slowly, especially when writing something creative, and I wanted it to be good so the short timeline we had really stressed me out. I was getting a lot of good feedback from classmates, my director Lindsey Esch, and my professor which helped immensely with the rewrite. However, I was still trying to decide what I wanted the play to actually be about. For me, it was just a fun story that I thought people might enjoy seeing. Suddenly, my play had to mean something or say something or be about a specific thing, but that wasn’t what I had originally wanted. I was just having fun, and now I had to worry about the quality and what people would think. I was starting to regret submitting my play in first place.

Finally, I got to a point where I just said “I don’t like any of this so I’m going to change it,” and I basically rewrote the entire script a day before it needed to be done. The characters were different, the ending was different, and my mindset was different. For the first time, I liked what I had written. Finally, I was able to confidently hand it to my director and say “This is it, this is the one.” Of course there were little things I would need to wrap up, but ultimately I could finally be happy with my work. In summary, this has been pretty stressful, especially since I have seven classes to worry about this term, but I think in the end it will be worth it. I am so excited to see the end result of my play, as well as all the others we have in the One-act festival. Lindsey is one heck of a director and I am so excited to see what she has planned for “The Last Person on Earth.”

- Rachel Stahly