Students at The Dalles High School had the rare, and perhaps nerve-wracking, distinction this week of performing a play for the man who wrote it.
Texas-based Don Zolidis was in town Tuesday to do a playwriting workshop at the high school and catch a dress rehearsal of “Game of Tiaras,” his comedic mash-up of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Disney princesses, and the HBO hit “Game of Thrones.”
The play, dubbed the “ultimate Shakespearean Disney spoof,” opens tonight at the high school auditorium and runs nightly through Sunday, and again Nov. 17 through 19. All showings are at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $6.50 for adults and students and $5 for senior citizens and children under 12.
Zolidis has written 95 plays, which have been produced over 9,000 times in 61 countries.
Once a teacher himself, he said he looked at available plays for middle school and high school students, and “I thought it was all childish, stupid or wildly inappropriate.”
Now a full-time playwright, his specialty is writing ridiculously twisted student productions, and they’re a big draw. Drama teacher Lowry Browning said the high school theater club’s biggest hit ever was a production of his called “Spy School.”
“Game of Tiaras” is the school’s third Zolidis play.
Zolidis said “Game of Tiaras” was actually commissioned by a high school teacher “as a fairy tale play to make fun of fairy tales.”
At the time, he was on a history kick, and was reading about the War of the Roses, the decades-long battle for the English crown in the 1400s that serves as the basis for “Game of Thrones.” So he decided to sneak some medieval English history into the play, which upped the body count. He ended up “going on a bloodbath through the entire Disney pantheon,” he said. There are about 30 characters, and he ensures everybody “has a fun role.”
His favorite is Cinderella. “I like characters that don’t care what others think and go after what they want.”
Cribbing from “King Lear,” the play features three daughters who fight over their father’s kingdom. Zolidis gets a kick out of sword fights, particularly when done by girls, particularly when they’re in gowns.
“I’m also making fun of Shakespeare a lot.” At the end of King Lear, the king has a heart attack and dies. “You can’t have the main character die. That’s ridiculous!”
He added, “I love messing with Shakespeare, by the way. I really do.”
He said the easy part of writing the play was the plot. “I basically stole everything from Shakespeare. I totally ripped him off. He’s dead, he doesn’t care.”
Asked how he keeps his ideas fresh for a younger crowd, he said, “I think I’m very juvenile.”
He recounted when one of his first plays was performed. “Somebody in the audience stood up, pointed at me and said, ‘You’re going to hell.’”
He thought, “’I’ve found what I’m going to do.’”
Plus, he loves what he does. “When you’re writing a play you get to act out all the parts. I’m the romantic lead.”
It wasn’t always thus. He first started acting in high school, to be near a girl he had a huge crush on. He had a bit part and blew his two lines every single performance.
He acted through college, but his focus became writing plays. He attended grad school in New York at the famed Artist’s Studio. A classmate was Bradley Cooper, “the good looking guy in ‘The Hangover’” movie, he said.
He was already a writer by high school. “I wrote novels in high school because I was a dork -- If you’re writing a novel, sorry,” he told the workshop. But he found it a chore to get reactions for his work. But with a play, “you can immediately see their reaction to it and know if they like it or not.”
He talked of his own failures, including rejections by all the grad schools he applied to except one. “I’ve faced lots of rejection, I face rejection all the time.”
But he urged students to use rejection as fuel. “You’re gonna show them.”
His path to where he is today “was definitely hard, but I never thought about quitting.”
As for writer’s block, he said he doesn’t believe in it.” I can get stuck and don’t know what I’m going to write next,” he said. But he had blunt advice: “just get over yourself. Seriously, go to work. No other person does that: ‘Oh, I’ve got teacher’s block, I can’t teach today.’”
He also feels that if a person gets stuck, their standards are too high. “The solution to that is being OK with writing crap.”
He said, “The key is not to shut yourself down because you’re ashamed you’re not awesome. Some of it is practice. You get better with practice.”
Out of college, writing plays wasn’t yet paying the bills, so he taught middle school and high school for six years.
Once, his middle school students complained that the play they were doing was old fashioned and boring.
So he adapted it a bit and people loved it.
Once, he wrote a play full of funny lines, but at a competition, it scored lower than one with a “kid in a stupid wig.”
He learned to think visually, that cerebral funny lines might be lost on older folks who can’t hear, or younger kids who don’t get it.
The value of visual gags was brought home the time he did a play that required a gun.
It being Texas, the drama department actually had a BB gun — but it went missing.
They were forced to use a long piece of wood instead, and yell “blam!"
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