A New Frontier….

The first words of Rick’s Star Ranch were written three years ago at the Santa Fe international hostel. After a night of unforgettable conversation, I knew that I had to capture, on paper, these unique and formidable personalities.

Rick’s Star Ranch is about passion and failure, about people, and how we form relationships around fear. But it is also about the boundaries of life and art, and the common ground between them. In my writing, I am often grappling with my own antithetical beliefs surrounding art and success. In Rick’s Star Ranch, these characters (based on real people I have known throughout my career) become conduits for beliefs that battle within my own brain, and I think that most people, in some way, can relate to these personified perspectives.

Because the battle to be heard is at the forefront of this story, I decided to take on a difficult form in the structure of the show in order to exemplify the feeling of battling, overlapping dialogue. In Rick’s Star Ranch, everything happens at once. Multiple scenes overlap each other, and an audience member must make the choice of what to focus in on, just as though they were there, truly, at a Labor Day party at a hostel in Santa Fe.

Still being a work in progress, this rough draft reading will be a great opportunity to see what works and what needs to change, in hopes that this new play can have an evolution that will carry it through to other productions in the future. Join me on this messy journey as we delve into the ego and id of the artists, and drink too much and talk too much, at a place that half exists: Rick’s Star Ranch: where stars are bred.