Georgia Writers Association

She’s young, pretty, a little scantily dressed for some people’s taste, and she likes to dance around my world, like, all of the time. Some of you may know one of my first plays (Pizza With Shrimp on Top) about dead people that takes place in a limboland occupied by some crazy characters who killed themselves; VERONICA was originally in that drama. Yeah, she was dancing around being her usual provocative, weird self, sometimes even going up to characters and asking if she can suck on their fingers.

Now that’s just gross. And perverted.

After my first several drafts of Pizza, we had a staged reading for an invited audience. My actor friends from the university were happy to deliver. I cast my girlfriend at the time as VERONICA. I asked her to dress in something black and tight and wear lots of deep red lipstick…for the part of course. To be authentic. And from what I can remember, she was spot-on beautiful—I mean she gave a stunning performance as VERONICA. Just how I heard the character in my head when I wrote her.

At the talk-back after the reading, where the invited audience has the chance to sound off on what they liked and what was perhaps confusing so that the playwright can make the necessary adjustments, in hopes, that one day his play will be fully produced, the feedback was mostly positive.

There was one member of the audience who raised her hand and asked this question, “What’s the point of VERONICA?”

ME: Huh?

PERSON: I mean, why is she in the play?

ME: Veronica is cool.

PERSON: Oh. Yes, but how does she push the story forward?

ME: (pause…silence…the kind of silence that proves I had no answer, until I finally said:) Ah, she sucks fingers?

Needless to say, I took VERONICA out of that play. No matter, I’m a writer. If I cut from one play, I can use it in another. Strangely enough, I think I’ve placed VERONICA in some form or another in every play I’ve attempted to write. She was a sultry waitress in my play that takes place in a restaurant, a rocketship driver in my play that takes place on the moon, a Starbucks worker in my play that has way too much coffee in it, and so on…and needless to say too, she’s hit the cutting room floor so to speak after every staged reading.
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I introduce my playwriting students to VERONICA when we talk about accountability. This is especially true in playwriting and screenwriting when dozens or hundreds of people are designing things for your story based solely on what’s written in your script. As a naïve, young playwright, I learned the hard way that keeping lines or characters just because they are “cool,” is never good enough. I learned that I have to be able to explain and claim how a line or character pushes the story forward or else cut it. Use it some place else.

Or in this case, VERONICA keeps me company when I’m writing. Now, I’m not proud of this. If she ever makes it to actual full production rehearsal, I may be in trouble. Where, then, will my inspiration come from?

Aaron Levy’s first young adult work, Pizza With Shrimp On Top, published by Dramatic Publishing in November of 2006, is a play that’s been produced over four dozen times around the country and recently in March had its first international production. Among other awards and honors, Pizza has just been nominated for the 2007 Distinguished National Play Award for the Middle and Secondary School Audiences by The American Alliance for Theatre in Education (AATE). Levy has been asked to serve on an authors’ panel for young adult drama at this year’s national conference for The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) in New York City in November, 2007. Pizza will also enjoy a full production with NYC actors at the ALAN Conference on Monday, November 19th.  Work on a multi-media teachers’ guide for the play, including information and endorsements by top prevention and education officials, will be complete at summer’s end and debut at an August 9th staged reading for all three hundred English teachers at the seventeen high schools in Cobb County, GA. This pilot effort in Cobb County is the first step in getting the play into the hands of theatre and English teachers in several Georgia school districts, and eventually across the country.

Levy’s One Man’s Dance  (now titled A Little Mental Illness) has garnered the Dorothy Silvers Playwriting award, Ari-Zoni Best Original Play in Arizona Award, an American College Theatre Festival selection, and a scene and monologue published selection in Smith and Kraus’ The Best Stage Scenes of 1994 and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 1994 respectively. Currently, it’s a requested submission for publication by Dramatic Publishing. His ten-minute plays, I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon and Bolt-Cutter Man were selected and produced in the Ten-Minute Play Showcases at Actors Theatre of Phoenix. 

Levy received a BA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a teaching certification. A former high school English and theatre teacher, Levy earned his Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction in 2004 and now trains current and future English teachers, along with serving as the playwright-in-residence at Kennesaw State University, a growing campus twenty miles north of Atlanta, Georgia. He recently finished his first young adult novel, Blood Don’t Lie, which has since found literary representation and is in the process of being packaged for seeking publication. Levy has always had an extreme interest in writing for pre-teens and teens and plans to write many more YA books and plays, including writing an adaptation of Blood for stage.

Besides his own writing endeavors, Levy loves doing readings and conducting writing workshops for teachers and students at area schools, training teachers in pedagogy and methodology, creating classrooms to develop student-written producible and publishable material, and most recently, promoting young adult dramas, Pizza and many others, in the English classroom. Levy currently resides in Marietta, GA where he lives with his wife, two kids, and a canine named Starbucks (a corporate dog). When he’s not writing, teaching, trying to convince his four-year-old to stick her head under the water, and begging his six-year-old to get out of the water, Levy enjoys playing basketball. At 5’8”, it’s been rumored that he plays high above the rim