This episode, Texas playwright Elaine Liner joins us to talk about her latest work, Finishing School, which gets its world premiere September 8 at the Geeks home theatre, Elkhart Civic Theatre at the Bristol Opera House.
The heartwarming comedy was chosen as one of the 12 winners in the AACT (American Association of Community Theatre) 2017 playwriting competition. It was the first choice for production by Elkhart Civic Theatre and is set to open its 2017-18 season at the Bristol Opera House in September.
Playwriting, however, was not the first profession for Liner, a native Texan who left the Lone Star state for a number of years but later returned to her Dallas roots.
Like many other successful vocations, it grew out of necessity.
For the majority of her early years Liner, 63, was a newspaper woman. After college in Texas, she went to New York City with a group of friends, all of whom “wanted to do something job-wise” in the Big Apple. Her first job, with Hearst papers, was proofreading knitting instructions. This led, eventually, to an editorship on one of the syndicate’s smaller papers.
“It was a great time,” she said. “Seeing great theater and music and shows on- and off-Broadway. But, in the ‘80s, everybody got laid off.”
When her unemployment ran out, Liner headed back to Texas to work on a new alternative weekly in Big D. That job lasted about 10 years and ended for the senior writer when the paper was sold.
“So I went to another paper,” says the lady with the glass-half-full attitude, reporting her following nine years as media critic in Corpus Christie. From there she headed east to papers in Toledo and Columbus, Ohio, and, since for a Texan all roads lead back to you-know-where, she was theater critic for the Dallas Observer for 15 years.
“Dallas is very accepting of people who reinvent themselves,” she says with a chuckle.
Then, “I got laid off in 2016,” Liner recalls. “Papers everywhere were getting rid of media and arts writers. I had felt the curtain coming down.”
Never without a backup plan, Liner
looked at a future “with fewer dead-
lines,” and began in earnest to write plays, an avocation she began in 2012.
“I always had ideas,” she says. “A lot of creative ideas, but no time. There was always a newspaper deadline to meet. Now there were a lot fewer deadlines.”
One of her earliest efforts, which combined pieces from her life and “instructions” from that initial Hearst job, was a one-woman, one-act play titled Sweater Curse: A Yarn About Love.
“I thought I ought to premiere it big,” she recalls. She checked and decided Scotland’s annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival, known as “the largest arts festival in the world,” was the place.
By the end of 2012, “I knew how to get it (her play) to the Fringe.”
She hired a professional director, production people and a trainer (“to get me into shape”) and even though she had done no acting since college, performed it herself.
By August 2013, she was at the festival. On an 8x12 ft. stage, her hour-long show ran every day for a month in the 30-seat theater. She has returned to the festival several times.
Not only did she write, produce and perform her “knitcom,” “I did all my own media,” Liner says. “I wrote a Q&A for myself and, for any and all possible audiences, contacted senior communities.” She also put together a workshop on Mastering the Media Matrix and has written a book “107 Publicity Boosters That Work.”
In addition, the enterprising lady is a Dallas tour guide. She leads interested visitors on the final route of JFK, complete with “minute by minute details,” she says, adding “I look at it as a performance.”
In a different vein,
