We last saw the sun yesterday morning, it is a stormy, rainy windy day in Bedlam – my favorite writing weather. Today, something different, a creative stretch. I had coffee with David Snyder recently, he’s the new muck-a-muck at Hubbard Hall, our beautiful arts and education center (housed on a former vaudeville house, an “Opera House.”). I’m not precisely sure how it happened, but when I left, I had agreed to write a short play for the Hubbard Hall Theater Festival in January.

I wrote part of a play once before, it was based on the day AT&T laid off many thousands of people in Northern New Jersey. I wrote it from the point of a 28-year-old “outplacement” counselor “advising” the middle-aged men who mostly made up the company’s workforce and whose lives had been unimaginably shattered. My play was shown in Soho on a new playwright’s theater night.

I’m taking on a similar subject for Hubbard Hall, I’m calling the play “The Last Day Of A Dairy Farm,” and it was inspired by my many visits to dying dairy farms in my agricultural county. I was so moved by the pain and loss these farmer’s faced, and by how society  – the politicians, economists and food consumers – has  abandoned them, discarded them like trash,  and left them behind.

I am intrigued at the idea of the discarded man (or woman), something that once was a shocking idea in American business, but it now business as usual. Once there was a contract between employee and business, now people are tossed out into the street like trash whenever stockholders get nervous.

My play will focus on the last day of Ralph Tunney’s dairy farm, as a small family farmer – his family has owned the farm for 200 years – has run out of money and options and faces the awful reality of shutting down. For Ralph, this also means that his beloved cows will never set foot on grass again, they will most likely go to a corporate farm where they will spend the rest of their lives on concrete and be put down the second they get sick. A wrenching thing to see, a hard thing to write.

I write here on the blog, and I write books, but a play is different, requires a different head. This morning, I’m holing up in my study, driving rain and wind keeping me inside. I’m trying out my new Tai Chi drills to get limber in the head and body (more about that later) but a good play is a tough thing to write. Wish me luck. I love trying new things creativity, love stretching my mind, keeping it open. You can put up photos of cute animals all day, but that is not really creativity to me, it is taking the leap and jumping right over the cliff. I have 15 pages so far, 30 or so to go.Have to think visually and in terms of good dialogue.