I am beginning to understand why I decided to take Christine Decker’s Acting 101 Class at the Oldcastle Theater in Bennington, Vt. last month.

I don’t want to be an actor, but I want to stir the creative spark inside of me, for lack of a better term. And this weekend, another reason came to the surface. Creative sparks need constant tending, like a wood stove fire, otherwise they just fizzle out.

Below is a brief synopsis of the play idea, there are five scenes in two acts.

I want to write a play, hopefully for Christine and Oldcastle, if she or they want it.

I’ve had parts of two plays performed in my life, on at a new playwrights showcase in Soho, New York, the other a part of a play at Hubbard Hall (Christine was in it, we connected rather powerfully there.)

John Morrison, the late director of the Dorset Playhouse asked me to finish a play I wrote for him before he died, but I never got to it, I was busy with a book at the time. I took a playwriting class with him. I’ve always wanted to go back to it.

I love theater and I would love to put on a full play, a contemporary play that speaks to the dislocation and cruelty of parts of the corporate world, a theme for all of us, whether we are political or not.

It’s also a very personal story of two different people thrown together in the corporate diaspora that has destroyed the American idea of work. Each changes the life of the other, and for the better.

I sent Christine a very brief plot summary over the weekend, she wrote back and said it was “fascinating,” and we plan to meet and talk about it when she returns from a trip to London over this coming week.

The play was inspired by the day ATT&T, Alexander Graham Bell’s fabled company, and once one of the best and secure places to work in America, laid off tens of thousands of people at its famed Bell Labs (where the phone was invented) and the rest of the company in Northern New Jersey.

Hardly anyone who uses a smartphone today would connect the modern version of the company with the one that defined loyalty and service. It wasn’t that long ago, but it was a different world, work-wise.

The play has two characters, Gene and Darlene. He is a 55-year-old supervisor at Bell Labs, who was laid off without any kind of notice after 32 years of service to the company.

He is given two hours to clean out his office before a security guard escorts him off of the premises – for  years a seminal part of his life.

In order to get his severance information, he is required to check in with Darlene, his newly appointed Outplacement Counselor, a brand new position at AT&T, a company famous for never laying off anyone. Work was a lifetime contract for the company and its employees.

Darlene is, in her own way, as much of a victim as Gene and the dozens of other suddenly unemployed men she is supposed to help transition out of the company. All day long, crushed and stunned outrage men wait outside her office for their packets an useless advice. She is shouted at all day long.

In our time, layoffs are a daily occurrence, but then it was a stunning shock to the people – mostly men then – who build their lives around the idea that they would be loyal to a company and the company would be loyal to them.

The play is a dialogue between these two people, thrown together in an impossible situation. Gene is shattered by the layoff, he has three daughters in college, a big fat mortgage and a second home in Ocean City, N.J.

His wife Alice has never worked, his daughters will have to leave school. Gene refuses at first to believe the only company he has ever worked for would not consider his life, and would throw him out into the street like a bag of trash. He can’t really process it, it is Darlene’s impossible task to get him to face reality.

Gene’s  whole understanding of work, life, family and security has just been blown to bits and the one person –  Darlene – who is supposed to  help him, has nothing to offer them. Both of them know she is a fig leaf, a pretense, a way of the company pretending it cares while it’s obvious to everyone that it no longer does.

In the first meeting, Gene rages at Darlene and she bursts into tears at her inability to help him or even get him to take her seriously.

Gene has no experience of strong women challenging him, and that is what Darlene does in their conversations. With each conversation, their relationship evolves.

Each surprises the other. This is not a love story, but the two come to listen to and respect each other, there each have something important to teach the other.

Gene drops his facade of the strong and all -knowing corporate exec, the layoff sends him spiraling into helplessness and fear, for the first time in his self-assured life.

She understands that the two of them share more than either knew at first, they are both victims of a system that has suddenly gone off the rails and revealed itself, money is all that matters any more, loyalty and compassion counts for nothing.

It is the rise of the Corporate Nation. The play is a series of intense, sad, sometimes funny, and ultimately profoundly uplifting dialogues between the two, avatars of a new era, victims  of the new corporate ethos – profit and loss, period.

Each helps the other to see their way beyond their dilemma and unhappiness, and towards a rebirth that is both inspiring and uplifting. The play is a story about the new corporate cruelty, and about how tens of millions of Americans have had to give rebirth to their lives.

Darlene challenges Gene to find the strength and vision to rebuild his broken life, and he causes her to rethink just what she is doing with her life, and how her work can be more moral and meaningful. You can’t, she says, give up.

And you, he tells her, are worth more than this job.

So that’s the synopsis, I have no idea if Christine or Oldcastle will want it or want to perform it, but I’m going to write it over the next month or so and try to get it performed. As with books, the odds are always long, the system unpredictable and fickle.

I love the idea of being Jon Katz, author, photographer, blogger and playwright. How sweet that would be.