Welcome to Script Insights! Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of a playwright? In this series, you get a rare and exciting opportunity to hear directly from the authors themselves. Each article offers personal insights from the playwright, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process, character motivations, and thematic explorations that bring their scripts to life.
Below, you’ll find a downloadable blog post offering valuable insights directly from the author of The Wizard Delivers (and Pinky Stays the Course). The downloaded PDF also includes supplemental classroom activities to help you connect the play’s themes and characters with your students.
Be sure to download this resource by clicking the button above!
On Writing The Wizard Delivers: A Note from the Playwright
Mark Rigney
The Wizard Delivers (and Pinky Stays the Course) exists because I wanted to write a play involving milk crates.
That’s right: plastic milk crates, the kind that, back in prehistoric times, used to be hoarded (which is to say stolen) by college students in order to store their vinyl records.
Why do I have a fixation with milk crates? I don’t, truly. But I do believe in utility, and having self-produced a trio of shows at the Indy Fringe Festival, I’d been thinking a great deal about how to construct a flexible, Lego-like set with “found objects.” Milk crates, eminently stackable, inherently modular, seemed to fit the bill.
I envisioned actors constructing a wall over the course of the show, no doubt a subconscious nod to both Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, and perhaps there’d be windows and a door, and at the end the whole thing would come crashing down. I even knew the actor I wanted to cast.
But that play never got written. I had a set, but no story. A worthy play cannot be hung on such sketchy scaffolding.Then, one day, I happened to be in Shanklin Theatre at the University of Evansville as the crew there worked to build their next set, and the back wall, just cinderblocks and some electrical pipe, was exposed. A single heavy door stood in the center of the cinderblock wall, and I found myself thinking that the whole arrangement looked a lot like the rear entrance of any given strip mall.
At the same time, my younger son was applying to college, and I’d been amused by the idea that he might be getting advice both from experts and from people with sub-par qualifications. All at once, Shanklin’s cinderblock wall became the delivery entrance for a strip mall pizza joint, with the audience crammed tight on risers all around the limited playing area, and the set (other than the wall itself, plus the door) could feature––you guessed it––milk crates. Also, a ratty chair from which a self-proclaimed guru could dispense advice to needy teens––and not just about college.
A play was born.
And as to whether the Wizard of Crusty Rusty’s Pizza delivers sage or useless wisdom, you be the judge. Could be it’s a little of both.
On with the show!