Read-through

Last Monday, my Writers' Group read the first draft of my stage play, The Eggs. It was nerve-wracking. I'd been trying to type up my handwritten first draft ever since I'd asked them to read it, three weeks earlier. I'm still not au fait with memory sticks or word processors.
I've still got an electric typewriter which my wife bought me, and which she couldn't really afford at the time. It was a touching gesture of faith in my abilities, and I've always felt guilty that I never used it that much. I was going through a prolonged writers' block, and simply didn't have anything to type. And now that I had something, I discovered that they no longer manufacture the ribbons for it.
I'd hald conceived this stage play as a way of winding up ny writers' group. They are a dry, dispassionate lot, mostly men, mostly into science fiction, mostly of a middle class outlook, and mostly atheist. They seem so bloodless and mechanical at times that I want to slap them ; but I must admit, they give good, fair advice on what is read to them.
But I wanted, with this play, to wake them up. Present them, in my two characters (Sue and Jackie) the world of two working-class women. I thought of it as an angry, Barrie Keeffe-type play, in the same vein as Gem or Gotcha. Instead, the two women reading the parts decided to send it up. Two working class women, after all, must be comic.
I couldn't stop my feet twitching under my chair as they read their lines. The bad lines became glaringly obvious, and I cringed at them. But there were times when it seemed to be working, when the two readers realized that I had been attempting real characters rather than stereotypes.
I felt at first that they were laughing at these women because, in the play, they had mourned Lady Diana Spencer. The group was laughing at them, and by extension laughing at me because I cared about them. I realized the play's shortcomings all too clearly.
Yet when they came to the end (or, rather, got to the bit where I'd run out of time to type any more) they seemed sympathetic. Could it be that the message of the play had actually got through?
I am determined to write a second draft. Determined. Because I don't want this play to die. I want it to be performed. I feel jubilant as I write this. In a way, I've fulfilled what this blog set out to do : to see me through to the end of a project. So now I'm moving the goalposts. My mission now is to work with this first draft, improve it, and see it brought to life on stage.