Douglas Whaley

My sister lives in Las Vegas so I decided to visit her for spring break between the two courses I was teaching this year at the Ohio State Moritz College of Law.   My husband David could not go with me, as he did two years previously, because he was in a play about to open at CATCO [“Moonlight and Magnolias”—the plot has to do with the creation of the screenplay for the movie “Gone With the Wind”] and it would have its first performance just as I was returning from Vegas.   Covid-19 was a problem, but a small problem on March 5th when I left for Las Vegas, but once there all of a sudden it exploded into the pandemic that all of us are still dealing with (sometimes known as the “collapse of civilization”).   I was staying at The Mirage Hotel and Casino, and sitting at the gambling tables, routinely handling chips hundreds of others had touched seemed like a bad idea, so I abandoned casino gambling (which I’ve loved since the 1970s).   The visit with my sister ...

I didn’t know I was a playwright until last year.   To my surprise my play “The Turkey Men” received a professional Equity production at Evolution Theatre Company (see “Related Posts below for details about it) and was very well received.   There had been talks about the play being produced elsewhere but of course those discussions were sucked into the covid-19 mist.   I thought “The Turkey Men” would be a one-off event in my life, but Evolution then sponsored a play writing competition, asking for submission of one act gay plays with a political or governmental theme.   That set me to thinking, so I wrote a short play about the possibility of the United States Supreme Court considering a case that might overrule Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 gay marriage case.   I sent in my play (anonymously as required by the rules) and was very pleased when it was chosen (from among twenty + entries) to be one of four such plays presented at the Evolut...