During a rehearsal of the Great Bend High School production of “The Love of Three Oranges” Wednesday, the King of Hearts (Alan Clark) meets the world-famous clown Truffaldino (Danen Levingston). Left to Right: David Webster, Levingston, Dalin Hinds, Holly Mosier, Clark, Aaron Mull.

Check out this great picture from Great Bend High School’s production of The Love of Three Oranges coming up this weekend! You can read the article about the production here.

How many characters can you identify?

The love for three oranges - L'amore delle tre melarance (Photo credit: Robin Iversen Rönnlund)

Skyline High School is performing The Love of Three Oranges this upcoming weekend. They created a website specifically for their production which you can check out here.

But I wanted to particularly highlight this line from their site:

Because of the impending doom of 2012, Mrs. Riddoch thinks that this slapstick comedy will be a great way to start off the year. “We need to lighten up this year” she said. “and ‘The Love for Three Oranges’ is the perfect way to do it!” She loves the comedy and hopes that in the midst of 2012, it will be a breath of fresh air and comedy.

I like the idea of needing laughter now especially when everyone’s convinced the world will end (whether they view that literally, as in zombies, or figuratively because of politics or whatever else). I originally wrote Three Oranges in the aftermath of 9/11 so the play was always meant to be a break from the horrors of the world. When things get tough, we need an escape and laughter is usually the perfect medicine.

So whether the Mayans turn out to be right and society as we know it will come crashing down around us in 2012 or not, I’m all for going down laughing! There’s no reason the end times can’t also be good times.

I just wanted to pop in to show you guys this:

Playscripts has been featuring Three Oranges in little Featured Title blocks throughout the site. The amount of support they’ve given this play has been absolutely amazing and this is just another way they’ve given us an extra kick in the proverbial sales pants. I didn’t even ask them to do this, they just started running them! They’re just too good to those oranges of mine!

Oh, and we’re still on the bestseller list for both adaptations AND full length high school plays, though we’re a slot down on each because of all the holiday plays. Might this be why I’ve been working on a holiday play all of a sudden? Hmm…

Another cool thing? The free preview of the play (on this page) has now been downloaded over 1,000 times! That’s not counting how many times it’s been read and passed around after download or all the paper copies they’ve sold. Pretty cool, eh?

Basically, what I’m saying is: My publisher is awesome, you guys.