Celebrating over 100 productions of The Love of Three Oranges

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

People often ask how different writing prose is from stage plays and, to me, the biggest difference is what happens once they are finished. Whenever you finish any writing and publish it, it goes out into the world without you and that’s always a strange experience. But, for the most part, a reader experiences a novel or non-fiction book or article privately and, if they connect with your words, you rarely ever hear about it.

But a play is a living thing. A finished play goes out into the world and gets into the hands of more and more people, each interpreting and, really, celebrating it in their own way. Every actor, designer, or director is putting their own spin on what your words mean to them. And none of them would have even chosen to direct/design/try out for the play in the first place if they didn’t fall in love with it to some extent because putting on a show is truly a labor of love and they dive into all the work and madness of getting the production off the ground because they believe in the show as much as you did when you wrote it. I was an actor and director long before I was a playwright and I know exactly what that feels like, to fall in love with a show and want to give it the best staging it’s ever gotten.

There are people who love The Love of Three Oranges. They love it sometimes even more than I do because, to me, it’s this thing I wrote a long time ago while to them it’s alive and new, this marvelous thing they’ve just discovered. They channel that love into some freaking amazing productions and it just blows me away. There are people laughing at the show, writing reviews of it, quoting lines to each other back and forth on Twitter and they don’t even know my name.

That’s the biggest difference between a play and anything else I will ever write. A play literally takes on a life of its own every time it’s performed and it’s the passion of all the people behind those productions that keep it alive long after I was finished with it. I will only ever connect with a fraction of these people who’ve been part of a production of Oranges and yet they’re as much a part of the show as any word I wrote in the script.

The very first production of The Love of Three Oranges was February 22, 2002.  In the going on 12 years (yeesh!) since it premiered there’s been over 100 productions. There’s been productions in Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Finland, Romania, Singapore, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as all over the United States.

I’d love to tell you the exact number of productions but I don’t actually know. Playscripts has records for 111 productions as I write this and I had a computer crash some years ago so I lost many of my records from the first few years so I honestly don’t know exactly how many productions there have been. Are we closer to 150? I really can’t say.

Assume an average combined cast and crew of around 30 people for 111 productions and we’re looking at well over 3,330 people who’ve been involved with TLOTO in some way. With audiences of over 100 people at each performance, that brings us at least 15,000 people, nearly all of which I’ve never even met, out there laughing and celebrating some words I wrote in my college dorm room with no idea whatsoever of what I was doing.

It’s very flattering, humbling and, also, terrifying to think how big this play has become. I sit here in awe of the support it’s gotten over these years and can only imagine how it will continue to grow into the future. To all of you that were a part of this weird little play spreading all over the world and having over 100 productions, I thank you, though it feels like not enough.

What else can I say but, here’s to at least 100 more!