Surprise, you’re in the New Works Festival! Um, thanks … huh? That’s how it happened, more or less, at least for Bruce Menin. The school committee member, you see, is an inveterate, although not especially detail-oriented scribbler. Last summer, he looked at the calendar and noticed it was like five minutes to deadline for the New Works Festival, so, he rifled through the old desk drawer and found a 10-minute play he had written almost three years ago. A couple of tweaks and, for better or worse, the thing was in the mail. He didn’t think too much of it, just kind of wrote it off. “It was such an afterthought, that I completely forgot about it,” he says. Until he ran into one of the festival organizers, who congratulated him for landing a spot in the festival, a two-weekend celebration of new plays by local writers. ”Much to my embarrassment, I had to ask him for what,” says Menin. “ When he told me that I had been selected for New Works, to my further embarrassment, I had to ask him which play I had submitted.”
