Set
The family room/kitchen of the Delaney Family, in Oakland California, 2005. Everything happens in that room.

Time
DEVIL’S DUE takes about two hours to perform, with one intermission.

During my playwriting career I have made an effort to create interesting parts for women, especially for women over 35. This has made me conscious of the plays that have been considered archetypical for males, including FAUST. One day I starting wondering how a play like this would develop with a more typical “ordinary” female being offered a deal, and I decided to go with it. Menny is Grace’s next door neighbor and buddy, and she gave me a chance to write in an Asian character, but one of the modern young generation. I would also be enthusiastic about casting any of the other characters with non-White actors. There is no reason they wouldn’t fit a play set in Oakland. The boys, for example, could be adopted.

Grace is the mother of two sons still at home, in high school. As I have done with the school plays I have directed, I double-cast the boys. High school kids are not only extremely busy, they are prone to illnesses and family obligations over which they have no control. Although the cast of this play was terrific, hard-working, dependable, and fun to work with, the most fun of all was the group of four boys. They were adorable to watch, full of ideas, and great with each other. They helped each other learn lines, watched rehearsals and made suggestions, and ran errands with enthusiasm. During the run, we assigned them nights to perform but they made several changes to suit their schedules and even came in to watch each other and help in the food and drink concession on their “off” nights. I highly recommend double casting Grace’s two sons!

Shortly after I wrote it, in 1986, this play was chosen in 1986 by the Burgess Theatre in Menlo Park for their Playwrights/Actors Workshop. Each play in the program got a month of workshop. I met for a reading with the actors every week, then had a week to rewrite. The next two meetings, we read and talked about rewrites. The final week, an audience was invited. An unfortunate, though in retrospect interesting thing happened during this period: the actress who played the playwright felt embarrassed to be playing a housewife. But instead of discussing it at our sessions or asking to be replaced, she badmouthed the play to other actors, and one of them told me.

At the time it was extremely frustrating and infuriating, as I myself was a “housewife” and it seemed the height of irony to have the modest intellectual life I was able to manage sabotaged. In fact, I put the play away and it took me nearly a decade to get up the nerve to send it out.
The sad thing is that the earlier theatre had gone to a lot of trouble to do a very good service, and the other actors and the director were very positive and reasonable. The director told me it was “very funny—I laughed out loud reading it.”

When I did get up the nerve to send it, it was taken by the first place I sent it to, Village Theatre in Danville, and that cast seemed completely taken with it, and seemed to find all the funny bits funny. The actress who played Grace there, Bonnie DeChant, said, “Have you been taking notes on my life?” Bonnie was a very professional and fine actress, and her comments certainly erased all my concerns about the part. Thank you, Bonnie!

One reason I am putting this incident into my web site is I want other young women becoming playwrights to understand that there will be women who are perhaps jealous of your role and that it isn’t about your writing. This kind of thing has happened in every profession where women have tried to go.

In case you think that this kind of issue is now in the past, realize that as I write this in 2016, even now only 10% of the plays produced in America are by women. We women playwrights are dealing with some of the behaviors that women doctors, lawyers, bankers, and CEOs dealt with in 1920.