The Raven Players’ ScripTease program is its unusual way to gather original plays for production, based on submissions every spring (March through May). From these, scripts are selected for public readings at several points in the year. Sometimes, a submitted play gets produced by the Raven Players for public performance.
That’s the case with A Good Deal, opening this Friday at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center. However it is by no means an amateur play; Ron Nash says he’s written about 30 plays, and directed many more, over his 50-plus years in the theater.
“When I started writing plays, it was all typewriter, cut and paste. When you made changes, it was literal—cut this out,” said Nash, now a sparky 84 years old, over a glass of wine at Little Saint. “When I went to grad school, computers were just coming out. First I had a word processor where you could only do like 20 pages.” By the time the ’80s rolled around and the computers we know today became available, he could actually write the whole thing on a machine.
While he admits writing on a computer has its advantages, he’s clear on the limits. “It’s made the writing, the editing part of the writing better,” he said. “But it doesn’t make you a better playwright—that comes with your abilities.”
Angry Young Man
The arts did not beckon when Nash was a young man—far from it. “I was in trouble mentally in high school. I was angry, angry, angry,” he said. He even got kicked out of school, but his athletic ability—he was a hurdlers champion in track—earned him a scholarship to college.
In his first class, Introduction to the Arts, the teacher told the students, “Theater is a social history of the world. If you want to know about what’s happening in Elizabethan times, don’t read a history book. See one of Shakespeare’s plays,” Nash recalled. “I was effin’ hooked. And I never looked back.”
His C.V. is three pages of single-space play titles, the early ones dating from the 1980s. He earned an MFA in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and his credits include set designer, technical director, lighting designer, 30-plus plays as writer and over 100 as director.
Nash is a “man of the theater” in the old style, with productions in several states and in Europe, an accomplishment he proudly sums up as: “I did make a living. That’s the point. I made a living in the theater. Which is, as you know, almost impossible—I should say effing impossible.”
His newest play, A Good Deal, is billed as “brimming with humanity and humor… a bittersweet tale of love, loss, and family connections.”
It’s also a play about a rare genetic disease, von Hippel-Lindau (VHL). “My first wife saw her father die of a mysterious disease in their living room,” Nash said. “When her brother was a high school senior, he lost sight in one eye, and by then they knew what it was.”
The disease brings an increased risk of having cancerous and noncancerous tumors that can develop throughout one’s body and throughout one’s life. Nash’s first wife’s brother had a successful career as a historian, though he became fully blind.
“So in this play, I wanted to get that in. It’s kind of a sad romance,” he said. “It’s about struggle and coming together in the face of adversity, I’d say. And love.”
Nash lives in Santa Rosa half the year, the rest in the Catskills of New York, where he built his own cabin. He showed me his hands when he mentioned this, and they looked capable of just about anything—writing a play, building a stage and making a living in theater.
‘A Good Deal’ is performed from Feb. 27–March 8 on weekends; Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 2pm; at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center, 209 North Cloverdale Blvd. Tickets $25 adults, $10 under 18, at raventheater.org.
