Author's Preface

Author's Preface

I started writing the play, Roswell 1947 several years ago. At that time I was teaching a drama class to a group of men with psychiatric disabilities. I was having difficulty finding a play that I thought would both meet the needs and capture the attention of my students. The thought occurred to me. Why don't I write my own original play? The result was the play, Roswell 1947.

I wrote this play in weekly serials. I had no set structure for the play. In other words I didn't have it all planned out, act by act or scene by scene. As soon as I had a section of Roswell 1947 completed I had copies made. During the next drama class my students and I would start working on the portion of the play that I had completed. During the time before the next drama class I would write another episode to the play.

To be honest, writing this play was not difficult. It sort of came to me in a stream of consciousness manner. The play just flowed as I wrote it. At times I actually thought that Roswell 1947 was writing itself. The majority of the play was actually written while I was at home recovering from total knee replacement therapy. I found that writing the play made me laugh out loud as I read it back to itself. I thought that if this play could make me laugh at a time when I was in a great deal of physical pain the odds were that others would find it funny also.

I found that the beauty of this play is that it takes the reader right out of their daily reality and into another world. I believe that this is one of the main purposes of good writing. I decided to publish this play in the hope that other readers will enjoy a very pleasant escape from reality by reading this play. I also have plans to make an audio version of this play. One of the key selling points of this play is that it begs to be acted out.

Some people are likely to find parts ,if not all, of Roswell 1947 to be offensive for a variety of reasons. I must emphasize that this play is not meant to be an accurate depiction of actual historical events or real life characters. The characters that I have created are all fictitious. For example the characters from the Andy Griffith Show are all transformed into something else by the writer. There isn't any real correlation between my created characters and those who acted in the real television series. These characters are reconstructed solely for the sake of the art of the absurd.

Anyway, I hope that you have a good time reading Roswell 1947.

Ken David Stewart