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It is the writer's dream.
One of your plays wins a prize. You see it produced and are invited to be artist-in-residence at a university.
Too good to be true? Not for Eric Pfeffinger, assistant director of the Office of Student Financial Assistance on the IU Bloomington campus. He has been writing plays for several years in his "spare" time.
Pfeffinger's idea of becoming a writer goes back to his days at the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he majored in English. What brought him to Bloomington was his wife's work toward a doctorate in English.
So, while he was working for the student financial assistance office, Pfeffinger decided to get a couple of master's degrees. One is in English and the other in library and information science.
"I also did the library science degree out of a slightly more vocational interest," he said.
Meanwhile, at home he was pursuing another goal -- writing plays. It was his work, Of How Maurice Ravel Fell Sick, and How He Died, that attracted the judges of the 4th Annual Midwestern Playwrights Festival in Toledo, Ohio. They liked it so much that Pfeffinger was awarded first prize.
Equally exciting was the opportunity for him to see the play produced and participate in the production.
"They (the awards committee) considered the participation of the affair to be a major part of it. So between the time when they first accepted it in the fall and its production last April, I went up there a few weekends and talked to the director a lot and talked to the cast and then before it was produced I went to Toledo for two weeks for a residency," Pfeffinger explained.
The residency included speaking to theater classes at the University of Toledo as a "guest artist."
Pfeffinger also used that residency time to finish a draft of a new play that will be produced next February in Bloomington by the Bloomington Playwrights Project. It will be called Where Men Are Empty Overcoats.
Of How Maurice Ravel Fell Sick, and How He Died is set in 1937 as the composer Ravel was suffering from a strange malady, still a controversy among biographers. The disease had not impaired his mind, but left him unable to communicate with others.
"He was limited in his ability to actually write music even though he was still thinking of all his music. The last thing he wrote before he contracted this ailment was a collection of three songs for a movie about Don Quixote. He was the ultimate example of someone who follows his imagination to the detriment of his human relationships, and so the title Of How Maurice Ravel Fell Sick, and How He Died is a paraphrase of one of the last chapters of Don Quixote," said Pfeffinger.
He says that his play could be considered avant-garde since it has two actors playing Ravel. One is playing his body and one is playing his mind, which is considerately more active.
"His mind -- because he can't fully communicate with the other characters -- does all of his communicating for the most part with an imagined Don Quixote. That's who is guiding him through the remembrances over the last 20 years," explained Pfeffinger.
He is philosophical about play reviews in the media.
"There isn't's a flurry of theatrical activity in Toledo. So there's really only one or two theatrical reviewers in town. The press was pretty positive. There are a few things that they didn't like, a couple of things I didn't agree with and a couple I actually did. All in all, I thought it was a pretty insightful review," said Pfeffinger.
The Indianapolis native has had a full-length play produced in Kentucky and a variety of short plays, one-acts and very short one-acts produced in places like New York and Los Angeles.
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