The internet occasionally throws up gems and The Wax Paper is one of them. I stumbled on its call for submissions through the highly useful (and free) online resource The Review Review (99review@gmail.com)
Published as a quarterly broadsheet in Brooklyn and distributed in New York, Chicago and Mankato, The Wax Paper has all the bluff of newspapers before they shrank into tabloids. Eight arm-stretching pages is enough to keep you reading happily for more than an hour. 
So I’m delighted, they accepted two of my short plays for publication in Volume Two (Issue One) alongside some powerful short stories, arresting photography and excellent poems. 
Poets may have a hard time getting published, but playwrights are competing for even fewer print opportunities.
Double bravo therefore to The Wax Paper for giving over an entire page to my two dramas. Lost Property has been performed a number of times, most recently at The Lost Theatre’s Five Minute Play Festival (see photo to the right with actors David Bevan and Maria Askew). 
Bathroom Secrets is a 10 minute play, most recently performed at Unheard, a Festival run by Goblin Baby Theatre Co. at The Bread & Roses Theatre in Clapham. 
On the left you can see actors Susan Hodgetts and Mark Lisseman in full flow as a married couple who can’t communicate.
Both plays are available to read on my website: www.bookerplays.co.uk
This issue of The Wax Paper contains poetry by the flamboyantly named Richard King Perkins II, Holly Wren Spaulding, Charles Rafferty, Robbie Gamble, Talal Alyan, Jennie Greensfelder and George Eklund.
Two of the short stories are absolutely knock out: The Gods by Melissa Knox is a fascinating critique of a life under Freudian analysis. The Second to Last Supper by Sabrina Harris, is a brilliantly satirical attack on capital punishment using the absurd (and I believe legally correct) premise that a United States prisoner cannot be executed unless they have been given their last meal request in full.
“The first priority of The Wax Paper is to expand our understanding of the people we share the world with,” says Editor Hans Hetrick. “Pieces will be selected on their ability to illuminate the humanity and significance of the subjects that inhabit the work – work that required patient observation, remained steadfast in its empathy and displayed genuine vitality.”
If you have poems, short stories, drama, collected conversations, photographs or artwork you think might belong within these lovely pages, please visit: www.thewaxpaper.com/submissions or email Hans Hetrick at waxsubmissions@gmail.com
Struck down with flu in November, I failed to see either of my two plays performed at the Lost Theatre Company’s 5 Minute Play Festival 2016. If I’d had any body fluids left, I’d have wept into my duvet.
It was part of a showcase of nine new plays – No U-Turn! – based around the theme of people trapped in traffic. Ironic, as it turns out, because on performance night, north London was plunged into havoc by engineering works and a defunct Picadilly Line. Despite this, more than a hundred people managed to get through to see the show.
We had to create up to four characters stuck in traffic, unable to leave their cars, with a specific place they were heading to. At the end of each play, the traffic had to move on, yet we weren’t allowed to reveal what had caused the jam.
A total of 16 actors and 9 directors set to work turning our words into theatre, including specially created choreography to link each of the nine plays. A big thank you to Rosie Ward and Lauren Orrock for their finely crafted performances as ‘Rat’ and Ellie (animal rights activists with a nasty secret in the boot) in Pig in a Blanket. I had great fun at the first rehearsal watching them go through improvisation exercises with co-directors Kieran Rogers and Peter Gould, including revisiting Rat and Ellie’s childhood haunts and a pretty hard-nosed police interrogation. 
bookerplays 