How did we get here?

It's all been a little bit mad really, this whole process. Up until lunchtime on Wednesday March 21, none of this had been thought of. Now, three weeks and two days later the read-through and auditions are all but over. Producer her has explained a bit of the background... here's a bit more.
I went out for lunch on that Wednesday, during the show week for Mort (see allaboutdeath.blogspot.com), with director demon. I put to him our problems with Return to the Forbidden Planet, our original summer show. And I said I had the idea that we should look at doing two one-act plays. And I said I would be willing to direct one, on Thursday nights. And he took the bait, said OK and that was it, the work began. We had to finish Mort, but on the Sunday, as we were taking the set apart he thrust a copy of the Joseph Weinberger's book of plays into my hand and pointed two out. Yes, I said, and he ordered them the following day.
Meanwhile I got box office to drop off my Samuel French directory which he had borrowed many moons ago on the Tuesday night. That evening, between 8pm and 1am I waded through the synopsis for 354 one-act plays for a mixed cast, 94 for just women and 33 for just men. At the end of it all I had selected 20 favourites as potential shows.
They included one by Dario Fo, one by Harold Pinter and one by Tom Stoppard. They were a mixture of comedies, thrillers straight plays and farces. I typed up the pieces about each show and sent them to director demon.
Then at home I asked secretary to pick the ones she liked the sound of. Then I went on the web to look at reviews and more information. That night I cut the list down to just 10. Some were out of print, some of them, on second thought, just didn't fit the bill, some of them I rejected because of secretary's advice.
The rest of that evening, and the following day and evening I spent searching for them on the net. I eventually tracked down and ordered them all ten. They arrived on Friday and Saturday and by Monday morning I had read the last two, travelling on the train to London.
I liked five of them. No that's not quite right. I liked all of them. There were a few I loved. One was David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago which I saw in the west end a few years ago. It is a masterpiece and filled many of the criteria I was looking for - a big challenge for me and a big challenge for the cast plus something different for the group. But ultimately I decided that using the c-word once when we did Stags & Hens was about as much as our Colnbrook audience could take and this would be four or five times too far. Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound is wonderful, but staging it would have been too complex and expensive. But in the end it came down to the best five.
So on Tuesday April 3 director demon and director witch sat down in The George pub in Colnbrook and went through those five together with the two which director demon had ordered. Ultimately though it was obvious which ones we wanted to do. I had read the synopsis for After Midnight - Before Dawn and instantly been fascinated by it. I had read it - last, deliberately. And I had been amazed by it. In the same fashion, he had loved the sound of The Demon straight away. He took them away to read, and the next night I was able to tell the CAST committee meeting of our decision. The following night the EGM gave us the go-ahead.
From conception to acceptance in two weeks and a day. Phenomenal. If only we could get everything done as efficiently.