Playwright brings his visions to stage

Playwright Nicholas Garelick contemplates the stage at the Country Playhouse. Photo by R. Clayton Mc

By BOB RUGGERIO
CHRONICLE CORRESPONDENT
Local playwright and Cy-Fair resident Nicholas Garelick was a bit bemused recently as he overheard some friends discussing 3D movies.
I said to them You know what else is pretty good in 3D? Actual live theater,' " he said. Going to see a live play is so different than anything on TV or the movie screen."
Garelick has had more than a dozen of his plays either fully-produced or read in rehearsal, including Radiant Star Paladin Pleione, which recently debuted at the Country Playhouse.
In that show, a 28-year-old mother of a sick child can't seem to grow up" or out of her fantasy to become a superhero. When her daughter is kidnapped and she discovers that her close-knit circle of gal pals actually are superheroes, what used to seem so unrealistic isn't so much anymore.
I wanted to write something about holding on to your youth, and I don't mean your appearance. More like that innocence, purity and the view that the world is an amazing place," Garelick said. It's the absence of hope which ages you more than anything else."
The play also has a very anime" feel, derived from Garelick's childhood love of the Japanese animation style, and in particular the show Sailor Moon."
Dramatic structure requires increasing conflicts, and Nicholas definitely supplied them," said Diana Howie, coordinator of the Playhouse's New Play Reading Series. And the parts certainly struck a chord with the cast of 10 actresses."
Garelick has lived most of his life in the Meisterwood subdivision of Cy-Fair, attending Adam Elementary, Arnold Middle and then Cy-Fair High.
He remembers his first writing" assignment in kindergarten. When asked to color some pictures, Garelick instead cut them up and wrote a story to go with them. He wrote his first actual play while in fourth grade.
It was interesting growing up in Cy-Fair because it's so removed from Houston. But it was a very nice area, and I felt safe," he said. It left me with a very optimistic view of life."
It wasn't until he attended Tomball and Cy-Fair community colleges that he really got involved in theater and play productions before eventually earning dual bachelor's degrees in theatre and English-creative writing from the University of Houston.
One early effort didn't go so well.
I wrote a play as part of an assignment, and the actors quit just before the show," Garelick said. I ended up doing several parts myself, and two of them with puppets."
Garelick continues to write as moods and ideas hit him, and has just produced a short play about geocaching" for an upcoming festival from Scriptwriters Houston, an organization of local playwrights for which he is also president.
And while his writing process usually involves him working on several plays at once and swinging between comedy and drama, children and adult, Garelick always tries to make sure what he's trying to say on paper makes it to the stage.
To me, playwriting is a hard form of writing, because after you write it," he said, it goes through the producer, director, actor and finally the audience.
So you have to be sure that you can still get your point across after it goes through all those layers."