Whittling a peg to fit a different shaped hole.

Or, how I don't like writing plays to satisfy someone else's expectations.

I'm not working on Ms Tittle's today or tomorrow. Tomorrow I have to rewrite a ten-minute play because I am finally - finally! - getting a chance to attend a scene night with PCSF. It's been months, I think, since I've had the opportunity. But that's not what I'm grousing about.
The play I've been working on today, and will finish tomorrow - cause it's due tomorrow - is a play that I volunteered to write and it has to fit specific criteria. It's a play about a Cheyenne woman from the 1870s who fights along the male warriors to defeat General Crook and save her brother from certain death. That's my choice, it just had to be about a woman, for the 365 Women A Year Project.
There are much worse restrictions for play opportunities. "You must mention the word, Albatross." or "There must be a teapot in the play." or "This opportunity is only open to six foot tall New Englanders with one or more body piercings and owns a shrubbery." The last one is, I hope you see, an exaggeration, and also off topic because it's another annoying restriction. No, the real issue that makes me gnash my teeth is "theme-ing" the play contest/festival. I don't know about other playwrights, but I'm not inclined to stop what I'm doing to write a new play, to fit some specifics that someone else generated, that may not be chosen for the production and just might, in many cases, be completely unsuitable for any other opportunity, thus rendering the play useless.
I also feel that really good playwrights and really good plays aren't looked at, and - I may be wrong on this - the quality of the submitted plays may be collectively less than if there'd been no restrictions on what subject the play can be about.
And, of course, it's not always a terrible inconvenience to my arrogant playwright Id. Asking for plays that focus on a general theme of death, or LGBT issues, or - as I mentioned being involved in above - women's history. Working on this play for 365 Women hasn't been a burden, nor a real issue - except that I wish there'd been more history to pull upon for Buffalo Calf Road and more depth of Cheyenne folk tales and mythology. What it did to was remind me of all these other opportunities where they are so specific I wonder if the person in charge is a failed playwright purposefully torturing other playwrights as a balm to their own pain.
Really, the only reason I'd ever want to write a play that centered around a garden trowel is if I came up with the idea on my own to help tell a story I already wanted to tell.
But I'm grousing. :)