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Miasha’s blistering best-selling novel, Secret Society,
unleashed a literary firestorm through her Philadelphia hometown that
is now raging in other cities. Miasha quickly learned that it required
some mental acrobatics to turn the titillating, tawdry tale of two
attractive social parasites — who possess a volatile secret — into a
stage play.
–terry shropshire
What inspired you to turn your novel into a stage play?
I was coming up in the era of Tyler Perry. [Perry] being able to take
his plays and turn them into movies was inspirational to me. I figured
it would be cool to go from [a] book to [a] play and then be able to go
and get it financed. The timing was perfect. Someone approached us and
he was in theater. He wanted to turn Secret Society into a play.
Since the Secret Society novel is your baby, was it difficult to leave the script to a playwright?
I’m very hands-on. Originally, my idea was to just give this book to
the [playwright] and let them write the script. But once I got the
script back and it [wasn’t] really representing, I sought to represent
[because] … I didn’t want to give my fans something totally different.
I still wanted them to see the essence of what I created. So I had to
go back and, not rewrite it, but throw a lot of my own dialogue [into]
the script. So I became like a co-writer for the script.
Casting for the play presented some unique challenges as well, talk about that.
The casting for it was gruesome, because we figured that they [fans]
already had in their mind what the characters look like. … So that was
hard. … It took about a year to get everything together.
Did you hire people to produce the play?
We [Miasha and her husband] were trying to figure out which book to do.
Once we did that, we just took matters into our own hands. We didn’t
approach any producers or anything like that. We just hired the people
that we needed like the director, stage managers … the whole crew. And
we made it happen ourselves pretty much. [The play is being backed financially by Fifth Street Productions, which is Rich and Miasha’s company].
To acquire one of Miasha’s books or see the play, log on to www.miasha.com.
