NYC EOY 2025 (part two)

My experience with LES theaters is limited to my several summers either witnessing or participating in the (former) New York International Fringe Festival. The last time I set foot in Under St. Marks Theater was in August 2001, to witness a solo performance, the coming out story for a queer individual of native ancestry. There was no air conditioning, it was a forty seat hotbox.

Nearly a quarter century later and in deepest December, it was a bit chilly in that space, which was only appropriate as we were attending a 5:00 pm performance of the RadioTheatreNYC production of The 15th Annual Edgar Allen Poe Festival, under the banner of Frigid NY. Directed by Dan Bianchi, the event was a live radio drama (with prerecorded music and sound effects) performed with creepy gusto by Frank Zilinyi and R. Patrick Alberty.

The selections performed included The Tell-Tale Heart, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Masque of the Red Death, Berenice, and The Cask of Amontillado. Given the format, the words took center stage and while the performers did not disappoint, listening to the stories spoken aloud in this way allowed both of us to become more critical of Mr. Poe than reading him off of the page.

The Masque of the Red Death was the weakest of the set, as it describes a selfish millionaire who shuts himself away from a world ravaged by plague. When he throws a lavish party for his monied friends, the personification of pestilence arrives and murders everyone. Even in its telling, it’s not particularly suspenseful or scary, you know exactly what’s going to happen from practically the first word.

No, it was the one with which I was least familiar, The Case of M. Valdemar, that had me on the edge of my seat. A first person account (it was first printed without any indication the tale was fiction, creating something of a stir) the narrator claims that he mesmerized a man at the moment of death, essentially trapping the man’s consciousness inside a dead body.

What we fear is what touches us closest, and for me that is not dying, nor illness, nor ageing, not for me personally. No, it is the fear of caring for someone else who is dying, and doing it wrong. That we – I – cannot accept the death of someone we love when that death is inevitable, and necessary. And we prolong their suffering as a result.

After we had dinner and cocktails at Schmuck (yes) which was stylish yet unpretentious (yes) the kind of place where they pour your half-finished martini into a newly frosted glass. Without even asking. I’ve never experienced such a thing before.

We walked briskly back to our hotel – we’d spent an entire day without need for a cab or bus or train – exhausted and happy and feeling like it must be nearly midnight. Checking my phone I laughed out loud that it was only eight. All’s well, we had an early night.

To be continued.

NYC EOY 2025 (part one)

Felix Empanadas
(Do you know this trio?
Would like to credit them.)

Since Covid, my wife and I have been making a point of visiting NYC at least once a year. It’s a city that holds so many important memories for both of us; primarily hers, she lived there for seven years. But Manhattan has changed so much since the 1990s, and we have spent a great deal of time there since, together and apart.

Toni finds the most amazing places to stay, this time it was the Historic Blue Moon Hotel on the LES, right across the street from the Tenement Museum. We checked in late on Saturday evening, and walked about the neighborhood to find necessaries (beer, wine, pain reliever).

Yes, it was Saturday night and yes, it was New York City, and yet I was surprised by the sheer density of clubs for which young people would stand in line in the freezing cold to access. As a trio of bright young things in short shirts passed us on the sludgy sidewalk, one observed, “I can’t feel my knees.”

Russ & Daughters Cafe

We passed a walkdown jazz club, we knew it was a jazz club because there was a sandwich board outside reading “Live Jazz” and though we were on a drug store mission we were both like, “Maybe? Maybe some jazz?” So when further down the street we noticed and then did a double-take on a trio wedged into one corner of a small empanada emporium, and were then waved in by a seated patron, we were primed to engage.

By then it was nearly midnight, we sat for a few numbers, an entertaining ensemble that warmed my bones and made the walk back to the hotel much more jolly. We promised each other to return for lunch before our time was through.

Sunday morning we took breakfast at Russ & Daughters Cafe and then made our first visit to the Tenement Museum, an institution which is a testament to everything the current administration hates and fears, a monument to the immigrant experience in America and to the working class in general.

The Tenement Museum

The Tenement Museum was founded in the late 1980s by two women, Ruth J. Abram and Anita Jacobson. 97 Orchard Street (later, 103 Orchard was also acquired) was built during the Slaveholder Rebellion (1861-65) in the style which had become prevalent, with four street front business spaces and four stories of apartments above, featuring a total of twenty apartments built specifically to accommodate the exploding immigrant population.

For the museum, many of the spaces have been restored to a state they may have appeared in when they were home to a variety of first generation Americans. Our first tour, Tenement Women: 1902, was to the home to the Levine family, when learned a great deal about the garment business, and of the Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902 for which the Jewish women of the Lower East Side united to mount a successful (if often violent) protest against a sudden rise in the price of beef.

Now a National Historic Site, 97 Orchard Street was required to maintain a number of spaces in the condition they were found at the time of their designation. As the landlord had decided in 1935 that bringing the residential spaces up to newly revised safety codes was no longer cost-effective, he chose rather to leave the apartments unoccupied and to only let the storefronts. You can imagine what state the apartments were in after fifty years of neglect.

It was just his kind of space – ceiling buckling, lath exposed, plaster cracked, wallpaper torn, no water, no heat, no electricity – that we can imagine being occupied by the denizens of the musical Rent, and it makes you wonder how many theatre kids would continue to fetishize “la vie Bohème” if they were forced to spend one night in such a squat.

God, I hate Mark.

To be continued.

Ten Good Moments in 2025

At the close of 2016, I found it necessary to reflect upon all the good moments in what was otherwise a year of dreadful turns of event. This year it seemed even more important to recall and share the personal moments that remind me how things are good even when they seem awful. 

1. Josh Johnson

Josh Johnson is that good. He writes an hour’s worth of solid material something like every week and just puts it out there, on stage and then on YouTube. He makes it look like it’s all just coming off the top of his head, like that one person you know who just can’t help being hilarious, but you know it’s not spontaneous at all because it can’t be. The timing, the execution, and the fact that he is riffing on something that happened literally yesterday, he’s just incredible.

We saw him live at the Mimi Ohio where the subject was AI – it was bleak and also hilarious. Josh Johnson kept me sane throughout 2025.

2. Greater Cleveland Food Bank

Mother was dedicated to the food pantry where she volunteered. When she began losing her cognitive abilities, and her ability to even write, that was one of her great anxieties. She was responsible for a great deal of organization, placing orders, and so on. When the company manager at my place of employment presented the opportunity to work a shift at the GCFB, I was anxious but also excited. It was only an hour or so, assisting folks in pulling items from the shelves.

America is a shameful place, one of the few nations where poverty is seen as some kind of personal failing, rather than the result of systemic inequity, a situation which seems to have only gotten worse over the course of my lifetime, and much more dire over the past year. I need to get back to that place again soon.

3. Big Band and Combos

Our youngest continued his studies in jazz at the Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, and one of the perks for me is visiting Caffè Vivace to enjoy flatbreads and cocktails and listen to aspiring (and seriously talented) young musicians.

4. Zelda’s Commencement

I was complicit in creating two beautiful humans. I cannot take credit for their achievement, only that I did my best to keep them fed and safe from harm. That they are both artists is probably also something I helped inspire, in equal measure with my spouse and basically everyone we know.

Watching our elder child cross the stage at the Convocation Center at Ohio University was a moment of great pride for us, especially when they snubbed the university president, refusing to shake her offered hand. Anyone in a position of authority that cannot stand up for the most vulnerable among us does not deserve our continued respect.

5. Dinner at Mina

There are a surprising number of Michelin star restaurants in Bilbao, Spain. I had never been to such a designated pace, none of us had. I could elaborate upon the menu, the wine pairings, the fact we all believed that it was Athletic Bilbao’s keeper Unai Simón who arrived late to the nine p.m. seating (he’d had an afternoon match).

But when people ask what I remember best from that evening was that the four of us sat together, phones down, from nine until one am, talking, laughing, eating, drinking, telling stories, relaxing into moments of silence, and observation, my wife and our two adult children.

6. Diwali

Our son’s boyfriend needed a home for his tortoiseshell cat Diwali, now that he would be attending university. My concern was for our rangy old cat Tiger, who nearly died from anxiety after we adopted a young kitty (who we named Masha) at the beginning of the year. Tiger recovered, but I worried another cat would end it for him. My wife theorized that another cat would occupy Masha and that together they would leave Tiger alone, and she was right!

Not only that, but Diwali has become my new favorite sleeping companion.

7. “I Hate This” in India

Our story continues to be told and reinterpreted. Many grateful thanks to director Denver Nicholas and his entire team for producing I Hate This a second time in Chennai.

8. Superman Walking Tour

Most of our actor-teachers this year are from out of state. Never been to Cleveland. And like most of us from the region, we cannot help sharing every Cleveland connection. The subject turned to the recent Superman film and suddenly I was offering to arrange a walking tour of filming locations.

There are a half dozen major shooting locations within a half-mile radius (e.g., The Leader Building, Public Square, The Old Arcade) and others I could point to in the distance, like the ballpark. I had even made a folder with images from the film, plus a few from other films that were shot downtown like Avengers and My Summer Story. The tour concluded by the new statue dedicated to the real punk rocker.

I should do this as a side gig.

9. No Kings Protests

Hey, you know what? Fuck that guy.

10. Cleveland Turkey Trot

Had not raced in some time. Had not raced in inclement weather for longer than that. Just walking to the venue from my parking spot was horrid, the wind coming off Lake Erie was almost unbearable.

I asked myself, why was I doing this? It’s not pleasant, it’s not social. I should be at home watching the parade, safe and warm.

I started far back in the pack, which was unfortunate. It took a while before I could actually run. My fault. But soon I was running freer and could focus on just enjoying myself. And it was pretty all right.

But I was even regretting choosing the five mile instead of the 5K ... until we split off around the second mile. At Carnegie and Ontario they took a right, and we continued onto the bridge. Oh, yeah. This is why. I would have missed that. Lorain-Carnegie, down West 25th and onto the Detroit-Superior. Worth it.

By the time I reached the finish line I was feeling good, and satisfied. My time was great, all things considered. And it was a well-organized race full of happy runners. But for a race like this, I really missed having a partner. Maybe next time.

Best wishes and a happy 2026 to you and yours.

The Thayer-Hansen 2025 Holiday Cartoon

Ten Amazing Productions in 2025

"John Proctor is the Villain"
by Kimberly Belflower
stage door with Sadie Sink
at the Booth Theatre

The American theater is dying. Long live the American theater! So far, so good, we have made it through another calendar year without a single Cleveland theater going under, due not only to the great work we produce, but the strength of our audiences. It is glorious to see.

I had the opportunity to catch many great shows this year, not as many as I hoped, but I was immensely satisfied. Here's a list of shows I really enjoyed, presented in chronological order.

Experts in a Dying Field (Test Flight)

Every single time I see a production in the James Levin Theatre at CPT, I recall that it must be the physical space in which I have ever seen the most live performances. Since 1992, and that was some time ago, when I attended The Chapel of Perpetual Desire presents a Liturgical Circus of Religious Fervour and Live Sex on Stage! I have either witnessed, participated in or produced something in that room several times every single year.

"King James" by Ravij Joseph
Cleveland Play House
Photo: Roger Mastroianni

And many times it has been something like this, a new work with an experimental edge, in this case a series of interpersonal vignettes written and performed by Jonathon Morgan, executed by an ensemble of cheery performers. I like spending time in the same room with people like that.

King James (Cleveland Play House)

Speaking as someone who has written his share of plays that take place in Cleveland, I was very excited to see this two-hander by Heights High graduate Rajiv Joseph. Every story has to take place somewhere, why not here? Why not at the same bar on Coventry where my wife and I spent so many of our twenty-something nights? That it succeeds on its own merits as a tale of friendship and basketball is why it’s justifiably being produced everywhere, but I’m very glad to have seen it with a Cleveland audience.

"The Wolves" by Sarah DeLappe
Dobama Theatre
Photo: Steve Wagner

The Wolves (Dobama Theatre)

My wife and I have raised two high-functioning people into young adulthood, folks whose adolescence was marked by the trauma of encroaching authoritarianism and global pandemic. DeLappe’s play about a girls high school soccer team so carefully tracks what I have seen in my own kids and their contemporaries, what they have been pressed to accomplish and what they have to put up with, should be necessary viewing for anyone who underestimates this generation.

John Proctor is the Villain (Booth Theatre)

I’ve already said many things about this play. This stage direction from the play script says it better:

they scream so loud and for so long
it’s a lifetime of screams
it’s awesome

"Twelfth Night"
Cleveland Shakespeare Festival

Twelfth Night (Cleveland Shakespeare Festival)

Twelfth Night is my wife’s favorite Shakespeare, and it’s certainly one of my top five. It’s a remarkably flexible text, and in production a skilled director can emphasize many different characters, and choose a variety of justifiable moods. The final image of the production at Great Lakes Theater this spring was of the twins, Viola and Sebastian, giddily engaging in cryptophasia. We saw a production in Montreal ten years ago that closed on three characters who were left without a partner – Feste, Sir Andrew and Antonio. Lisa Ortenzi’s production for Cleve Shakes was ideal for free, outdoor theater. It was funny, silly, bright, and very fast.

The Right Room (BorderLight Theater Festival)

We did it, thanks to the folks at BorderLight we produced a play that takes place in a hotel room in an actual hotel room. I got to watch the final dress rehearsal in the Presidential Suite of the Crowne Plaza Hotel – which was also the only rehearsal in the actual performance space – but I did not have the opportunity to experience it with the audience, there was no room. But I could hear it, and that was a lot.

"Sincerely, (the diary play)"
by Bryanna Lee
The Vagrancy

Sincerely, (the diary play) (The Vagrancy)

The day after The Right Room, I managed to see six shows at BorderLight, including this memoir play by Bryanna Lee. And when I say memoir play, I meant that literally -- the entire script is masterfully shaped from found documents (journals, video recordings, medical records, text messages) into a self-elegiac narrative about adolescent hope and betrayal.

Sunday in the Park with George (Great Lakes Theater)

Sondheim doesn’t make it easy. There is a reason this one isn’t done often. It’s challenging in so many ways. I was so excited to have the opportunity not only to see it performed live (for the first time) but also to share it with my entire family. The wall of beautiful voices at the conclusion of each act brought me to tears.

Cat on script.
November 9, 2025

Ten November (reading)

I was introduced to this script by Steven Dietz over twenty years ago, and kept ruminating on a possible production. Living on the Great Lakes, the Edmund Fitzgerald has a kind of personal significance and I have wanted to tap into that. The fiftieth anniversary of the disaster seemed like the last opportunity to acknowledge this. We have a charming little house, full of clutter and love, and don’t have people over often enough, and so created a haunting evening with a cross-section of friends to tell the story.

I Wear My Dead Sister's Clothes (Cleveland Public Theatre)

We end where we begin, in the Levin Theatre. Amy Schwabauer (with director Ray Caspio) has brought this monodrama about grief and things through an extensive development process and I finally took the opportunity to see it at a Monday night showing. I love Monday night theater. We're thinking of developing a new theatrical memoir and just as I was questioning the importance of death narratives, I saw this and feel entirely justified (again). So you all have that to look forward to.

My Life in the Theater (Part V)

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

- probably not Leonardo da Vinci

George Bernard Shaw
born July 26, 1856
(112 years before me, to the day)

A theatrical production has a strict time limit. From the beginning, you know when it will end; there are set performance dates, so when you are cast as an actor, when you have been assigned a role, you have a set period of time in which to prepare.

David Mamet says you don’t need to prepare anything, just read the words on the page, in the right order, all the rest is self-aggrandizement. In this, as in so many other things, Mamet is just wrong. Silly and wrong. It is true, the audience can’t see your backstory, will never know or even care how many books you read – in a very, very short time – to learn about the time period, the setting, the particular brand of tea your character might drink.

But as a twenty year-old in 1989, playing a twenty(ish) year-old in 1904, there are things that are seen and heard by the audience that are very important. After all, this isn’t a movie. The set helps, the costumes help, but the performer is the primary focus and it is the details, the immersion into character that either transports the audience or it doesn’t.

True, there are actors who are so compelling in and of themselves that they do not need to do any kind of deep research. The rest of us try harder.

My third year at school was the most challenging, and revelatory. I won’t get into the details, but following a near nervous breakdown in the fall, I was (for the first time) reborn with a renewed sense of purpose, and expanded my major from acting to a general theater degree. It was as the man said, “Look to your left, look to your right, only one of you will complete a degree in acting.” I was not the one.

Winter 1989, I had no acting practicum. I had not been cast in either mainstage show, I had no lab work, I focused on my studies, worked to control my diet, grew my hair, tried to be what today they call mindful.

That spring, however, I had three shows to split my focus; a role on the main stage, I had written a one-act for the playwrights’ festival, and I was assigned a role in a lab production of George Bernard Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband.

Third year undergrads were paired with graduate level directors to create an evening of one-acts. It was a class, so rehearsals were during the day. Our director was, or he seemed to me at the time, a rather intense man, charming in his way, and we spent weeks on the text with him. Weeks.

We were a three-person cast, I was He, the ingénue. It was the only time I have ever played a fresh-faced young man. She was my then ex-girlfriend Jules, and Her Husband was played by my best friend, Rich. The four of us sat in chairs around a small, square table on the stage of the Little Theatre, like we were about to play Bridge, only we had scripts instead of cards, and George, our director, led us through the piece, word by word.

We would read a word, or a short phrase, and we would stop and he would talk, and ask us questions, while throughout he would handroll a cigarette. This was part of the process. Every mechanical part of rolling a cigarette would take a significant amount of time, each rehearsal. I don’t mean to say he moved in slow motion, just that, as one of us read a phrase, he would get out his papers, and stop and we would talk, his hand holding the envelope of papers, for however long the discussion lasted, maybe five minutes, before moving on, now the envelope was gone, but the paper was between his fingers, and so on, forty-five minutes into rehearsal there might be tobacco resting in the the fold of the paper, I would be fixated on one strand of tobacco leaf hanging from the edge as he held it there, as we discussed the text, it may finally be a complete cigarette after an hour or so. It was a mystery to me and we never commented on it.

I imagine this ritual prevented him from smoking throughout the rehearsal, in this way he limited himself to one. But I found it fascinating. Time expanded as we ruminated upon the manners of the very early 20th century, for a piece for which every word is carefully chosen.

As a writer, I do appreciate that one thing above all other considerations, is that actors say the words, all the words, and in the order that they are set down upon the page. But you will never have so much time to read, understand, consider, and digest them, as you will at school.

I know this is not entirely the case, there are those theaters that make it a practice to spend months on a production. But they are the exception. A LORT production will have a very short turnaround, where are actors are often expected to arrive on day one with lines memorized, because of the cost. Time is, as they say, money.

Twenty Twenty-Six

Happy 200th Birthday, America.

For many years I would include a post this time of year in which I would look forward to the year to come. This started in late 2012, because I was excited about all the new work I was developing at that time. I had three workshops or productions scheduled for calendar 2013, and that was the first time that had happened.

Often, I have new work scheduled but am not yet at liberty to announce them yet, so this post has to be a coy “wait and see” message, and this one is going to be like that. Last year, I didn’t even bother to write a “Twenty Twenty-Five” post because post-election, things were all so bleak, I didn’t feel that I had much to look forward to. It was also unknown as to whether I would have anything new to share, though it turned out to be a production year, regardless.

The world remains bleak. Next year is the American Semiquincentennial. Fucking yay. We thought things were bad in 1976. Elderly Gen Xers can remember celebrating our nation’s birth by learning how to make soap and dip candles, and by painting our fire hydrants to resemble colonial patriots. I’m no prognosticator, but I believe celebrations on July 4, 2026 will feature tear gas.

Closer to home, I have several projects in the works, and yes, I am not at liberty to announce them yet. But at least the work continues. Received a commission for a non-fiction piece, and workshop productions that will provide new and expanded audiences to some recent plays that have so far had limited exposure. And as usual, that doesn’t include all the business that is currently in their proposal stages.

So, resuming this tradition of looking ahead; it’s not so much about promoting upcoming projects, that will come soon enough. It's about reminding myself of something that is in short supply these days: hope.