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.
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.
"Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare Guerrilla Theater Company, 1994
"Let's talk." - Romeo and Juliet, III.v
The last time I yelled at an actor was in 1994.
We were close to opening Romeo and Juliet at the Actors’ Gym (current site of the Bourbon Street Barrel Room) for Guerrilla Theater Company. It was one of those moments when the entire company crosses the stage, a pantomime, as music and recorded narration plays.
I was seated in the house. I could hear chatter throughout the space, especially out in the lobby, and it was those folks who needed to center first, setting off the action. I was pretty sure they weren’t paying attention, and I called the cue anyway.
The music started, and … nothing. No one entered, as I had assumed. I hollered for the music to stop, and from my seat I cried for everyone to stop fucking around and pay attention – to act like professionals.
There were murmurs of assent and understanding from the far corners of the space and we continued without further incident.
I was twenty-six. I have lived well more than another lifetime since then, and I cannot recall shouting in anger in a theatrical setting ever since. Not at Night Kitchen, not at Bad Epitaph, not in my current position. I have taught myself not to lose control; yelling is never helpful, and it may very well be harmful. Better not to.
"You Can't Take It With You" by Kaufman & Hart Bay High School, 1982
Our drama teacher in high school yelled at me exactly once (well, twice – the other time was in a class, that is story for another time) and it was for the exact same reason. I was a freshman, it was tech week for the recently mentioned production of You Can’t Take It With You, and I was goofing off in the house when I heard my cue.
Panicked, I bolted through the auditorium and leapt onto the stage, ducking around the curtain in a desperate attempt to make my entrance late when our director held the action and dressed my down good. It was probably that moment I had in mind when I scolded the Guerrilla company. Perhaps that’s why I did it.
Are there those who enjoy anger? Who luxuriates in it? That anger is the way they get things done and that is a necessary avenue to success? Because I don’t see it. I have never been so alienated from a cast as I was from the Romeo and Juliet company, for a variety of reasons. It was quite the education. But shouting in anger is the end of open communication. Let’s figure things out together. Let’s talk.
A couple weeks ago, we attended a dance concert, the Cleveland Dance Festival in the Westfield Insurance Studio Theatre in the Idea Center. Looking about, I saw a couple hundred people I had never seen before, which was fascinating. I always recognize at least a few folks in any theater audience.
But those would be theater people. These were dance people. A completely different population. It was fascinating.
Dance is weird. Non-verbal performance – abstract, movement based performance – it can be alien, and that by itself is disquieting to me. We use words to describe our world with specificity. But dance is an entirely new language, a visual, physical language.
Freshman year, one of the very first exercises we were asked to prepare for Acting 101 (I don’t think it was called Acting 101 but you get me) was to lip-synch a song from a musical. I chose "Heaven on Their Minds" from Jesus Christ Superstar. Our instructor, a grad student, then picked apart our choices.
Why that song? Why hide your eyes with sunglasses? Why spend so much time standing still in a pose, wagging just one finger?
That last one stuck with me. We can be myopic about our bodies, we think we are making a “Grand Gesture” when we point with our finger. We feel our entire self projecting through what is, in visual reality, a very tiny part of your body, the tip of your index finger.
Use the whole self! Do not neglect one single part of yourself! Be aware of your entire person, and use your entire person! Know how you appear to others.
At the same time, I was also taking a modern dance class. It’s the only time I have taken a course in dance, and as with so many other courses, I was exposed to a whole history of artists of whom I had been entirely ignorant; in this case, it was those who had broken with classical, traditional, acceptable forms of movement for something entirely new and different, to discover another way to communicate, to express through movement.
And I was learning it all for the first time, and it was awkward. Lanky, six foot teenager, flailing about, sometimes literally flailing, attempting grace. Not aspiring to it, merely attempting.
You can’t fake it. I would soon become aware of just how many of my achievements to date had been accomplished by faking it, by not doing the work, instead relying upon my experiences to simulate knowledge, wisdom, or understanding.
Acting is pretending, but you can imitate what you don’t know. And you can’t pretend to dance.
Preparing for "Death Knocks" Bay High School, 1984
The first time I ever stepped onto a stage was my freshman year in high school (You Can't Take It With You by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart). My character appeared at the very end of the first scene. I remember the moment. We’d rehearsed, I had my lines cold, very prepared, familiar with the entire ensemble – making a mistake was not a concern, I hadn’t even thought of saying or doing anything wrong, that’s how well-rehearsed we were.
And yet, just before I moved from backstage, unseen, hidden behind a fake door, to onstage, into the action, under the light, entirely visible to the audience, I was struck with one thought, shockingly vivid to me, even to this day:
“Who said you had the right to do this?”
Who said that? What voice was it? Was that my mother’s voice, she who I had embarrassed so many times with my pranks and shenanigans? Why do you have to attract attention to yourself in this way?
Maurice Adams, Brian Pedaci "The Vampyres" Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1997
Two years later, when I directed a short scene for an evening of one acts (Death Knocksby Woody Allen) I heard the same voice, right before I entered through an open window that was part of the set, only the voice in my head was a little louder. Because this time I was not merely a participant, I choice this piece. I was responsible for it happening.
When I drew a somewhat controversial comic strip for the university newspaper (if you believe being inscrutable as controversial) my college roommate asked the same question, suggesting as my mother would have; you could just draw these things and put them on the wall of our dorm, why do you have to put them out into the world?
Once more, when I was twenty-eight, this time sitting in the audience, as the lights came down and the music came up on opening night of my first full-length play (The Vampyres). I’d been working on the script for over two years, all my friends were involved in the production; directing, acting, designing the set, the mural, the costume, the lights, the sound – Oh! The sound!
We had a full house, everyone was very excited, and in the darkness, before the protagonist spoke his first word, I heard a voice say, “Who said you had the right to do this?”
"I Hate This (a play without the baby)" Staged Reading Dobama Theatre, 2002
Well, obviously, I did. I told myself that.
My wife thinks it is strange that I would even think this; after all, who has the "right" to do anything? And what entity provides that right? God? Society? My mother?
I do not always feel this way. Call it Imposter Syndrome if you like. But usually I rise above it. What is the difference, though? Confidence, I imagine. In myself, in the work. When I performed my first monodrama (I Hate This) I didn’t think, “Who said I had the right to do this?” No, I thought, I have a story to tell, and these folks came here to hear me tell it.
And it’s that last part, that people came here to see this, and that they are counting on me, and on you, baby, to do our best.
I applied to two schools. One accepted me. And so I matriculated into the Ohio University School of Theatre. I had no idea the school was in flux at that time. A sudden transition of leadership. I wasn’t even asked to audition.
Why did I want to study theater? Why wasn’t I an English major? Because acting was play and writing was work. There was an instant gratification in doing a play, and none for writing – I did not see how writing could get me attention, at least not positive attention (that is a story for another day) and attention had always been what I craved.
I am a 57 year-old man who keeps a blog. Of course I crave attention.
Erin Cameron, Steven Pack "Living Together" by Alan Ayckbourn Bay High School, 1986
I tried my hand at directing a two-act play (Living Together by Alan Ayckbourn) my senior year in high school. I had no idea what I was doing. Tell a bunch of my friends to move about on stage and there would be a play. No thought about costumes, or a set – I knew there were odd furniture pieces stored backstage, we’d use those – and light? To me, light was the invisible art. Surely, you just turn them on at the beginning and fade them out at the end.
I wasn’t just inexperienced with design, I was ignorant of design. I had never noticed it. It did not exist.
And that was who I was and how I started my undergraduate theater experience. I knew nothing. I would soon be trying everything.
My brother tells a story; fifty years ago, on November 9 (also a Sunday) it was unseasonably warm, so warm that he recalls that mother took me to the beach. I was seven, this was an unremarkable occasion for me, but he was fourteen and would remember how the temperature plummeted the next day, and how soon he and the nation would be rapt by the haunting mystery of the disappearance of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.
Last night, we invited a small ensemble of friends to have an informal, private reading of the play Ten November by Steven Dietz, with song lyrics by Eric Peltoniemi. Commissioned by the Actors Theatre of St. Paul, the play premiered at Wisdom Bridge Theatre in Chicago in 1987. It is a fast-paced, harrowing tale of the disaster and its aftermath, and also an examination of how, as Blue Öyster Cult put it, “History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.”
My desire was to invite a number of friends to gather around a fire in the backyard, to spin this yarn on a cool, fall evening, but the weather turned, as weather will, and we seventeen crammed into our beloved, tiny house. An unrehearsed ensemble, reading for ourselves, to mark this historic occasion. Five of us were alive when the Fitzgerald went down. It was an education for most. Folks familiar with the Lightfoot song – and this is a common refrain, which I have heard many times before – often don’t even know it’s a true story, or even that it happened during the twentieth century – let alone the late twentieth century.
Fifty years is a long time for a human. It’s not a long time for history.
Sarah Blubaugh and Scott Hanna interpreted the lyrics, which really elevated the experience, the assembled rewarded them with snaps after each melody as I pressed forward with the stage directions. Everyone who attended was provided a speaking role, it was a marvelous and varied chorus of voices.
It is a script that weaves together a variety of tales to provide context to the mystery. The fact that it was written before we had even visited the ship at the bottom of Lake Superior, before the bell was recovered in 1995, the site designated a grave site, not to be disturbed, actually serves the work. It illustrates the confusion and the frustrating search for solutions in the aftermath of tragedy which are often not to be found.
My grandfather was a merchant marine, and before he settled down to raise children, he piloted freighters like the Fitzgerald, though none as large. One of my recent discoveries in the effects I kept from my parent’s home was the old man’s personal logbook. An illustration he drew of the Steamship Robert Fulton was on display during the reading. Twenty-nine men died in a sudden storm on the Great Lakes on an evening fifty years ago, any man of them like my grandfather.
As the assembled departed last evening, the rain had turned to snow. Not exactly the blizzard we were promised. Sometimes, nature is kind, or so we perceive her to be.
Last week I was running the track at the Rec Center, and a song came on that I knew but I could not place from where. A bombastic anthem of nostalgia and regret with an all-encompassing theme of acceptance.
A quick search reminded me that this song, It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over and Done) by Bleu McAuley was the song that played over the closing credits of the Netflix series Sandman, based on the comics series of the same name.
When I was a teenager, I yearned for something which was not yet possible; that a TV show or movie might be successfully adapted from the genre materials that I loved so dear. Not just comics, but also books like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When such attempts were made they suffered from a lack of technology and funding (see the BBC’s TV series for HHGTTG) or the inability to transfer what was essential about the material to the project (see Howard the Duck).
As I was never a DC fan, I had no strong emotional ties to either Superman or Batman, so while those movies (1978 and 1989, respectively) were important, to me they were only weigh stations to something that mattered. When X-Men (2000) was released I was a giddy 32 year old and mostly satisfied.
Sandman was an epic, 75-issue fantasy series which focused on the personification of dreams, sometimes called the Sandman – but not really, he was more often called Morpheus or often just Dream, and his primary function was managing that place we all go when we fall asleep.
I loved this comic because it was literate, transgressive, and Goth – Goth in that it was dark and moody and brooding and romantic. It also owes a lot of its imagery to familiar musical acts; Dream appears like Peter Murphy or Trent Reznor, Lucifer like Bowie. Word has it Delirium was modeled after Tori Amos, and Desire, of course, looks like the cover of Duran Duran’s album Rio(Patrick Nagel, RIP). My ex-wife Diana introduced me to the book, which started publication in 1988, and we read them issue by issue. Later, I bought the bound reprint books.
The other night I asked my wife Toni why Sandman has been so important to her (yes, I married two women who love Sandman, quelle surprise) and she reflected to me how expansive it is, and immersive. When she thinks of it, she doesn’t see the panels, the specific artwork, she sees worlds.
When it was announced in 2019 that Sandman would be a series on Netflix, I was excited about that. In the past, such announcements came with a certain amount of dread, like the feel you get every time they announce a new Fantastic Four movie. I love the IP, they are going to fuck it up. The thing about comics, for example, is that they are episodic, and most superhero movies prior to The Avengers (2012) would spend half the movie on the origin story. Even when there was a reboot, they would tell the origin story again.
Then there is the idea of cramming years of potential narrative into one two hour feature. It loses nuance, even when it looks spectacular. There will be nothing unique or interesting. And then there is casting. There were plans for a potential Sandman film in the early 90s that was to star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But mostly, it is the adaptation of one thing into another thing. Comics are one particular thing, and movies a total other. Comics are cheap and movies are expensive, so comics can do so much more because it is only ink on paper and relatively few are reading them, whereas movies are practical and have to make money.
Martin Freeman (Arthur), Sam Rockwell (Zaphod) "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
This is where Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) failed. The source material is a science fiction satire, with the emphasis on satire, not science fiction. To wit; it is veddy British. In the original, a bunch of weird things would happen in the service of a dry, witty punchline, and the film kept the set-up but cut the punchline. The film gives us spectacular visuals and gags presented by writers and directors who did not understand or care why it was popular in the first place.
But now it is the 2020s and not only can you make almost anything look real, popular culture is so fragmented that the idea of a comic book with an enormous – and intergenerational – cult following being turned into not a single feature film but an anthology series makes total sense.
I will not describe the allegations here, except in how they relate to the subject at hand. Let us state what was and what is. Neil Gaiman was once a model figure for those who feel outside of the mainstream; he not merely wrote the works that made them feel seen – adult fantasy fiction like Sandman, and also children’s books like Coraline – but was a constant presence in public and on social media who defended the right for people to be different. His tweets were a protection against the trolling of J.K. Rowling.
At the same time, in his personal life, he was a serial abuser, a monster and a creep.
The second season of Sandman dropped this past July, with little notice or fanfare. I didn’t even discover that it had for a month after. The first season encompassed (more or less) the first twenty issues of a seventy-five issue series. They could have easily made three or even four seasons from the remaining fifty-five books, but chose to cram them all into this final, second series. Even the most lauded issue of Sandman, the World Fantasy Award winning story about Morpheus commissioning Shakespeare to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream is briefly shoehorned into a different episode. It is as though the folks at Netflix said, all right, let’s get this shitshow over with.
I chose to watch, even though I was conflicted about doing so. I mean, so many artists contributed to making this show a reality, that’s the thing about artistic collaboration. So I wanted to see it, I wanted to see them. But I was wondering how it would feel, knowing what we know. As it happened, I had my second bout of Covid in late summer, which was an opportune moment to binge the second season while in my own private delirium.
"It had been her own fault." Sandman #17: Calliope (1990) Pencils: Kelley Jones Inker: Malcolm Jones III
Knowing what we know, certain storylines pop with dread. To quote a meme, “Mister Police. You could have saved her. I gave you all the clues.” One, Calliope, is about Richard Madoc, a famous author with writer’s block who takes action to harbor the actual muse of epic poetry – essentially, he has trafficked her – to spur his creative output.
Dream arrives to free her from the author, something he does not actually have the power to do. The author must freely release her. But Morpheus can torture Madoc, and does so by flooding his mind with so many original ideas he goes nearly insane. When the writer announces Calliope is free, his torment ends, but he can no longer think of anything new or original.
Not arrested, not pursued by other supernatural entities, Madoc simply remains creatively empty, which we are free to assume is something Gaiman believes to be the worst punishment imaginable. (It isn’t.)
Witnessing the second season, released post-allegation, themes of remorse, regret, and atonement are pushed to the forefront. To be honest, they were always there in the text, but are so much more apparent now. Dream had committed an unforgivable act, and in the process of making it right was compelled to do something which (literally) brought the Furies down upon him.
In the end, all the chaos, pain, and anguish, the sum of a lifetime of poor decisions, are wiped away as the entity that was Dream is eliminated and replaced by someone new. End of story.
But reality is much more complicated. Morpheus apologized, repented, and took responsibility for his actions. To date, his creator has not.
As if the media hasn’t always been saturated by the overstated concerns of the Baby Boom generation, in the early 90s there was a talk show on WHK called The Fabulous Boomer Boys. Three guys, Stuart Fenton, Bruce Bogart and Bob Snyder, friends since childhood, had their own show to address issues which they felt had been overlooked.
It was called “the first radio show dedicated to the Baby Boomer generation” which was utter nonsense. Since 1946 absolutely everything that exists has been dedicated to the Baby Boomer generation.
However, they were pretty fun guys. Imagine Car Talk except with Cleveland accents and the topic was, well, themselves. Lots of camaraderie, self-effacing humor and laughing at their own jokes.
Just after we openedThe Taming of the Shrew, Guerrilla was invited to participate. Bruce Bogart met Beemer while she was working at Dillard’s at Westgate and asked about her Guerrilla pin. He was truly interested in our theater company, even more so when he learned that Boomers were often the focus of our abuse.
Bruce: Well we’re lucky this evening, we’ve got in our studio Torque —
Torque: Hi.
Bruce: — Tower —
Tower: Hello.
Bruce: — and Beemer —
Beemer: Hello.
Bruce: — of the Guerrilla Theater Company. These guys have a theater company — where is it located?
Torque: It’s located downtown, in funky up-and-coming Tremont — it’s right next to The Flats.
Bruce: And it’s a safe neighborhood, right?
Torque: Uh no.
Beemer: It’s getting there.
Bruce: It’s getting there, and one of the reasons it’s getting there is because of the Guerrilla Theater. What they do is, they have this show, and what Torque told me is that they poke fun at our generation with their theatrical productions.
Torque: That’s right.
Bruce: For those of you at home, these people are 24 years old, they’re not exactly Baby Boomers, and they have the audacity to poke fun at our generation.
Tower: Sometimes all you Boomer folks act as though we don’t have any brains at all. You use tactics like the “Just Say No” campaign. Rather than explaining a problem and how it might affect us, you just tell us not to do it. Political correctness is another example.
Torque: You come up with no solutions, just knee-jerk decisions and you want everyone to abide by the decision that you make.
Beemer: You know what you want the end product to be but you don’t want to take the time to reach it so you just think up a catch phrase like “Just Say No” and that’s supposed to take care of it.
Bob: Do you think there are any Baby Boomers like me who “live for today” instead of people like Stuart who like to plan their life?
Torque: Yes, I do, and I respect them, and most of them come to see Guerrilla Theater Company, which brings up another subject which is that we are currently putting up our production of "The Taming of the Shrew" and that runs every Friday and Saturday night sat 8 o’clock and Sundays at 3 o’clock.
Bruce: Okay, you guys come here, you put down my generation, you put down our basic listening audience, I wanna know what you guys would do to make this a better world.
Torque: You mean, as opposed to “making love, not war”?
Bruce: Whatever.
Bob: That slogan I like, forget the “just say no to drugs.”
Bruce: “Make love, not war,” that’s not your generation’s slogan.
Tower: No, our generation says “Make love, not divorce.”
(General groans from the Boomer Boys.)
Bob: That’s a touchy subject for our generation.
Bruce: But I’m not hearing any solutions, I’m hearing slogans from you, too.
Torque: That’s the point, instead of the quick solutions, like divorce, we’re talking about working things out, about working our problems out, not the sound bite kind of answers you get on radio, but going ahead and taking some responsibility.
Bob: Are you married?
Torque: Me? No.
Bob: Then how can you talk like that?
Tower: I’m married.
Stuart: Tower is married, he said before the show he’s been married for six months, and you call yourself a househusband, right?
Tower: Right.
Stuart: Your wife supports you, makes the money, you take care of the house — how long is that going to last?
Tower: How long is that going to last?
Bob: Househusband, isn’t that a Baby Boomer idea anyway?
Tower: Oh you wish.
Bob: Thanks to the Baby Boomers, Tower, someone like you can let their wife go out to work —
Tower: I don’t have to let her do anything, we have this wonderful relationship, it’s not what I give her permission to do.
Bruce: What does she do?
Tower: She’s a systems designer.
Bruce: What’s that in English?
Tower: She makes computer programs.
Bob: Computers, another thing the Boomers created.
Tower: Shyeah, but you don’t understand them.
Stuart: My turn, to talk about sex, with Beemer.
Torque: You want to talk about sex with Beemer?
Stuart: What about sex in your plays, do you talk about the Sexual Revolution?
Beemer: Do you mean gender issues?
Stuart: I mean about how Baby Boomers made sex free, and accessible to all people, and how it’s looked about differently now.
Beemer: You mean “Free Love” and “Expressing Yourself”?
Tower: Done that.
Stuart: Aren’t you glad the Baby Boomers opened that up for you?
Beemer: Yeah, but there’s a difference between free love and having a hundred million different partners and having free love with your own personal sexuality.
Torque: We’ve got diseases now, you gave us Free Love, thanks, now we’ve got all these things to worry about, we’re trying to figure out how to come up with one partner when all of our role models say hey, it’s okay to have as many partners as you want, there’s no need to be anything but promiscuous.
Stuart: Woo!
Bruce: You guys are really down on us!
Tower: We’re getting the big thumbs up from the slackers in the control booth.
Bruce: You people are fascinating to me because I see in you a lot of my thoughts twenty years ago when I looked at my father’s generation. And I wonder what makes you think that twenty years from now someone isn’t gonna laugh at you and say, you people think you have all the answers, you don’t.
Torque: I hope they do laugh at us.
Beemer: I think that’s the difference between our generations — you had the same thoughts that we do now, but we have the drive to carry them on as we grow and do the work, so that our children will be even more motivated to continue that.
Bruce: You think we didn’t have the same determination twenty years ago?
On the first leg of my flight to Portland last month, I had a window seat. On the aisle, a very chatty white woman, about my age. Between us, in the middle seat, a younger man, on his way to Kashmir. He was concerned he might miss his connection in Philly, a non-stop to Qatar.
The woman was fascinated by the idea of his globe-spanning journey, and had many, many questions. Where? Why? What? Where was he from? What is Kashmir? Isn’t that place dangerous? He was very patient, and generous. I felt for him.
The word “halal” was introduced into the conversation and she didn’t know that word, know what that was. This is where we are in America today, your average Midwestern white lady doesn’t know what halal means.
So, as a matter of course he was revealed to be Muslim, and she became even more fascinated! An outside observer might think this was a pleasant conversation, but in spite of my efforts to keep things banal. She wanted the history of the partition of Kashmir, of Pakistan and India, all the while making sure she reinforced her open-mindedness about things, while successfully cramming the Iraq and Afghan Wars into the conversation.
He was on his way to Kashmir to see his brother whose wife had recently suffered a stillbirth. The white woman asked more than once how the baby died, so soon before the due date. He said he didn’t really know. She suggested twice that the baby was probably strangled by the umbilical cord.
I thought he must have either planned this journey weeks or months ago, intending to play uncle to a happily expected child, or last-minute due to the tragedy, I didn’t ask. I told him I was glad he was going, his brother would be very happy to see him, and that I was very sorry for his loss.
As soon as it was convenient and appropriate, I put in my earbuds to watch a movie. I could no longer deal with this mostly one-sided conversation and wanted to duck about before she brought up 9/11, which in its way brings me to my most recent read, One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, a concise and scathing take-down of Western Liberalism, specifically in the face of the ongoing atrocities perpetuated daily by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
I read this book last summer, sitting on a deck on the coast in Maine. I pulled it off the shelf from a bookstore in Damariscotta and bought it without knowing one thing about it. I didn’t know what others had to say about it, if it was any good, but I was fairly certain I knew what it was about, based on the image on the cover, and on the title. Based on that title alone, I bought this book.
Just this past weekend, our elder child and I were discussing reading and I mentioned El Akkad’s book. They said they should read that and I said, “I don’t think it was written for you, it was written for me.” And by that I meant my child, both of our children, know what the book has to say. It is a lecture (lecture n. an educational talk to an audience) for the Western Liberal about the Western Liberal, and it asks one question quite plainly and directly, “What do you stand for?” Because it is evident that when presented with the unnecessary and entirely avoidable pain, suffering, and death of children, the Liberal will do nothing.
I know this, I have known it for some time. It has been almost thirteen years since Sandy Hook. That we could face the horror of that day, and do nothing. If the children of Palestine knew how we responded to the slaughter of twenty small children and six of their minders, each of whom were our fellow citizens, with weak words and absolute impotence, they should not be surprised that we wouldn’t do a thing to help them. Care about your children? We don’t care about our own.
At this late date, it is apparent those who lead the Democratic Party believe it will be enough at the mid-terms to say, “We aren’t him.” Not even we aren’t them, the Republicans, it will just be about the guy. And they believe this is all it will take to win seats, and perhaps they may. But having run on nothing, they can keep on keeping on. Because to stand for something is a risk to power. Yes, it is said and I have repeated it, you cannot do anything if you aren’t in the room.
But then they never do anything. We never do anything. About Gaza. About guns. About rights. About justice. There are things we believe. But as a man said, "Belief without action is dead."
One month ago, Poochu’s Productions produced my play, I Hate This (A True Story), at the Alliance Française de Madras in Chennai, India. Directed by Denver Anthony Nicholas and performed by Karthik TMK (and also by Abinaya R, more on her in a moment) this was not the first time these two men have presented this play about my experiences with stillbirth.
Four years ago, Denver, Karthik and I had a few email conversations about their producing the play in Spring 2021. They asked for a number of perfectly reasonable changes. The production would be performed in English (once referred to as India’s "subsidiary official language") and take place in America, but there were certain passages which would not be understood, culturally. Also, some of the names were unusual – a woman named Toni, for example – and could those be changed.
Most significantly, in my opinion, they asked if the several characters who I would traditionally have performed myself be performed instead by another performer, a woman. When we adapted the play into an audio drama in 2005 – was that really twenty years ago? I digress – I felt it would be easier to understand if every character had their own voice. But I always thought of it as strictly a solo performance.
Abinaya R
But that’s me. Theater is nothing if not an expansive art form. I was intrigued. And why not? They know best how to present this play to their audience, and I don’t. For this most recent production they cast Abinaya R, with whom they had most recently worked with in a production of Doubt by John Patrick Shanley.
Part of the design concept for this production of I Hate This was to emphasize the idea that while Karthik is telling the story now, today, Abinaya represents the past. He wears colors, she is monochromatic, dressed in black, her face and hands made white and gray. He looks at her, she never sees him. I was struck by this upon her first reveal, as the mother on the phone. She appears in a pool of light, far upstage. She looks so small compared to him in that scene, almost as though she is in a thought bubble.
When Denver and Karthik first produced this work, I was asked if they could change the title. This title, I HATE THIS, is the original sin of this particular work, as far back as 2002 it was suggested to me that the phrase might present a barrier to attendance. I took the risk. They were right, but I do not regret my decision. The show needs a content advisory and I believe the title serves that purpose.
Karthik TMK
As they strove to return to live performance following the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Denver felt that the original title would alienate audiences, and we agreed upon the much more digestible title What Happened. In the play that is asked as a question, as presented here it is simply a statement. This is what happened. For this new production, they decided it was now acceptable to use the original title, with the subtitle "a true story."
I have my own reasons for having written this piece, and why I keep returning to it. I am grateful to Playhouse Square and University Hospitals for producing the film (starring James Alexander Rankin) which continues to be used as an educational tool and an instrument of comfort for the bereaved. However, those few times (so far) that companies or individuals have inquired about producing the piece independently, I am always deeply curious as to their interest, or intentions.
Abinaya R
For Karthik, it is the opportunity to play something dramatic. Most solo performances for men are comic (I have heard this before, even from high school students seeking something different to perform for competitions) and he was looking for something which would allow him to be vulnerable on stage, and tell a story that would move people.
Denver told me about the first performances of What Happened/I Hate This, four years ago, when a young woman who saw the show was inconsolable and sobbing following the performance. A few years later, Denver’s company was holding one of their monthly Enter Stage events, a kind of open mic for artists to perform their own monologues. A young woman told a powerful and personal story of having suffered a miscarriage. When she was asked about this after her presentation, she said that it was her who had been so emotionally overwhelmed by my play, because of her own loss – and that the experience had inspired her to tell her story on stage, something she may not have done otherwise.
Director Denver Anthony Nicholas (center) with Karthik and Abinaya
I have written several plays which have been published, rights for production handled by others without my participation. There’s a production of Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street next weekend in Louisiana. It's going to be dinner theater and if the photos are any indication, I would love to get there for the food alone. I Hate This is not currently published, so there have been far fewer independent productions.
But when they come, when artists have found the script and reach to inquire about production, it means that our story, mine and my wife’s story of how we incorporated loss into our lives, that it is being told to an entirely new audience. And the fact that that story might have an impact on someone who lives and loves and grieves on the other side of the earth, that is truly remarkable.
Three months. Summer has been ending earlier and earlier, this year it began earlier, too.
To celebrate our eldest’s graduation from college, we planned an international journey, a vacation in Spain. We hadn’t taken our children on a transatlantic expedition since they were very, very young, not since I brought I Hate This to the UK. They don’t even remember that trip, only in photos.
First, however, a snag. I thought I had a valid passport, and I did, but it was due to expire. We noted this days before our departure. Renewal necessitated an urgent drive to Buffalo, which was in its way a not unpleasant prelude to the season, which included a fine cocktail in the hotel bar, and a rainy day stroll in Niagara Falls State Park, waiting for my ID to be processed.
Fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes in the presence of Bridal Falls. I live for moments like this.
Bilbao, Spain
When folks ask what my favorite part of our Spanish vacation was, you will forgive me for saying it was the opportunity to spend ten, responsibility-free days in the company of the three people I love most in the world. Social anxiety issues aside, our kids are excellent travelers. They are not only open to interesting, sometimes unplanned experiences, unusual spaces and food, they are also very good communicators and check in when they need a break. I am also better at this than I was as a young person, and that is thanks to them.
Our eldest’s achievements inspired this excursion, so the emphasis was on art. We saw the Prado, and the Reina Sophia. We attended the Guggenheim Bilbao, and finally the Segrada Familia. However, we also took in a little jazz with the boy, happening upon a barside trio outside the Guggenheim, and the David Pastor Quintet in Barcelona. I tagged the bandleader on my socials; a brief interaction revealed the connection between him and the head of the boy’s department at UC. Small world, indeed.
Great Lakes Theater Camp
I am always seeking new and better ways to lead, instruct and create. This is as true at our annual summer arts camp as in any other arena, and not only did the team put on some pretty amazing performances, I was developing new ideas as how to best curate an all too brief playwriting workshop, and how best to showcase the work.
We had about a half hour, every day (which is to say, for only six or seven days) for a small cohort of middle school aged campers to write short plays, which then received staged readings by high school aged campers. Everyone agreed the work was good, and I have some powerful thoughts about how to make the experience more exciting for all involved next year.
Peter Voinovich "Churchill at War" Actors Summit Productions
The eldest and I turned out for the No Kings protest where I spotted Fred Armisen casually walking past om his way to the opening of the SNL exhibit at the Rock Hall. By his gaze he seemed either impressed or bewildered by the Free Stamp.
We’ve also been attending a lot of Guardians games. It’s been a season of ups and downs, for the time being I’m withholding judgment. I have also had the chance to meet up with old college friends (emphasis on old) including seeing my roommate Peter onstage for the first time since, well, college, playing Churchill in a solo performance in Akron.
Much of my mental energy has been focused on The Right Room, of course, and my physical energy as well. While rehearsals were taking place I was acting as de facto sound designer and also curating and even creating props for the production.
Zach Palumbo, Nicole Coury "The Right Room" In Rehearsal
The BorderLight Festival was remarkable. I posted about our performances last month, it was all up and over on the same day. The next day, a Saturday, I saw a half dozen shows.
Highlights include Impact Award Winner Sincerely, (The Diary Play) by Bryanna Lee, She Was a Conquistawhore by Rachel O'Hanlon-Rodriguez, performed in The Snug at Parnell’s (where Give Me Your Keys produced my play Step Nine two years ago) and Eric Coble’s The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus, masterfully performed by Tia Shearer Bassett.
Then we got the heck out of town.
Zach Palumbo, Nicole Coury "The Right Room" BorderLight Theater Festival Photo: Daren Stahl
I try not to look forward to our annual journey to Maine. It will come, as it (almost) always does, but once it’s gone, so is the summer. This year, however, we were joined not only by the children but also their partners. It was a joyful and relaxing celebration of family and fellowship, replete with day trips and afternoons on the rock just reading, great food and drink and conversation.
Our last night on the road, stopping in Little Falls, New York, I had another chance to indulge in falling waters, writ small.
Now we’re back and home and at work and August has barely begun. But this weekend we’re going to Cedar Point.
I brought a couple of books with me for the trip, but when we visited the local library I was determined to get something and finish it before we departed. Ideally, I would finish it, get another book from the library and finish that before we departed, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
It’s not a very large library (it will get larger, more on that in a moment) but it is packed with tomes, and bestsellers, books with big names (literally) on their spines fairly leap off the shelf at you. I may have been gazing at the plentiful offerings from Maine-and-world legend Stephen King when I overheard another patron ask the women at the front desk for a copy of Hillbilly Elegy.
The former James David Hamel wrote one terrible book and became Vice President. It galls my kibe. I promptly turned away from fiction, faced biography, and found King’s On Writing; A Memoir of the Craft. It’s one of those books I have told myself I should read, and it was about damn time.
Here’s the thing; I’m a fan of Stephen King, the man, though not so much his work. But I like his writing. But I don’t care for horror or suspense. King was a constant presence of my adolescence; adaptations of his novels, films like The Shining, Christine, Cujo, The Dead Zone, they were on cable all the time, I didn’t watch them anymore than I watched any of the slasher films that were so popular at that time.
I did watch Creepshow, though, because it looked weird and I was delighted that it was funny. If I had given his work half a chance I may have appreciated King’s tremendous sense of humor in his fiction. And, of course, there is King’s own wonderful performance as Jordy Verrill in that film which made him an actual person in the world to me, and not just a name on a book.
It was my ex-wife, who loves all manner of fiction, who recommended I read The Stand, which I loved, but remains the only novel of his that I have read from the page. For long road trips, she and I would listen to the first three Gunslinger novels on audiobook, narrated by the man himself. It was because of this experience that I will never listen to an abridged audiobook. When possible, I prefer when it is read by the author.
I admire King. I should read more of his work. I am starting here.
"Jordy Verrill, you lunkhead."
Part of the book is autobiographic, “how I became a writer” stuff, but for much of the work he provides actual instruction (he has been an English teacher) not only on what constitutes good writing, but what and how makes good writing enjoyable to read.
King also advises the would-be writer – though you don’t need to be a writer to enjoy reading this book – on practice, which is very helpful. Much of this I know, or have my own personal opinions on, which I have come to in my own way and in my own time. But so much of what he says is true, practical, and useful.
He also repeats certain truths, because they are the most important, but so basic one might forget them in the details he also provides. You must read. You must write. You cannot be a writer if you are not reading and if you are not writing. If you don’t read, your writing won’t matter, and if you don’t write, you’re Fran Lebowitz.
“If you want to be a writer. You must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot.” - SK
Keeping King honest is not only his own sense of humility, but he is also unafraid to, from time to time, call out those whose work he does not respect. He loves all kinds of writing, so unlike those who would call his work trash only because he specializes in genre fiction, he dislikes editing that is bad, regardless of genre.
He calls a few authors and their work by name (the book was published twenty-five years ago, so Hamel’s 2016 book is not included) because he believes you can learn by reading those, too, a cautionary tale on how not to write. Okay! I should read those!
King is also an arbiter of truth in writing. When asked about the origin of one of my plays, I said, something pithy like, “It’s all stolen, but it’s all true.” I don’t know how the latter justifies the former, but it seemed appropriate at the time. Making stuff up is what fiction means, but it needs to ring with honesty, and this, as the man instructs, is how you bridge the gap from “write what you know” to “here’s a story about swatting with a fungo on Jupiter.”
And this is as good a time as any to explain that while this non-fiction book was situated on a shelf at the Friendship Public Library opposite King’s fiction, I had to go to the woman at the desk to find it, I didn’t just turn around and see it. But I could have, and you would know, because it sounded true, took less explanation, and sounded like a boss move.
Tabitha & Stephen King
The big question, for me, was what lessons I may have taken from Stephen King for my playwriting. He emphasizes story above all else, and also that dialogue defines character, but in drama dialogue is story, dialogue is action. He says, “writing good dialogue is art as well as craft,” and that is certainly true, and never more so than in a play script.
One of King’s extended metaphors is the writer’s toolbox, and what is one each level of the toolbox. Vocabulary, for example, and grammar, on the top layer. Below that, the proper elements of style, like tense and adverbs (not adverbs ...) below that, structure – literal structure, like how to construct paragraphs.
As you can see, a playwright’s toolbox will be very different. It’s all a matter of which tools you use the most, and which you use less frequently. The first layer would be dialogue and character, the second layer stage directions – the necessary stage directions, which are different from the ones you write for the first draft of your script and later cut because they aren’t necessary and will only annoy the actor.
This is a tremendous exercise, and one I need to think through before continuing. The Playwright’s Toolbox. A quick Google search tells me someone wrote a book by that title and just last year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t create my own.
The most critical part of the book – to me – is when he cautions the writer about backstory. To wit; “The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.” I have also been told, more than once, that a good play is about what is happening, and not about what has happened. Story telling can make a decent monologue, but any entire play cannot be about rehashing the past.
And I wonder, isn’t that what I do? Doesn’t that describe a lot of my plays? How much of The Right Room is couples talking to each other about their lives? And yet, I have seen how it is effective, that there is present action in story telling. Isn’t that why we love The Breakfast Club?
Finally, I was touched by the credit he provides his mother, and also his life partner. His mother, who worked her entire life, raising her children on her own, was supportive of his desire to write fiction from the very beginning. He also name-checks his several mentors.
But it is his wife, Tabitha Spruce King, herself a novelist, and also a poet, to whom he attributes his success, and not in some abstract, I couldn’t have done it without 'er kind of way. He is very specific about how, without her work, he would not be this highly visible, let alone successful, author. Not without her belief, her criticism, and her actions.
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