How I Spent My Summer (2022)

June: Topsail Beach

This past weekend we visited Athens, Ohio. To celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday. Also, to drop our eldest back at school. A second-year. A sophomore. There is much I could say about my sophomore year at Ohio University. It is enough to say I never accomplished as much as they have their first year, and I lazed away my first summer break from college while they worked and worked and worked. They are my inspiration and my motivation.

I have continued to recuperate from my eye surgery. There are good days and bad. Sleeping remains a challenge. And writing. And reading. I spend a great deal of time on social media, because that is easy. But even my relationship to social media has changed this summer.

July: Deck Time

Last month, someone contacted me via Twitter to let me know they have been made aware that something they had posted on that social media site I have reposted onto my professional Facebook page.

I post all manner of things on my Facebook page, related to playwriting, to spur conversation, sure. But also to generate attention.

However, I don’t know this person. Another playwright, yes. But they are not a famous person. What right did I have to repost their thoughts somewhere else for my own purposes? None at all. It was a mistake. I was wrong. I took down the post and I apologized.

This exchange occurred just as my family was leaving on vacation without me the day before I would undergo surgery on my left eye was extremely helpful. It meant that instead of spending the day feeling sorry for myself, I could spend the day hating myself.

July: Zoom Reading

Feeling sorry for myself means something beyond my control happened to me, that I am a victim of circumstance. And as far my eye is concerned, perhaps that is true.

But I do shit like this all the time. Social media has only enabled me to cast a wider net of people to hurt. Hating oneself, at least, places blame squarely where it belongs.

The ten days I spent on my own I had the chance to do a lot of viewing. I watched Under the Banner of Heaven, completed BoJack Horseman, a friend came over and we watched The Moderns, another joined me to watch Magnolia. Each and every one of these stories are about men who plow thoughtlessly through their lives, only tangentially aware of their own sense of entitlement. Viewing or reviewing them, I was acutely aware of my own failings.

July: College Visit

I have both thoughtlessly and also with intention damaged personal items that were meaningful to my ex-wife. I have ended friendships with one carefully chosen sentence. I have complicated relationships by saying things I should not have said.

I have transgressed. I have been inappropriate. I have failed to return that call. I have pretended to be asleep.

Early in the social media era, long before the #MeToo era, this guy I know posted something on Facebook along the lines of, “If you are a woman I have hurt, I want to apologize.” That was it. I was incredulous. I’m sure I wasn’t alone. No one responded. Because cringe?

August: Birthday Reunion

But, you know, I understood the impulse. We know we have done bad things. We want people to believe we are good. But we’re really not. I wasn’t when I was a sophomore at Ohio University. And also last month. When will I hurt someone next?

This is not really an account of how I spent my summer, except to say that I have been going through some things. Convalescing has provided an awful lot of time to go through them. My final year of grad school begins next week, and I wonder what I will be writing.

June: Theater Camp

Play a Day: Monica: This Play Is Not About Monica Lewinsky

Dianne Nora

For Friday, I read Monica: This Play Is Not About Monica Lewinsky by Dianne Nora and posted at New Play Exchange.

“I have faith in people and I can’t seem to shake it.”

This is a fascinating brain experiment, to cast the idea of a woman about whom we have the most intimate knowledge, but about whom most people know absolutely nothing. 

In that, this fictional version of Monica Lewinsky becomes an everywoman. Some suffer their abusers in private, others on full display, and the real Lewinsky is one of the most public examples of that. 

But this play is not about her specifically, but every woman’s journey toward feeling whole, to having a heart (as is described so poetically in the denouement) that can heal itself.

Nora’s narrative jumps back and forth in time with a dry wit, passion, and alacrity. It is an experiment which determines its thesis.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Slaying Holofernes

Emily McClain

For Saturday, I read Slaying Holofernes by Emily McClain and listed at New Play Exchange.

Sometimes an evocative title can create in the imagination its own narrative, and then you read a thing and find out you were entirely in another universe, or if not entirely, at least that you were wrong.

I thought "Slaying Holofernes" might be the story of taking down wistful, entrenched, and useless academics, the Holofernes of the title a reference to he who is found in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. But I was mistaken.

Judith Slaying Holofernes
(Artemisia Gentileschi, 1613)

In this case, we are referring to the biblical Holofernes, a marauding general who was beguiled by the Hebrew widow Judith, who got him drunk and cut off his head. The tale was immortalized by the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who is a subject of McClain's play.

McClain's work is an intense courtroom/boardroom drama, moving back and forth in time to detail the unfair treatment of two women in the workplace, a seventeenth century painter and a modern numbers cruncher.

The two tales compliment each other, as we are treated to compelling debates, with echoes of the Kavanaugh hearings, which was itself a repetition on a historic theme, in which women are asked the same contradictory questions in order to exonerate the man; Why did you wait to speak? Why did you not behave differently at the time? Why don't you just shut up?

The playwright's use of classical paintings, and her stage directions regarding to use of light are particularly compelling. I am drawn to plays about painters, enticed by their description of color and theme and light. This is a powerful play, enhanced by Biblical, classical, and modern atmospheres.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

Kimberly Belflower

To round out the week, I am enjoying a script that I have been looking forward to for months, yet purposefully avoided.

For Friday, I read John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower and listed at New Play Exchange.

Last weekend my new play The Witches was to have received a workshop production at Cleveland Public Theatre. As I was trying to create a modern take on the historic events of the Salem Witch Panic of 1692, I was worried that I might be influenced by this piece which has been getting a lot of attention.

I need not have worried. If anything, Belflower's play script has inspired me to return to my own text and push it further. Because her play is startlingly biting and beautiful and just what we need right now. I hope it gets produced all over the place.

And it is in reading such pieces that I feel challenged to create more and better work.

I love the title, that's first. And I was stunned and delighted that the holding company for Arthur Miller's written works granted permission for text from The Crucible to be quoted in this play. We could compare and contrast how those gatekeeping works by dead white men such as Samuel Beckett or Edward Albee have (mis)managed their estates, in this case I was gratified to know the keepers of Miller's work appreciate that criticism does not mean erasure.

Taylor Atwara, Anna Nicolosi 
Academy for the Performing Arts, 2023
Photo: Daren Stahl

John Proctor Is the Villain is a high school drama which excellently describes the familiar manner in which woman is still pitted against woman in American society, a society still haunted by its Puritanical roots, for the continued domination by men. The cracks are beginning to show, though the light shining through them remains dim. It's a hopeful story, but also realistic. There's so much work left to be done.

This script is tense, taut, humorous, dramatic, powerful, poetic, and devastating, and high schools everywhere should be producing this.

In the past two days, I have read plays about transgressive relationships between teacher and student, this one and Meet Me In The Bathroom. One of the iconic taboos, as it is not only a violation of our communal understanding that it is criminal for adults to engage in sexual activity with children, but also represents a violation in the bond of trust between student and mentor.

It is a power play; one uses their position of power to satisfy their own desires, with little or no regard for the damage that might cause the disempowered.

Broadway Premiere
Starring Sadie Sink
The Booth Theatre (2025)

As a child, or pre-adolescent, I was exposed to the Kubrick film version of Lolita, and also the popular song which name checks the author of the novel from which it was adapted, "Don't Stand So Close to Me." At that time, in these cases, such titillating fare made an impression on me because I thought of myself as the child, receiving forbidden knowledge, and not as the adult, and I was caught up in the romantic danger of it, instead of paying attention to the very apparent abuse.

This was further complicated as I entered high school and as a freshman was complicit in turning a blind eye to an actual teacher-student relationship. "Tell my parents I'm with you," is a lie teenagers have been pressed into telling on their friend's behalf since before the invention of the telephone.

Whether it be Nabokov or Sting, we used to learn about these stories from the predators point of view, one who positions himself (usually himself) as the hero. Increasingly, as with these two scripts, we see it from the student's. And that is a powerful thing.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Meet Me In The Bathroom

Cassie M. Seinuk

So the other day I got shamed by an actual, platinum-certified rock star for mocking the name of his band on the morning announcements in 1985.

Seriously, he took me to task for being a dick thirty-five years ago. Not that I wasn't a dick, but that's how he remembers me.

The lesson here, maybe, is never to be a dick. Ever. Not now, and not in high school.

For Thursday, I read Meet Me In The Bathroom by Cassie M. Seinuk and available at New Play Exchange. It's a cutting teenage drama, one that literally takes place entirely in one high school bathroom.

Seinuk creates a modern Greek tragedy, complete with chorus of voices, debate and off-stage violence, and the Unities followed in spirit if not the letter.

The question, for several of these teen protagonists, is when does betrayal actually happen? When an act of tragsression is committed, when the act is proposed, suggested, or as yet unspoken, living on in the mind of the perpetrator?

An intense tale for the #metoo era, flashing with on-point modern lingua (it helps that I have teenagers in my house) old wrongs fuel present actions and the conclusion is tragic for everyone involved.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Monsters Are Made

Hannah C. Langley

For Monday I read Monsters Are Made, a new work in development by Hannah C. Langley, and available at New Play Exchange.

The playwright has chosen to post a new script which is in development, which is a brave and unique move. It would be one thing to read this 82-page script and believe it is complete, but I can see where there is room for development.

I keep these blog entries to reflect upon the work, not to critique, just to record my reading, but properly workshopped it would be fascinating to see the struggle play out between these two well-defined characters, not just mentally but physically. It is quite violent.

The #MeToo moment has emboldened women (and men) to come forward and accuse their assailants, and they have done so in overwhelming numbers and we know it is only the tip of an iceberg. We are hearing their stories, full-throated and without apology, and we who listen are learning a new language for their survival, strength and determination.

This play asks the question, though, to what extent must we understand the assailant, the rapist? What do you do with a perpetrator who demands his own punishment, when doing so is merely another form of control, dominance, and presence? One character states plainly, "you know you're a rapist but you don't even know what rape means." We now better understand what it means to be the victim, but those in positions of power do not yet understand what it means to be the assailant.

By the way, Langley's bio was written by her mentor which is a boss and creative idea.