Twenty-Nineteen

"About a Ghoul"
(Talespinner Children's Theatre, 2019)

How do you get that next production? That’s a question. Without a name, without a history, when your work has largely been confined to your own community, without representation, how does one push their own work into the larger world?

In the gig economy, there are plentiful opportunities to attract attention to yourself, but there are thousands of others taking those same opportunities. Yes, there are many examples now of playwrights whose work has been discovered on New Play Exchange. For a moment I thought I was one of those.

In January, a small company in a large city cold-contacted me about one of my previously produced works. They really wanted it! I was interviewed by the artistic director. I was consulted about concept. They requested a contract, which I sent. Then … nothing.

I tried to reach out once, just a big hello? Are we on? No response. They announced their season in the summer, and no surprise, my play was not there. How disappointing. That’s not how you do that.

The entire year has been like that.

Casting spells in the rain.
(Harry Potter World, Orlando)

The year literally began on the tarmac. After a significant delay, we touchdown in Orlando minutes before midnight New Year’s Eve, and rang in 2018 waiting to exit. It was a last-minute decision, to drop everything and scurry off to see Harry Potter and Mickey Mouse. After the horrors of the holidays, the wife just wanted time with her family.

What we got were four wet days in an amusement park, with temps in the mid-forties. But we were adventurous, we dined and played and loved together as a family under a dark cloud, because that’s a metaphor for everything these days.

New writing was under the radar this past year, I spent far more time doing crossword puzzles. It’s just a fact. However, works that have been in development or previously presented found their home, some more than one home.

The Way I Danced With You was presented as part of their Factory Series at Blank Canvas Theatre, and it was a very successful weekend. Funny, I did not think it was particularly well-attended. It’s not a big house, and it felt like there a lot of empty seats. And yet, the feedback was highly positive -- and it keeps coming. Since March numerous people, folks I didn’t even remember attending, have told me what an impression it made how much they are still thinking about it.

"The Way I Danced With You
(Blank Canvas Theatre, 2018)

The script will receive a full run of performances, opening March 21, at Ensemble Theatre. Directed by Tyler J. Whidden, The Way I Danced With You will headline the 2019 Columbi New Plays Festival. Auditions were announced yesterday.

Last year I lamented how I had fallen away from writing, longhand, every morning. Well, it took most of the year, but I now have an established ritual of writing 30 minutes or three pages every single morning, without fail. And it makes a difference. I even pushed through an illness to keep covering the page.

Just last night, Talespinner Children’s Theatre announced their 2019 season, which will include the world premiere of About a Ghoul, my new play inspired by Moroccan folk tales.

On the publication front, I have two exciting developments. In an effort to control my own work, I decided to self-publish I Hate This on Amazon. Ten years ago there was a limited edition of that script released in Britain, with all profits going to a national charity. To my surprise, I have found copies of that script going for as much as $50 on various websites. So I have published a version for $5.95, which means pennies for me, but at least it is available to whoever wants it at a price they can afford. You can get an electronic version for even less.

The second publication is still in the works, and I look forward to announcing that soon.

Forward. Always forward.

Plays of Regret

"Screen Play" at Pandemonium
Brian Pedaci & Toni K. Thayer

re·gret (rəˈɡret)

verb 1. feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity).

noun 1. a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over something that has happened or been done.

Groundhog Day

Why does the movie Groundhog Day work? I mean, the premise is facile, but inspired. One person wakes up on the same day, day after day, seemingly for eternity.

It could easily be a horror film, like an episode of the Twilight Zone, a "No Exit" situation, in which our protagonist is driven to madness. When he is finally released and it is finally February 3rd, he’s a gibbering, quivering mess, or unleashes unspeakable violence on the citizens of Punxsutawney before being carted away in a loony wagon.

Instead it's a somewhat broad romantic comedy that includes one unfortunately dated homophobic gag.

Bill Murray plays the main character, and he's a complete jerk. But he’s not the only jerk, there's a lot of jerks in this movie. I couldn't help but imagine that piano teacher and her decision, every single time, to accept a sizable amount of money to kick her adolescent student out of the house. Man, that girl looks really sad and confused.

Also, Chris Elliott. That’s all, just, Chris Elliott.

Watching the film for only the second time the other night ("don't @ me") I was impressed by the structure. The different phases our man goes through, confused, manic, suicidal, resigned, driven. But I was not only amused by but disturbed by Murray’s performance. I’m not sure he changes as much as people want to believe he has.

He fails when he takes an easy route into into Andie MacDowell’s pants, by discovering and memorizing her favorite things, and then repeating them back to her. But aren’t his long-term efforts at becoming a full-actualized human being the same thing, only more sophisticated? Does he learn languages and philosophy and boogie-woogie piano because he wants to, or because that is what it will take to attain the acceptance of the only person in town he apparently can't bamboozle?

Nailed it.

He accumulates several lifetimes of experience and practice, an autodidact’s liberal education, but he’s still kind of a jerk. He bathes in his own cleverness. I mean, Bill Murray always does. However, I believe that fact is the film’s redeeming quality, that he does not become an entirely different person. He changes, yet he does not. The best that can be said is that he does not seem to hate himself anymore. It's not even about her. Do we not all hope for that kind of radical change?

“How old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?" The same age you will be if you don’t.
- Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Groundhog Day was released when I was twenty-five. Half my life ago, with so much in front of me, I wasn’t particularly touched by his dilemma. At the age of fifty, which of us would not -- barring the opportunity to actually go back in time and change things -- take the opportunity afforded from one single day, repeated over and over, to make up for lost time? Reliving, reliving, and recreating. The young man finds it amusing. The older man just sees his own life and thinks, what have I been doing with my many varied days?

Make no mistake, Groundhog Day is ultimately a movie about regret. Because there are no do-overs, we cannot relive a moment to get it right. It is a fantasy of longing for the one who got away.

Plays of Regret

Several of my plays have been inspired by brief, passing encounters, expanded upon and brought to their ultimate, extreme conclusion.

Twenty years ago, in 1998, four playwrights (David Bell, Suzanne Miller, Toni K. Thayer and myself) collaborated to create a new work for Dobama’s Night Kitchen titled Cole Cuts. Set in a trendy, late 90s cocktail bar, each fifteen minute piece was to include a lesser-known song by Cole Porter, performed live by the company, piano by the incomparable Michael Seevers.

"Cole Cuts: The Imaginary Date" directed by Dan Kilbane
Featuring Adam Hoffman, Elaine Feagler, David Thonnings & Alison Garrigan
Piano: Michael Seevers
(Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1998)

In my scene, “The Imaginary Date,” a young man (Simon) is pressed into service, pretending to hit on a friend of his (Missy) to make her ex-boyfriend jealous. By the end of the short scene the gambit has worked -- the ex stomps off in a huff -- but Simon is left wounded by the connection he allowed himself to believe has been made with Missy on their “imaginary” date.

The convention of the complete, one-hour play (set in a bar called The Porterhouse) gave this scene additional impact, as Simon returns to the bar, continues to drink through two other scenes, and sadly staggers out near the end of the final piece.

Emotional role play is also a major plot point in The Way I Danced With You, in which a young couple attempt to rekindle a flagging relationship. This piece, which received a weekend of performances at Blank Canvas last March will have a complete, three-weekend run this season at Ensemble Theatre.

A few weeks ago, my ten-minute piece Screen Play premiered at Pandemonium, Cleveland Public Theatre’s annual gala. Two years ago I tried it out at CPT’s monthly public workshop, The Dark Room with Brian Pedaci reading the male character. This summer he asked if I wouldn’t pitch it for the party. I was surprised he remembered it. I was surprised they chose it. It’s a little kitchen sinky, but between he and my wife, Toni K. Thayer as she, it was taut, compelling, and we got some lovely responses from party goers.

"The Way I Danced With You" at Ensemble Theatre
Sarah Blubaugh & Cody Kilpatrick Steele

Unlike those other two pieces, featuring youthful protagonists in the very midst of romantic decision-making, here we have two Gen Xers in their middle years, a quiet evening at home, on their screens. He googles a one-night stand from college, and his attempt at re-connection (an ill-thought impulse) is met with a less-than-positive response. The ensuing conversation with his spouse leads to several uneasy conclusions.

Dan Savage said, “every relationship you are in will fail, until one doesn't.” Is the success of an entire relationship defined by whether or not it ends? How many relationships hinge on a single word? Have you ever felt the regret that comes with doubting the choices you have made, and the possibility that one choice, one moment, one word -- stay -- may have created for you an entirely different life, a different world, a different you?

If you had it to do all over again, would you?

And would you regret that also?

Ensemble Theatre presents the World Premiere of "The Way I Danced With You," through April 7, 2019.


This post was updated on 3/22/2019

The Way I Danced With You (process)

Sarah Blubaugh & Michael Johnson
(Blank Canvas Theatre, 2018)

Several of my plays have been commissions. There is a need, a proposal, I satisfy certain criteria, the play gets produced, we move on. Then there are the plays I write because I want to write them, I need to. But where do they go? And how do you know if they are even any good?

The Way I Danced With You has followed a process, it keeps moving forward. We read it at music stands in Valdez, Alaska following a two-hour rehearsal. We took three days to rehearse and stage it with scripts in hand, no tech, no set or costumes in Waterloo. And now we have taken three weeks to fully memorize the piece, dress up the actors, and see what it actually looks like or could look like in some future, premiere production.

It makes a difference, hearing the script aloud. A big difference in this case. At the first read-through a few weeks back, Sarah (playing Dani at Blank Canvas) observed that the second scene or act is entirely different when read out loud, looking at the person you’re speaking to you, about the person you're speaking to. You really have to do that to understand what is happening and the emotions involved.

It is still a script in progress, but not by much. The first two scenes are pretty much right where I want them. The first was almost completely set in stone after Alaska, I remember cutting an entire page during our brief rehearsal. Tyler and Chloe read it and I was like, wow, we don’t need that at all! It was liberating.

But that third scene … my lead adjudicator at Last Frontier was Kevin Armento (Balls, Devil With the Blue Dress) and one of the most significant questions he asked was; whose play is it? I said I wanted the play to be about both of them. He said that’s fine, but that it was currently Charles’s play, the man’s play. And that this was largely due to the third scene or act.

Chloe Cotton & Tyler Browning
(Last Frontier Theatre Conference, 2016)

Significant revisions were made, for Playwrights’ Local, and then for Blank Canvas. My wife says the play is now about Dani, the woman, that it’s her play. And I am all right with that. But even now, listening to Michael (Charles) in the third scene, playing it all out, I am in sitting in the house constantly thinking about every line -- this could be different, that is unnecessary... Hearing it, seeing it, and seeing her (Dani’s) reaction to everything … it’s important. It’s necessary. I’m seeing and hearing things I’ve never heard in the previous workshops, when scripts were in the way. Reactions are as important as the words themselves.

Having said that, the performances this weekend have been tremendous. And during that scene, that final scene, you could hear a pin drop in the house. No one in the audience moves, they’re all hanging on every word. It’s thrilling. They want to know.

Interestingly, while I leave the ending with a question, Lara, the director, has pretty much made up her mind her mind as to what happens next, after the curtain, and I think it’s pretty clear. Another director might handle that differently, and that’s okay, too.

So there are a few minor edits still to be made on that last scene. But it’s ready to go, this script is ready for a full production.

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

The Way I Danced With You (glossary)

Sarah Blubaugh & Cody Kilpatrick Steele
"The Way I Danced With You"
(Ensemble Theatre, 2019)

Perhaps you are planning to catch The Way I Danced With You  this weekend. I hope you are. But perhaps you were born after the year 1980, one of those "Millennials" people keep talking about.

Maybe when you hear the name "George Michael" you immediately think of Michael Cera. Maybe you've never been to Chicago. Maybe you don't even know where you are.

Here is a brief list of pop culture references which may help you appreciate and enjoy the performance.

All entries sourced from Wikipedia.

Geena Davis & Jeff Goldblum
(The Fly)

Deerfield is a village in Lake County, Illinois, approximately 25 miles north of Chicago. Deerfield High School is consistently one of the top high schools in the state. It is said Deerfield was a major inspiration for Shermer, Illinois, the fictional setting for several of John Hughes’ 1980s teen films.

"A Different Corner" is a 1986 song written and performed by George Michael. The song reached number 7 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

The Fly is a 1986 American science-fiction horror film directed and co-written by David Cronenberg. Starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, the film tells of an eccentric scientist who, after one of his experiments goes wrong, slowly turns into a fly-hybrid creature.

Footloose is a 1984 American musical drama. It tells the story of Ren McCormack, an upbeat Chicago teen who moves to a small town in which, as a result of the efforts of a local minister, dancing and rock music have been banned.

Glencoe is an affluent suburb of Chicago, located on the shore of Lake Michigan. This village is also the setting for the 1983 film Risky Business.

Harold Washington College is a community college part of the City Colleges of Chicago system of the City of Chicago, in Illinois. Founded in 1962 as Loop College, the college was renamed for the first African American to be elected Mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, after his sudden death in office in November 1987.

"Love on the Rocks" is a song written by Neil Diamond and Gilbert Bécaud that appeared in the 1980 movie The Jazz Singer. The single reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in January 1981.

Midland is a city Michigan. In 2010, Midland was named No. 4 "Best Small City to Raise a Family" by Forbes magazine.

The Palmer House, Chicago

Mel Gibson was People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in the year 1985.

Navy Pier is a boardwalk entertainment district on Lake Michigan in Chicago, which in 2018 encompasses more than fifty acres of parks, gardens, shops, restaurants, family attractions and exhibition facilities. Established in 1916, and not yet extensively renovated until the early 21st Century, by the 1980s it was a destination in decline.

A Night at the Opera is a 1935 American comedy film starring the Marx Brothers, A smash hit at the box office, A Night at the Opera was selected in 1993 for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Older is the third solo studio album by George Michael, released in 1996. It was his first album since 1990's Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 – the six-year gap was due to the legal battle that Michael experienced with his record company. "Older" is also the title of a single from this album, released in 1997. The single peaked at number 3 on the UK Singles Chart. It did not chart in the United States.

The Palmer House (now the Palmer House Hilton) is a historic hotel in Chicago in the city's Loop area. It is a Historic Hotel of America member, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is one of the longest continuously operating hotel in North America.

“The Queen and the Soldier” is a song from Suzanne Vega’s eponymous, 1985 debut album.

The South Side of Chicago has a varied ethnic composition. It has great disparity in income and other demographic measures. Although it has a reputation for high levels of crime, the reality is much more varied. The South Side ranges from affluent to middle class to poor, just like other sections of large cities.

Wham ft. George Michael
("The Edge of Heaven")

Top Gun is a 1986 American romantic military action drama film directed by Tony Scott, Despite its initial mixed critical reaction, the film was a huge commercial hit. Additionally, the film won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Take My Breath Away" performed by Berlin.

“The Way I Danced With You” is a lyric from “Careless Whisper” (1984) by English singer-songwriter George Michael. It was released as a single and became a huge commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the Pacific. It reached number one in nearly 25 countries, selling about 6 million copies worldwide.

Winelight is a 1980 album by jazz musician Grover Washington Jr. It received the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance in 1982. It is also the title of the first track of the album.

Ensemble Theatre presents the World Premiere of "The Way I Danced With You," opening March 21, 2019.

This post was updated on 3/20/2019

Pretty In Pink (film)

Last fall my mother and I traveled to England together for my niece’s graduation. Flying east is never an issue, but flying west for any significant duration can give me a terrible migraine. One technique I have is that if I watch movies, one after another, then I have something focus on and am less affected by the buffeting headwinds, and also by the time.

These days, thankfully, most long-range airlines provide in-flight entertainment of your choice for no additional charge. It’s probably best to keep all the passengers distracted as it keeps the rage to a minimum. Choosing what to watch, however, can be a trial. There are so many choices! But not enough choices!

I decided to view the 1986 John Hughes film Pretty In Pink. You may be surprised to learn I have never actually watched Pretty In Pink. Not one second of it. Yes, I am a devoted fan of the 1980s. Yes, I have seen most of John Hughes films (at least from Vacation through Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and like many my age, straight, gay, or other, I have a thing for Molly Ringwald.

When the soundtrack was released early that year, I noticed at the time that it was the first record I purchased which had a "1986" copyright notice. This was significant to me because I was to graduate that spring, the number 1986 was magical, the two digits, 8 and 6, that I had on my sleeve since getting my “Bay jacket” in junior high. The future was finally now.

So I had the soundtrack, but never saw the movie. And it is an amazing soundtrack, solidifying my love for New Order and The Smiths (which I had only recently discovered) and introducing me to Suzanne Vega and Echo and the Bunnymen. It also had a track from INXS which my friend Scott was quick to dismiss as sounding like something they had decided not to include on Listen Like Thieves, and a rather tepid cover of the previous year’s hit single “Wouldn’t It Be Good.”

I have this on cassette. It is useless.

I knew the basics about the story, Molly Ringwald’s character, who lives on “the wrong side of the tracks,” is being courted by a rich kid (Andrew McCarthy) and this dweeb named Duckie. What I also knew was that the original ending, which takes place during Prom, because so many teen films end at Prom (did that start with Valley Girl?) in which she chooses Duckie, did not go over well with test audiences. In the final cut she chooses the Andrew McCarthy character.

Blaine. His name is Blaine.

Anyway, flash forward to fall 2017, and I’m finally watching this movie in a plane for the very first time. I learned several things:

• Molly Ringwald is hands-down adorable in every single frame of this movie and if she were my daughter I would be so proud of her for being smart, artistic, resilient, good-hearted, and quick-witted. To put it another way, she is exactly like my actual daughter. 
• Harry Dean Stanton as her depressed father is also adorable, and I was particularly touched by his performance because the actor had only recently passed away. I was also happy for him because it was obvious they shot all of his scenes in one day on two sets, so he probably got a fat check for very little work.
• Duckie (Jon Cryer) is not the adorable, pompadoured dweeb I was led to believe him to be, but an aggressively toxic young man, one of those assholes who in common parlance use terms like “friendzone,” believing women should surrender to him by virtue of merely existing and being omnipresent.
• Andrew McCarthy, whom I really enjoyed as a shell-shocked, morphine-addicted World War One veteran in Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, employed the same vacant, thousand-mile stare eight years earlier in this film. I kept asking myself if Blaine was supposed to be high all of the time, or if that’s just that thing McCarthy does.

In general, I was disappointed and underwhelmed. I don’t think Hughes’s work has weathered well, and that future generations may not understand their appeal at all. His films are not merely lily-white, but in the case of Ferris Bueller and Sixteen Candles blatantly racist.

His masterpiece, The Breakfast Club, remains a sincere, downright eloquent expression of teen angst, with a far more nuanced attitude toward gender relations, and the entire screenplay is packed with memorable turns of phrase. I cannot for the life of me recall a single thing anyone in Pretty In Pink says. In fact, I was stunned by how nothing anyone said made any sense at all.

This was written to be a cutting rejoinder.

The one exception was James Spader, who cannot create a forgettable performance. He has a keen ability to say things, even horrible dialogue, like he is the smartest fucking person to draw breath. Spader and Stanley Tucci need to make a heist movie, where all they steal is scenes from each other.

Heading out from seeing Lady Bird last night (the wife is on a tear to watch all of the Oscar-nominated films over the course of this weekend) she observed the obvious nods to Pretty In Pink in that film. They even toy with the phrase “wrong side of the tracks” in literal, devastating fashion.

The difference between these two movies, as I saw it, was that unlike so many Hollywood films, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird has a roster of well-developed female characters, and a trio of one-dimensional male tropes (the closeted love interest, the hipster douchebag love interest, the pathetic, depressed father) as obstacles in the protagonist’s journey toward adulthood. Unlike Ringwald’s Andie, who seems to have entirely bought into the idea that she must end up with somebody at the end of the film, Saoirse Ronan’s Christine realizes friends are more important than boys, and that the most important person to end up with is yourself.

The past week, we began rehearsals for one weekend of performances of my new play script The Way I Danced With You, which will be presented at Blank Canvas Theatre on the near west side later this month. Lara Mielcarek directs, and the piece features Sarah Blubaugh and Michael Johnson as Dani and Charles.

I am not crying. It is you who is crying.

Writing this piece, I tried very hard to put myself back in that place in the mid-80s, a time when we tried a little too hard to play dress-up and pretend we were adults. Like James Spader's Steff, sitting at his father’s desk in his father’s home office, in his father’s bathrobe, smoking cigarettes and, doing what? Working? He’s a rich, hungover high school student, putting on his daddy’s armor and pretending to be a Master of the Universe (the Bonfire of the Vanities kind, not the action figure.)

While my character Charles is nowhere near as hot and self-possessed as Steff, he does try in his own way to be that thing. And without all the whining, he reflects a slight degree of Duckie’s self-righteous insistence that staying power justifies deserts.

That may have been the most disturbing part of watching Pretty In Pink for the first time ever, at this point in my life. It was like stepping through a time machine into a moment I know and feel so well and so deeply, and I was surprised and even moved by what I found there.

UPDATE: Ensemble Theatre presents the World Premiere of "The Way I Danced With You," opening March 21, 2019, directed by Tyler Whidden, and featuring Sarah Blubaugh and Cody Steele as Dani and Charles.

Urinetown: The Musical @ Blank Canvas Theatre

Daryl Kelly as Bobby Strong (Blank Canvas, 2017)

It is a well-known fact that the ground-breaking musical Urinetown: The Musical was set to open on Thursday, September 13, 2001. As events played out that week, it is no small feat that they only need to postpone the opening for one week, and opened instead on September 20.

What is less-reported is that I already had a ticket to see it two weeks later, on Saturday, October 6. Not only a ticket to the show, but also a plane ticket for LaGuardia. The emotional trauma of witnessing the events of September 11, even just on television, endowed the idea of flying with a newly realized dread, one which continues to this day.

Earlier that summer my wife and I took a transatlantic flight, international terrorism was furthest from my mind.

I had several reasons I really wanted to attend this new production, however. I knew some people who were deeply invested in it, and I had long been a fan of Greg Kotis from when he was a member of the Neo-Futurists.

My first impression of his work was a Too Much Light play called “Documentation” from 1991. Kotis stepped out onto the empty stage with a Polaroid camera and asked, "Will all the Jews in the audience stand up, please?"

People stood, the guy I came with stood. I’m not Jewish, I didn’t stand. Kotis took a photo of the audience, looked at the photo until the image was clear. He said, "Thank you." Curtain.

Simply told, haunting and cautionary. Our imitative company in Cleveland were always trying to reach the elegant impact of plays like that one. The idea that someone whose experimental work I had seen in a rented theater in Chicago ten years earlier had written the book for a Broadway musical was inspiring and I just wanted to see it.

My wife had written a play which was produced at that year’s New York Fringe at the old resent Company space, a mere two years since Urinetown had made its mark in the same venue. The Broadway producers of that musical were about, drumming interest and selling copies of original cast album, which I purchased.

So, I knew what the show was about, and frankly I was a bit concerned how it would be received. We were still, supposedly in an era of “post-irony,” SNL producer Lorne Michaels had only the weekend before my arrival asked Mayor Giuliani on the show if it was okay to be funny again. (The mayor’s response; “Why start now?”)

John Cullum as Caldwell B. Cladwell (Broadway, 2001)

Even Urinetown’s most experienced and lauded performer, John Cullum, didn’t get the show or think it was funny. In Backstage earlier that year he said he thought the show was “strange and crude and by the end of the first act I was angry and offended.” Later, I heard Cullum in an interview admit that it was his wife who read the script, thought it was hilarious, and encouraged him to take the role.

My first night in Manhattan I met and drinks with some friends. We were well uptown, far from Ground Zero. I had already seen it, however, from the sky. We arrived at dusk, the sky was dark, but the site of the former World Trade Center was lit as bright as day, crews working around the clock, the pit still actively smoldering. Everyone in the plane was looking out the window. Many literally gasped. The guy sitting next to me had a tourist guide, he was visiting his son at college, and good for him.

I asked my friends, should I go? Should I go downtown and see it? Was that the right thing to do? The wrong thing to do? These were early days. I didn’t want to be a ghoul.

They said, yes! You must! And so I was absolved. And I went. And what I saw there is a story for another time. It is enough to say at this time that all of this was hanging in the air the night I first saw Urinetown: The Musical at the Henry Miller Theatre.

Was the audience apprehensive? Perhaps they were. Maybe it was just me. And maybe it was just me, but the company seemed apprehensive. They were totally on, the show was funny, and it music popped. And we were appreciative. But even from the beginning, I felt as though some previous audience had mistreated them, and that they weren’t sure we were going to like them. And I wasn’t sure if we were either.

It wasn’t until "Run, Freedom, Run!" -- in the middle of the second act -- that the audience was, at last, entirely on their side, and it brought down the house. We liked the show. We liked it a lot.

The following spring, I returned to NYC with my wife. It had been less than a year. Driving into the city we were struck by the absence of the Twin Towers. We met our friends, we had a beautiful weekend in New York. And I took her to see Urinetown.

By this point, it’s success was apparent. The theater was buzzing with excitement which hadn’t been present the previous fall. This guy sitting near us said this was his third time. It was a hit. And maybe it was just me, but I could see it in the cast. They were relaxed, confident, hilariously confident. John Cullum, who seemed a bit above it all my first time, was now rolling in the production. He got the joke.

Dayshawnda Ash as Little Sally (Blank Canvas, 2017)

I was thrilled when Kotis won a Tony Award for Best Book, and disappointed when the show lost out on Best Musical to the more traditional Thoroughly Modern Millie. But a play as acidic as this one had never been bestowed that honor before … though such arch material soon would be. This is what I meant by “ground-breaking.”

This weekend, the entire family went to see Urinetown at Blank Canvas Theatre. Other parents take their children to Wicked, we take them to Urinetown. They were not unfamiliar with the show, the by has heard the about the girl saw a production at Shaker Heights High last year.

And yet, even today, even following the success of arch-satiric musicals that actually won a Tony for Best Musical like Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, watching it again I was struck by how “strange and crude” the play still is, to its credit. If anything, its themes of greed, want and unsustainability are far more relevant now than they were sixteen years ago.

My daughter goes to Heights High, and she already knows who Thomas Malthus is, which is more than I could say when I first saw the show. Watching the corporate masters of the show's “Urine Good Company” raise fees on public amenities the same day our Senate passed their version of Trump’s tax plan was entirely not lost on our audience.

Or maybe that was just me.

Blank Canvas Theatre presents "Urinetown: The Musical" through December 17, 2017.

Sources:
John Cullum: A Real Pisser in "Urinetown: The Musical" by Simi Horwitz, Backstage.com (5/9/2001)
Weekend Edition, NPR (12/1/2001)

On Cold

Devon Turchan is the Emcee in Cabaret (Blank Canvas Theatre)

We work in the city. The spaces we inhabit for our art and our the nourishment of our souls are made of cement and brick and glass, those man-made substances least likely to trap or keep heat. And yet, that is where we go, to occupy empty storefronts where we scheme and build, so close friends and friends we haven’t met yet can huddle against the elements to have our little moments before scattering to our various sectors once again.

Last week the wife and I went to the 78th Street Studios, once the design headquarters of American Greetings, then another largely vacant warehouse in the largely vacant near west side. Today it is a feature of the Battery Park district, an artists’ haven with spaces for galleries and also private functions (I have attended a wedding reception there) the site of several temporary Theater Ninjas installations and currently home to Blank Canvas Theatre.

We were attending a sold out performance of Blank Canvases’ acclaimed production of Cabaret. They had sent an email message to all those who had reservations (God, the things we could have done with email back in the day) warning us that parking would be an issue, as the entire building would be packed with interested shoppers taking the Holiday Bazaar. They recommended we arrive early, as to have time to find a parking space and then leisurely browse the wares of dozens of local artists.

I have seen a couple of shows at Blank Canvas, a tiny space with roughly ninety seats on three sides of the stage. Have you ever seen Cabaret in someplace the size of an actual cabaret? It is a rare treat, I will tell you that. They had a wait list, the best of their shows often do. It doesn’t matter how many seats a theater has, you want it full, people like to know they are part of something special, something in demand.

We (not me, the collective we) used to create these spaces, carving them out of the unhappy emptiness of urban abandonment. A storefront in Tremont with a single light over the door lighting a hand painted sign that read “The Actors’ Gym.” On any given Saturday evening we would wait for five or six the trickle in. Then there was the coffee shop carved out the space between two buildings with a metal roof over it, “The Brick Alley.” They offered folk music and the occasional dramatic offering.

John Coltrane's Christmas Meditation (Moko Bovo)
12 Bands of Christmas Sing, 12/22/1992 (Cleveland Public Theater)

Our new theater company used this space to produce a modern-dress yet otherwise pretty traditional three-hour Hamlet which was surprisingly well received and was also selling out its run, filling each of its ninety seats. People would drive in from their homes in the suburbs, park on St. Clair or 40th Street, see the show and then promptly vacate the area.

Cleveland used to have one major urban entertainment center at a time. Once, you had the Flats. Then it was the Warehouse District when everyone began fleeing the Flats, later East 4th. It was as though the number of people coming downtown weren’t enough to accommodate two neighborhoods at once.

Last week there was a public hearing regarding Cuyahoga Arts and Culture’s decision to eliminate the Creative Workforce Fellowship, and many opinions were expressed regarding how these individual artist grants contributed to the cultural strength and vitality of neighborhoods like Tremont, Ohio City, Gordon Square, Waterloo, Hingetown -- those last three are names that were made up in the past ten years, they used to be called the Detroit Shoreway, Collinwood and, uh, Ohio City (?) as they have each become distinctive downtown neighborhoods where people actually hang out instead of scurrying right back to their homes.

So, we were seeing Cabaret in this tiny space in the middle of a large warehouse. Audience members with beer and popcorn jostling for position in our seats, remaindered from some defunct movie theater, trying to find space for all of our large, poofy coats. It was happening, the dream is real. I was reminded of that strange opportunity we received, almost twenty-five years ago. This guy owned the Union Gospel Press Building and wanted our company to move in. He wanted us to do our work there, we’d be pioneers, the rent would be seriously cheap and we could do whatever we liked.

We also wouldn’t have a lease, because he didn’t believe in those. I can only imagine what it would have been like if we had moved the entire operation, lock and stock, into that space on the edge of Tremont, overlooking the only recently completed Interstate 490.

We would have had off-street parking but no one would have stepped foot into that place just to see us, and even if we were able to turn it into a success we’d be out on our asses the moment the guy decided he didn’t want us there any more. That's not urban homesteading, that's like subletting on the surface of the moon.

Jean-Jacques Sempé (2005)

The other night I began a new project in the service of another writer, we had our first read-through in a former storefront, part of the massive Cleveland Public Theatre complex. The mercury was in the teens, but a fragile pane of glass was keeping us from dense, muscle-deep and piercing cold. We gather together to read a new play script.

This evening my wife and I will welcome folks into our home for the final salon of the calendar year (more on that some time) building a wall against despair and disillusionment, against the cold. It's what we do. It is what we have always done.

One of my very favorite New Yorker covers is by Jean-Jacques Sempé. Published in January, 2005, it features a street in the city, winter, cold, snow falling. The neighborhood is dark except for one street-level club, the lights are on, the band is playing, people are heading in wearing their heavy winter coats.

Outside, it is winter. In there, it’s so hot.