Our Alaskan Honeymoon (1999)

Can you see Denali?

This has been a season of celebration. Since we dropped our youngest at college last fall and became “open nesters” (that’s the hip, new term for it) my wife and I have been spending a lot of time on each other. More time talking, more time lingering. More time viewing, too, movies and TV, as well as plays.

We have taken journeys, to the Southwest, to NYC. And to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, we took a transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, and spent a few nights in London. We took in some shows there (see: Three Very English Plays) and last week held an open house to celebrate with friends.

We took our first cruise, together and as individuals, for our Honeymoon, in July 1999. When deciding what to and where to go she had first suggested the Caribbean. I said sheepishly that I would prefer not to go somewhere tropical. I had been married once before, visiting Hawaii, and I wanted to avoid any possible reminders. It was stupid, I know, but God bless her, she was disappointed for one moment, and then began conducting a web search Alaskan vacations.

The ship was the Holland America MS Ryndam (now the Celestyal Journey) departing from Vancouver, where we spent a day before boarding. At that time in my life I was manic about seeing shows, especially when I was someplace new. And they had to be unusual, not professional. It was all “research” for my work as the producer of the newly formed Bad Epitaph Theater Company.

That first night, we attended a performance of Moo by Sally Clark at the Vancouver Little Theatre in Heritage Hall. Quotes are from my journal: 

“One of those why-is-life-so-fucked plays. A dysfunctional couple, madly in love, and too proud to actually love.”

I was actually more interested in the space, always looking at spaces, because Bad Epitaph didn’t have one.

“Wild, rough space. Cheap. 60 seats on three sides, very low ceiling … canvas floor over wooden plans which creaked throughout the show.”

MS Ryndam

In my last post, I described the time capsule we had created twenty-five years ago, for which we both wrote letters to our future selves. We read the letters we had made for each other, and then those we ourselves had written. I was surprised at just how much anxiety I held at that time, but this is also reflected in my journal. I kept making random notes about the company. I couldn’t stop thinking about the work. For example:

“CAN WE GET A DEEJAY FOR THE SIN BENEFIT?”

Our sea voyage was along the “Inside Passage” with stops at Ketchikan, Juneau, Sitka, Valdez (where I would return in 2016), Seward, before disembarkation in Anchorage. We’d spend one day in that city, before getting on a train, first to Denali, and finally, to Fairbanks.

What can I say about the cruise. My own notes from that time are shocking, but I wasn’t as mellow as I am today. We were appalled, if not surprised, by the countless attempts to get extract additional cash from us, selling us inscribed things we couldn’t use or didn’t need and so many opportunities to pose with characters like the Wacky Fisherman or to Wacky Prospector.

We found many of our fellow passengers on this journey to be rude. And loud. We chose to spend as much as time as possible together on the bow of the ship, watching for whales, otters, seals and icebergs.

After seven days on board a ship where we were among the youngest passengers (yes, even at the age of thirty) we were thrilled to be on our own for a while and the very first thing we did was to pick up a copy of the free Anchorage Press to see what live theater might be available!

Hiking Taku Glacier

At the turn of this century, Anchorage had a population of about a quarter million people. While they did and do have a thriving arts scene, it is not as large as even Greater Cleveland. We chose to see Libby, a one-woman show adapted from Betty John’s book about her grandmother, Libby Beaman, the first European American woman to live on the Aleutian Islands.

Adapted for the stage by David Edgecombe and featuring Elizabeth Ware as Mrs. Beaman, the piece had toured several states before a performance at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference (now the Valdez Theatre Conference) and a month-long stand at Cyrano’s Off-Center Playhouse in Anchorage, which is where we attended. Several years later I would attend Last Frontier, where a large percentage of artists had experience at Cyrano’s, which is still a thriving endeavor.

“Cyrano’s bookstore was very quirky and I wondered what we were getting into when we stepped into the theater.”

Whitewater rafting in Valdez

Again, anxiety. At that time, I felt every performance I attended was some kind of gamble. If it wasn’t a transformative experience, then it was a wasted opportunity. And a two-act solo performance? That's a commitment. As it turned out I was tremendously moved, Ware’s performance stays with me to this day, and even informed my own monodramatic work.

“A very nice selection of local interest books. At one end a small movie theater – that night ('Libby' playwright & director) Edgecombe … was working on his new one-man show, ‘Syd’ in that theater.

“There was also a functioning coffee bar … A business plan … go in with Red Hen, get a space, Toni manages the bookstore, we share space. Starkweather space?”

Still, thinking about the company, the work, about space. Space was such a big deal for me at that time. We knew where we were to produce Sin, and were in talks about The SantaLand Diaries. But my journal indicates that the idea of producing Lysistrata was still only in the theoretical stages and I cannot remember how many different venues we visited to find a suitable location, before entering into a relationship with Cleveland Public Theater.

"Alaska or Bust"

At Cyrano’s, I bought a copy of Anne Higonnet’s biography of Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, and that became my reading for the rest of the trip.

“Any shrinking of the will is a bit of substance lost. How wasteful, then, is hesitation! And only consider how immense the final effort necessary to repair so many losses!” - B. Morisot, February 23, 1862

“Amazing how similar our neuroses can be.” - D. Hansen, July 13, 1999

We, as well as a small number of our fellow former shipmates, departed Anchorage by train, headed for Denali National Park and Preserve.

Denali, as you probably know, is the highest mountain on the North American continent. You need special permission (and equipment, of course) to journey too close, as it is part of a protected wildlife reserve. Tourists can take a multiple hour bus trip to get as close as possible and hopefully take in some incredible views, which we did and were treated to remarkable sights on the drive there and back, and the mountain itself. We were fortunate about that last because most days of the year the peak can be obscured by a variety of weather conditions.

After the day-long journey I was delighted that my bride suggested we attend the Alaskan Cabin Night Dinner Theater! All-you-can-eat salmon, ribs, taters and corn, biscuits and berry cobbler while an ensemble of performers told tales of Gold Rush era Alaska and sang standards.

As I wrote in my journal, “My interests were purely anthropological, trust me.” Following the performance we got into a conversation with some of the performers, I was intensely curious as to how someone gets a job like this one. I was currently unemployed. One of the actors heard we were from Cleveland and excitedly told me he was from Akron, and I had no idea how to respond to that.

At last, onto Fairbanks.

“Thursday night we checked into the hotel and, while everyone else was scurrying around, trying to find their luggage or stretching their legs, we swiftly got a hotel shuttle to take us to a movie theater.”

What we had asked was "how close is the nearest movie theater," and the concierge responded, “You mean the movie theater.” 

Offering the shuttle to get there was a kindness, the Goldstream Theatre was a mile and a half away. The photo of Toni in front of the sign at midnight (right) is a reminder not only of how close we were to the Arctic Circle, but also what an outrageous year 1999 was for movies.

We chose South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. My opinion at the time? “It’s very funny and about a half-hour too long.”

On Social Anxiety

Has anyone ever taken a picture of you, a candid photo, and you realize it is at once the most accurate and the most horrifying picture of you ever taken? A photograph that both captures and destroys your soul? This is that photograph (above) at the Valdez (formerly Last Frontier) Theatre Conference in 2016.

We’re at the Wheelhouse. The place is packed following a performance. I have gotten a beer. And there is nowhere for me to sit. And I do not know who to talk to. Everyone else is engaged in conversation, they look relaxed and content, and there I am. Caught, framed in the near-center of the photo, deer in headlights, unsmiling, lost. I may as well be naked.

This is the most upsetting picture of me that has ever been taken, because I know how small I feel in that moment and I feel everyone else knows it, too. That’s me in the corner. That’s me in the spotlight. 

I want to make it clear that I had a marvelous time in Valdez, received invaluable criticism and playwriting advice, and made friends and colleagues with whom I have kept and stayed in touch with for the nearly six years since.

But on that night I felt awkward, homesick, out of place, and if I hadn’t already bought that beer, I would have ghosted. I was shocked a week or so later to see this moment captured in such vivid detail among the dozens of happy images posted after the conference.

Last weekend, I attended a poetry reading at Superelectric in Gordon Square. I showed up twenty minutes before it was supposed to start, and yet I was the first person to arrive. I sat at the bar, I got a drink, and watched as folks walked in. I didn’t know any of them, except for two professors I recognized and I did eventually speak with them. But again, I felt like a complete outsider. Everyone there seemed to know someone, or at least not be anxious about meeting someone new, and mingling was happening. I had nowhere to go. I felt I had no “in” to any of these conversations.

The reading was good. I left as soon as it was over. One of my professors encouraged me to stay, telling me the party would continue at a bar across the street. I thanked them and begged off. 

I do like being social. Except when I absolutely do not.

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! 

Play a Day: Elephant

Ivan Faute

For Tuesday I read Elephant: A Comedy by Ivan Faute, and available on New Play Exchange. This is another script that was workshopped at Last Frontier last summer, another that I missed. I first had the opportunity to chat with Ivan on the puddle jumper from Valdez to Anchorage on our way out of town, which is often how these things happen.

Elephant is an outrageous condemnation of moneyed East Coast liberals, depicting a world in which it is difficult to discern exactly who is complicit in the destruction of the planet, until you realize it's pretty much everyone, including the (literal) elephant in the room.

White people are insane and they are ruining everything. Not sure there is any argument against that at the moment.

When Elephant was read, I was in the next room over, enjoying a delightful, period piece for children. Uproarious laughter could be clearly heard through the thin, conference center walls, and I had that familiar feeling I have at parties where I am having an intense one-on-one conversation with a good friend who is telling me a personal story that is extremely important to them, and over in the corner the cool kids are laughing their asses off about something and I try really hard to concentrate on my friend but I can't help but wish I were over there with the cool kids.

Play a Day: Greyout

Whitney Rowland

This morning I read Greyout, a one-act by Whitney Rowland. We met in Valdez last summer, and though she made time to attended and comment upon my play I was unable to attend her reading of this play because I was in rehearsal for another reading, which was disappointing. Reading this work feels like I have taken care of some unfinished business.

A twenty-page excerpt is available at New Play Exchange.

May I ask once and for all what the hell "one-act" means? The title page said one-act and I was relieved to see that, based on the number of pages this play is indeed one act long. But theater companies around the country insist on advertising one-act festivals that are, in fact, festivals of ten-minute plays. Ten minutes is not an act.

Deep breath. Okay.

What are the consequences of bad memory, of bad wisdom, and how best to present them on stage. Going into dark places for writing is very challenging for me, because I am not sure what I will find there. Maybe I am worried I will find myself.

Unbearable horror and sorrow, leavened with seriously dark humor, just this side of guignol. Would like to have heard the comments after her reading, I would like to ask her about that.

Top Ten Events of 2016

Obligatory "Hamilton" sidewalk selfie.

There are those who have suggested that 2016 is the worst year in recent memory. They are generally referring to the deaths of numerous pop culture figures from the 1980s and the election of Donald J. Trump.

My father died this year. In fact, two of my great friends from my youth, their fathers also died this year. Everything else can go hang, it has been a year of personal mourning, it’s all subjective, ask the children in Aleppo how this year has gone. Kind of puts the death of the inventor of the Red Solo Cup in perspective.

Every year sucks. Every year is amazing. Here is my entirely subjective top ten list (in chronological order) of the most amazingly awesome things that happened to me this year, and only a few of the incredible people with whom they happened.

1. I Hate This (a play without the baby): This one-night-only, 15th anniversary performance, directed by Chennelle Bryant-Harris, was an eye-opening rediscovery of a work I thought I knew, and I got to share it with a wonderful audience.
2. Cleveland Marathon: Chris Fornadel and I survived the CLE Half Marathon through an absurd, freak mid-May snowstorm. Could not have done that without this hilarious running partner, but that was crazy.
3. Last Frontier Theater Conference: Playwright Kevin Armento was an inspiring and encouraging lead panelist for my new script. Also glad I got to see a performance of his Good Men Wanted at the conference, his personal philosophy of writing is one I can get behind.
4. Cavs Victory Parade.

   

   The Chosen One.

5. Twelfth Night (As Told By Malvolio): Celebrating the First Folio in Cleveland, I adapted and directed a 45-minute version of Twelfth Night with some of my very favorite young actors, which we toured to Cleveland public libraries around the city.
6. Saw fucking Hamilton.
7. Cleveland Playwrights Festival: Playwrights Local presented a script-in-hand workshop of my new work, The Way I Danced With You, directed by Melissa T. Crum, who, with Chennelle, has been instrumental in my development of this script. Response was very positive and the entire weekend of events was an instructive experience.
8. Tony Kushner & Sarah Vowell: This Think Forum event, ostensibly an open discussion about the life of Abraham Lincoln, the evening was a bleak, hilarious and ultimately reassuring post-election balm.
9. Reception: My wife and I began holding a salon of arts and ideas at our home late in the year, and we seem to have discovered a wonderful coven of brilliant hopeful minds.
10. 28th Annual Great Lakes Theater A Christmas Carol Writing Contest: Always a delight and an honor to help shepherd this contest for Cleveland middle school students, this year’s winners all felt particularly poignant, their interpretation by performers from GLT's production A Christmas Carol delightful. Have you listened to the broadcast yet?

He judges my blogging.

This list only mentions a few people and barely scratches the surface of the productions, festivals, parties, personal moments, journeys, concerts, school, neighborhood and campaign events, and all the details which make up a year well-spent.

There was so much pain in 2016, from the very first day (when I have have to admit I was terribly hungover) to this day. Well, not today, actually, today has been pretty calm and relaxing. 

I hope you have also been blessed with good times this past year, walking between the raindrops (as they say) and wish you great and wonderful things in 2017.

The Star (Dare To Dream)

The Star (Dare To Dream)

When I was in high school we formed an improv comedy troupe called The Sausage Works. As a burgeoning impresario I was fairly decent at booking gigs and even creating swag, like buttons. We even got airtime on a public access show, a program of which, not coincidentally, I was a co-producer.

What I spent much less time on was developing our craft, rehearsal, or being in any way amusing. Ours was a terrible improv comedy troupe. Good name, terrible improv. Should have put that on a shirt.

In college I was a member of the improv comedy troupe, Rupture, and by that time I had taken some classes and had at the very least the benefit of experience. (More on that here.) One of our crew suggested a wide variety of theater games we could play that would make for good comedy, including Party Quirks, Radio Dial and Singing The Blues.

Once during winter break in late 1988, this same friend suggested we all see the preeminent Cleveland troupe Giant Portions, which at that time included such notable performers as Lisa Lewis, Jeff Blanchard and Marc Moritz.

We all had a fun time, but I was taken aback and a little disappointed to discover that every single theater game we employed in our performance were from Giant Portions’ act. All of this original work I thought we were doing, and we were just copying off another company.

Now, I know that good improvisation is not about the structure you use but how you work with it. All games are merely tools to facilitate spontaneous, honest discovery and emotional reaction.

Having said that, there is nothing spontaneous after thirty years of Party Quirks. I saw Cabaret Dada three times, almost five years apart each time, and though the faces had changed, each time they played Party Quirks and I gotta tell ya, Tourette’s Syndrome wasn’t actually funny the first time.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy improvisation, and improv comedy, and have actively sought out long-form improv, when it is available. No one has made a run at it in Cleveland since Dobama’s Night Kitchen.

In my own way, I militantly keep working to push young people into the form at our annual summer theater camp. My journey to Alaska meant missing the second week of our annual Camp Theater (for which I am extremely grateful to my employer) but two weeks ago I had the opportunity to lead a team of middle and high schoolers through a series of basic storytelling exercises, the goal being to be able to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end using monologue, two person scenes and a conclusion incorporating an entire team of four.

This year it was much more like a competition, as each of four teams watched each other work and one was declared “winner” by acclamation. They also squared off performing “Jump” improv (competing to see how many different scenarios could they begin within two minutes) and then volunteers played First Line, Last Line with surprising success. It was a very focused group this year, they took the work very seriously. We created our little nightclub, this time called The Star (Dare To Dream) and had a great morning, just performing improv for each other before moving onto the Shakespearean splash scenes for their families that afternoon.

The Star (Dare To Dream). That was the name they chose for their nightclub. One suggested we call it The Star, another added, "No, no -- call it The Star ... dare to dream!"  That's the crew we had this year. They were awesome.

Scared Scriptless: Weekend at Bernie's Sketch

Last Wednesday at Last Frontier, there was a party following Valerie’s performance, and so no Fringe performance was scheduled to take place in the Mariner’s Room. Instead, three guys from the Anchorage improv troupe Scared Scriptless -- John, Warren and Will -- staged an impromptu show, and many went along to see that.

We only caught the last twenty minutes or so, but I really enjoyed the style of sketch they were employing. The physical Weekend at Bernie’s scenario notwithstanding (though that is certainly hysterical the first time you see it) most of the work was cerebral, much of it steeped in argument and counter-argument and the kind of insult humor which works best among aggressively competitive friends.

These were very different games to me, just stepping out to interrupt each other (what we called Give & Take in The Realistic World) to riff on a subject offered by the audience. Objection is a game I will certainly be stealing for use in the future. I had the chance to walk and talk with John my last night in town and he said it’s rare for Scared Scriptless to perform with a skeleton troupe of three.

My fictional improv comedy team The Times (from This Is The Times) is also a three-person company, and I have dithered about whether to rewrite the entire thing with additional company members, but there is a magic in three, especially when you are trying to keep your story neat and compact. Watching three guys ping back and forth like that was particularly inspiring.

One of the things which is most challenging in coaching teenagers to improv is encouraging them to trust their brains, to speak without fear, and most of all to trust each other. We are conditioned from birth basically to be assholes. Every tweener program on the Disney Channel conditions our kids to point and laugh at others, to mock and dismiss. This is not unique to that network, but when my daughter began to watch their programs she immediately began to model the behavior.

The family mutually agreed she had to stop watching Jessie if she wanted to remain a good person.

Yes, we have the opportunity to play fools on stage, but the players need to be there for each other for it all to work. This year the program at The Star (Dare To Dream) included a great many scenarios where people were helping each other to achieve some bizarre goal, and those scenes worked best. It was the scenarios where campers couldn’t separate their personal feelings from the characters they were playing, and engaged in direct conflict that the scenes fell apart.

Our improv guru at Ohio University was the head of the Masters in Directing program, George Sherman. He had been a member of The Compass in St. Louis. You could count on him to attend every single Bobcats basketball game, the man was fanatic about basketball. Because basketball is the sport most aligned with the skills necessary for improvisation.

Come get your Love.

He put it this way; football is like rehearsing a play. You get to experiment and play around in practice, developing a rigid set of scenes or plays which you then perform pretty much the way you rehearsed them on game day. In basketball the practice is drilling the structure of the game in rehearsal, but on the day you trust your instincts and your teammates and anything goes. That’s improv.

Big parade today downtown for the greatest improv troupe in America. #AllIn216 #GoCAVS

Looking forward.

Challenging to conceive that in just a few days I will be in Valdez. I am an easy traveler, I know how to pack simply, wisely. A week long journey with plans to visit the laundry exactly once. First, a day long flight to Anchorage.

Yes, I will have my phone, an iPod, the laptop, and also my notepad and pen, and a novel. That’s something I need to find, I am currently without one. Generally I prefer non-fiction, but not on journeys. What to read? Suggestions welcome.

The program for this year’s Last Frontier Theatre Conference is available online. I have perused the workshops and seminars that are being offered, and the evening performances. Valerie Hager will be presenting her solo work, Naked In Alaska, which was a must-see production at the New York Fringe in 2013, which was also the year we produced Double Heart at the Connelly.

However, I could not get a seat, because performances kept selling out … but now I can! I am reminded of when Weeping Spoon brought Alvin Sputnik to the International Children’s Theatre Festival. That was another sold-out hit at the NY Fringe (2009) that I was provided another opportunity to catch.

This morning the wife and I were looking over the agenda, on any given day there are two or three Play Labs to attend, and seminars are divided between performance- and writing-based concentrations. It’s interesting; several deal with genre I have attempted before (Personal History Writing or From Newspaper to Stage) but never received any instruction in. I am very interested in receiving such instruction.

The program was also how I learned who will be my acting company for the new work I wrote. Taking place over two time periods, ten years apart, I was hoping for actors who could realistically play both 18 and 28 years of age. With no idea what kind of acting pool might be available in the “last frontier” imagine my delight and surprise when I found the producers had contracted two experienced performers in their mid-20s.

I have had a few reading with colleagues. This will be a first with artists whose work I don't know -- and who don't know me from anybody.

This new work, which I have formerly referred to as The George Michael Play, is a romantic, ninety-minute two-hander, or I hope it will eventually be ninety minutes, at the moment I have no idea. It is ninety pages, which may or may not amount to a minute per page. Regardless, after many adaptations, histories, sequels and parodies, this is the first truly original work I have composed in some time. It's new to me, it's different. And it's very exciting.

In addition, playwrights in the Play Lab were invited to submit 10 minute plays and also monologues for a series of workshops which will culminate in performances at the end of the conference. I took advantage of each of those and was very pleased to not only have an original monologue accepted, but that an actor has already chosen it as their subject for their workshops. If they stick with it, I may even see that performed just a few hours before I board my flight for home.

You may read this monologue here.

I Hate This: Fifteen Years On

Don't you think I'm looking older?

As the new year began, I was struck by all the unique milestones, personal and public, that lay in our way in 2016. My daughter was to become a teenager. Shakespeare’s First Folio would be visiting Cleveland (and all those Republicans.) We would elect a new president.

I was also aware that our first child, stillborn in 2001, would turn fifteen. On the tenth anniversary of the events described in my solo performance, I Hate This, that play and a companion piece were produced at Cleveland Public Theatre. It was rewarding to expand upon the play in that way, and have the opportunity to widen the scope of what stories I could tell in a single evening.

For this birthday, however, I wanted to reconnect with I Hate This on its own. But how best to proceed? I considered intimate, private performances, maybe even hosted in my own house, or someone else’s house. Maybe a string of them, a series of appearances for an audience of ten at a time. Perhaps one day I will still attempt that.

I was actually about the abandon the idea. We were putting together The Secret Adversary tour, and soon I would need to begin rehearsals for a forty-minute abridgment of Twelfth Night we will be presenting as part of the First Folio proceedings. It just wasn’t the right time, you know? You can always tell yourself it isn’t the right time.

Then two things happened. First, my father died, and life itself took on a startling new dimension for me. Preparing a memorial service, physical contact with a deceased and beloved family member, making decisions you never imagined you would be called upon to make ... so much that had been buried into the past returned to the surface.

And shortly following that, I was accepted into the Last Frontier Theatre Conference, which I greatly wished to attend, but scarcely had the money to pay for. It made perfect sense to accomplish two goals at once, raise funds in exchange for which I would offer an entirely relevant premium -- my work. I would remount this play, with purposeful intent.

We have put together a production team, with Josh Brown adapting the multimedia he created for the CPT production (2011) and we will be including Dennis Yurich’s original score from 2003, which is now appropriately period.

Most significantly, I have asked Chennelle Bryant-Harris to re-stage the work. She has worked three seasons as an actor-teacher in the residency program, and we collaborated as co-directors for the Love In Pieces project two years ago. She is a talented, young director who will bring a fresh perspective to the work. Significantly, I suggest, for at least one important reason - unlike my previous collaborators, she wasn’t there. She did not know me then. Her experience is based entirely by what I set on the page, and so my words have to do much more work.

During the past two years I have watched with fascination as two other men have taken on the role, John Dayton and Brian Cook. Their interpretations gave me an opportunity to think of the text in new ways, have liberated me from thinking there was one way to perform this show. It’s my show, to be sure, but I was locked into a delivery, a certain cadence and choreography, which was established almost from the first reading in August, 2002.

When I polled friends on Facebook as to whether anyone would care to see either this play or And Then You Die (How I Ran a Marathon in 26.2 Years) again, Brian P. commented, “I'd be more interested to see how time and the vicissitudes of life has affected your approach to (I Hate This).”

So would I, Brian. So would I.

Click here to visit my GoFundMe page and make a donation and reserve your seat to see "I Hate This" on May 7!

Last Frontier Theatre Conference

Because in those days I had a yearning to go to Alaska.
- Willy Loman, "Death of a Salesman"

Founded in 1993, the Last Frontier Theatre Conference, presented in partnership with Prince William Sound College, is a weeklong event which features performances, staged readings and workshops, providing emerging playwrights the opportunity to receive valuable feedback from professional and often prestigious playwrights, directors, producers, academics and critics.

In Valdez, Alaska. The LFTC takes place in Valdez, Alaska, in June. And I’m going.

Notable playwrights who have been honored or have attended have included many whose last names alone are recognizable, like Miller, Albee, Kushner, and Wilson (both.)

Me, I wrote something I had been thinking about for years, it spilled out maybe two years ago, I have had a couple of readings and wanted to try it out. Among several of its offerings, LFTC has a “Play Lab” in which you will have one rehearsal and then a staged reading which will be attended by a trio of special guests who will comment on your work. I chose to submit my new play to LFTC in August 2015, and almost immediately received an email from director Dawson Moore. Not an acceptance email, but one he no doubt sends to every applicant who does not live in the great Northwest.

The gist was, “Really?” As in, so you've applied to our theater conference via email. Did you notice that we are in Alaska?

My response was not as ridiculous as it seems. “Hey man, I’ve been to Alaska.” I’ve even been to Valdez, though admittedly, it was part of a cruise the wife and I took for our Honeymoon in 1999. But I can fathom the vast distances, the miles, the expense. Yeah, if accepted, sure.

See? I been to Valdez.

Last month, shortly after my father died (I mean, just ten days after my father died) I got the message. “Congratulations, David.” It read. “Your play The Way I Danced With You has been accepted for inclusion in the Play Lab at the 24th Annual Last Frontier Theatre Conference.

“I hope you will be able to join us.”

Indeed. I hoped so, too.

It took a little time. Summer is busy, but work and family have been extremely supportive, and I am definitely going. The folks on the Facebook page have been very helpful and informative. I can expect a bit of roughing it - not exactly camping, but I may be lying on the floor of a college dorm in a sleeping bag in a room with at least two other people. Theater people.

I will also be attending others’ readings, produced productions, workshop and seminars, dinners with complete strangers, perhaps a glacier cruise (included!) and generally hobnobbing with a gang of writers and other theater people, none of whom I have ever met before in my life. It's thrilling, It's intimidating.

First things first, this will take some cash and I intend to do a bit of fundraising. However, to that end I am working to provide a very special premium - a performance of I Hate This.

It was my intention to perform the show again this year, as the events in question occurred fifteen years ago. I haven’t presented I Hate This in five years, but have been inspired by subsequent productions by others in Manchester and Oneonta. After father died, it suddenly seemed even more important. Then I got the call, and now it also seems practical.

Here’s the thing. Soon I will create crowdsourced fundraiser. There will be one premium; a ticket to the show, which will occur in early May. Details to come. I hope I see you there.