Ten Good Moments in 2025

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

1. Josh Johnson

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

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

2. Greater Cleveland Food Bank

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

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

3. Big Band and Combos

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

4. Zelda’s Commencement

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

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

5. Dinner at Mina

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

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

6. Diwali

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

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

7. “I Hate This” in India

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

8. Superman Walking Tour

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

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

I should do this as a side gig.

9. No Kings Protests

Hey, you know what? Fuck that guy.

10. Cleveland Turkey Trot

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

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

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

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

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

Best wishes and a happy 2026 to you and yours.

My Life in the Theater (Part I)

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.

To be continued.

The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1988)

Folks need to stop auditioning with the tuna fish monologue from Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild (1987). It’s a go-to comedic monologue for people who need a funny and check a list of “ten best comedic monologues for women” or something, I don’t know where they get it. People born in 2001 can’t possibly have ever seen this show. Anyway, the "Child of Prague" monologue is right there and I’ve never seen anyone try that.

When I was a sophomore at the Ohio University’s School of Theater, I played the role of Father Donnally in an undergraduate production of Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo. I recently came across my script, upon which I had drawn a faithful self-portrait (see right) as the character Father Donnally.

For the run at the Public Theatre in 1985, the role of Father Donnally was originated by Richard B. Shull who is best-remembered by my generation for performing as the judge in Billy Joel's "Keeping the Faith" music video. The role of Paul was performed by another Ohio University School of Theater grad, J. Bill McCutcheon who played Uncle Wally on Sesame Street fame and also Dropo in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

There was much about this play that I did not understand as a nineteen year-old undergrad. Alcoholism for one, child loss for another. A thinly veiled roman a clef about his own family (the playwright played the protagonist in the original production) Bette is a woman who desperately wants lots of children, but only her first survives. Bette and her husband “Boo” have the Rh factor, which was why my own grandparents’ children all died, in utero or shortly after birth.

Self (Father Donnally) with Katurah Nelson (Bette)
"The Marriage of Bette & Boo"
Ohio University School of Theatre (1988)

We say quite simply that a couple “can’t have children” but what we’re really saying is that they tried, probably several times, with heartbreaking results. After two miscarriages and a stillbirth, my grandparents adopted my father.

Father Donnally is a figure of patriarchal uselessness. He and a doctor are supposed to be played by the same actor, the only character who is not a member of Bette and Boo's family. A different actor played the doctor in this production.  

In the play Bette and Boo, every time another child is expected the doctor arrives with a swaddled bundle, drops it on the floor and announces dispassionately, “It’s dead, the baby’s dead.” In the Forum Theatre at O.U., the doctor dropped the baby from the lighting grid over the stage. On opening night, each announcement got bigger and bigger laughs from the packed house of supportive theater students.

The second weekend of performances was Parents’ Weekend, and that Saturday night there was absolute silence or uncomfortable moans whenever we made a dead baby joke. I asked our director, Dr. Condee, why all our parents didn’t laugh. 

He said quite simply, “Maybe they don’t think stillbirth is funny.”

Assessment

I’ve been high and I’ve been low,
And I don’t know where to go.
- The Godfathers, “Birth, School, Work, Death”

This used to be my plaground.

Late August is a time of stasis. It’s all about to happen, but nothing’s happening. We’re still in a pandemic, but we’re behaving as though we aren’t. Sure, we’re vaccinated. Went a few weeks not masked, the change for us came during our trip to Maine this year. Drove up not wearing them, came back wearing them.

That was almost a month ago.

Drove the eldest to school last weekend, a transition made all the more surreal by a two days blackout just prior to our departure. Fortunately, they are always well-prepared and had had most of their packing done before the power went out. Imagine last minute preparation in the hot and dark.

But where am I? Where are we now? As they are attending Ohio University, my alma mater, I have had nostalgic memories rattling around my head, not all good ones. Mostly not good ones. Also, shocked to discover they’re tearing down all the dorms on (old) New South Green. Just as well, I guess. It’s like a graveyard to me.

Anyway, I was thinking of the aforequoted song by the Godfathers, their only single, really. It slaps (as the kids say) but the lyrics are terrible.

Less writing. More reading.

BIRTH

I have not been writing. Like, not at all. For six hundred days I wrote every single morning, and then I stopped. It’s like it never happened. I am not down on myself about this, but it is a lesson, for anyone about anything. You can maintain a process. And the process continues as long as you maintain it. You can resume when you are ready, you are also welcome to stop. No one judges you, and it is best not to judge yourself.

It has been a summer for other things.

SCHOOL

I have found it necessary to adjust my status as a student, which is disappointing. I won’t be taking a full course load this semester, only two classes, both in playwriting. This is good, in so much as that is my major, but I was hoping to continue expanding my literary knowledge and experience.

The workshop starts tomorrow night. An in-person class! It has all been on Zoom since I began last fall. We are expected to create entirely new work. I was planning to take this as an opportunity to develop a previous manuscript, but I am going to meet the challenge with positivity because that is why I am here. To do something new.

Last week's joke.

The fact that I have no idea where to start is daunting, but that’s hardly unusual.

WORK

March 2020 broke with all that was normal as all in-person events, of any kind, were abruptly canceled and after a brief respite we tried to figure out what we were going to do in the interregnum. This time last year we were in the planning stages to create interactive, asynchronous videos to market to schools in place of the residency program.

Next week a new slate of actor-teachers will come together as we last did two years ago, as I first did twenty years ago, to learn lesson plans to bring into schools across northeast Ohio. But we will take precautions. Masks and sanitizer. Open windows. And figure out how to stage scene work without contact.

We know things aren’t normal. We aren’t pretending that they are. We are trying to move forward and do our work without getting sick.

Please don't kill me.

DEATH

I have developed what I find an unhealthy preoccupation with death. I started when mother started ailing, it passed for a while after she passed but it hasn’t entirely gone away. I have become much more attentive to every aspect of my health, getting regular physicals, and trying to eat better and to exercise. It’s all you can possibly do, what is in your control.

I choose to run, while I can still run. I still keep a running blog, I have logged every single run I have taken for fifteen years. The wife says I need more upper body work, and she’s right. But just stepping out into the world is a blessing, that I can still do this. Who knows how much longer I can run. Twenty years? Ten? Five?

On Friday I was feeling low, and motivated myself to take a late afternoon run. And it was a good decision. It was hot, yes, and humid. But that doesn’t bother me, I like it. I ran through the city, stopping at every intersection, giving berth to the pedestrians walking to and from the Greek Festival on Mayfield

A block from my house I spotted a car coming slowly to a stop at an intersection and I waved as I began to run into the street. But they hadn’t seen me, they just rolled to a soft stop and sped up again, missing me by a couple feet.

I wonder how I will die. It may be a long time from now. It might be tonight.

Balm In Gilead (1989)

"Balm In Gilead" by Lanford Wilson, directed by Dennis L. Dalen
(Ohio University School of Theatre, 1989)

Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
- Jeremiah 8:22

“‘Disintegration’ is the best album ever!”
- Kyle Broflovski, South Park

Nineteen Eighty-Nine was the greatest year in musical history. This is a point of some debate, but I know it to be true. Psychologists have explained that each individual believes the music released in one’s twenty-first year will generally be regarded as superior to all others.

But come on, Paul’s Boutique, Three Feet High and Rising, Deep, Pretty Hate Machine, I could go on. Disintegration is indeed the best album ever, and well describes my own psyche at the end of my third year in college, when it was released.

I had gone from second-year golden boy to third-year pariah, and started my fourth-year in perhaps the most mentally correct place I have ever found myself. I learned that I need to get my professional shit together and was ready to just bear down and work until graduation.*

The undergraduate production that fall was Balm In Gilead by Lanford Wilson, a production which opened thirty years ago tonight. An ideal play if you want to cast as many people as possible, Wilson’s work is a hipster fantasia taking place in and around a twenty-hour diner frequented by the addicted, sex workers, and also thieves, hustlers, and criminals.

Joe (Peter Voinovich) and Darlene (Susan Hobrath)

All my best friends, my contemporaries, were in this production (except Jules, who was across the alley, performing in Hurlyburly) and we all underwent a deep, focused investigation of the world of heroin users, expending the kind of time on research that was so plentiful at school, even if we were unaware of it.

We had scheduled a meeting with a therapist at the campus addiction recovery center. I knew absolutely nothing about heroin, save for having watched Sid & Nancy. What I learned became quite valuable, as I will soon point out.

We did not need to study the time period, because director Denny Dalen did not set it in any specific time period, or to be more accurate, we were each from different eras, as though we were walking through some kind of purgatory.

Larry was a 70s street hustler, with picked out Afro, Pete a Miami Vice styled wannabe kingpin in a blazer and T-shirt. Ricky in all-white disco attire, Susan a 60s flower-child, Lisa a hard-boiled 1950s waitress with small apron and snood.

Me, I was the narrator, an addict named Dopey in a mid-80s Deep Purple T-shirt and a high school varsity jacket. My long hair ratted out and my first real beard, I have deeply warm feelings about this costume. Much love to designer Tavia DeFelice.

The script is very challenging to read, as several conversations can be happening at once. You had to say your line in the order it appears on the page, but you might be responding to something someone said three lines back. But the more we did it, the more we heard it, and the more it became like a kind of word jazz.

I remember the week leading up to opening was particularly tough. Denny had something for everyone, and more for some than others. The underclassmen were a pain, as they debated every observation Denny had for them, responding with some explanation for how the way they were doing it made sense.

There's a saying. "Take the note." Don't argue with me. Do it.

One night, before we started in with notes, someone speculated on how long notes were going to go, and how wearying it all was.

Self as Dopey

“Not for David,” said one of the second-years. giving me the side-eye. “He never gets any notes.”

I was a little too quick to respond. “No, I don't. But if I did I’d be sure to pitch a fit about them.”

It got better. Denny was not happy with the penultimate dress, and everyone knew it.

He said, “David is the only person on this stage who knows where he’s coming from and where he’s going to,” or words to that effect.

I don't usually remember compliments, but I remember that. A couple years ago, when posting about Greg Vovos' play, How To Be a Respectable Junkie, I recounted my experience in preparing for this play, and how close study of the text and an understanding of the effects of heroin made it possible for me to pick apart the threads of conversation and develop a clear map of (as the man said) where I was coming from. Where I was headed to.

Check out the post, the playwright makes it all crystal clear.

So yeah, I was proud of myself, for being the professional, for embodying a whole character and being confident about it. It has been a very long time since I have had the opportunity to dive so deeply into a character.

But the whole production was like that, it was practically immersive. Balm was staged in the Forum, a deeply thrust stage. The set (Daniel N. Denhart, designer) inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the non-present walls of the diner clearly defined by light (James A. Gage, designer) all organey warm inside, and bluishly cold out.

The script is a symphony of despair, one that repeats night after night, as we lounged about the set, crouching in corners, shivering, when we weren’t on. Smoking live cigarettes. Spitting.

DOPEY: (turns to face the audience) Are you getting any of this?

And who knows. Maybe I could have been an actor.

"Balm In Gilead" by Lanford Wilson and directed by Dennis L. Dalen, at the Forum Theater at Ohio University, November 3 - 11, 1989.

*Side Note: Fall Quarter 1989 I had roles in three productions, the mainstage and two fourth year studio plays, whereas all other fourth years were in only two. In addition to Dopey I also played the Fire Chief in Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano" and in Tennessee Williams' "The Gnädiges Fräulein," the Cockalooney Bird.

Cloud 9 (1986)

"Cloud 9" by Caryl Churchill
Directed by Deborah Nitzberg
Set Design by Fred Duer
(Ohio University School of Theater, 1986)

Recently, my wife noticed that I sometimes do not include my role as Artistic Director of Bad Epitaph Theater Company in my biography. Bad Epitaph operated (more or less) from 1999 until 2004. We had many great artistic triumphs, and a few failures. I feel my work as titular head of the company to be its Achilles' heel, and am therefore loathe to cite that responsibility as a credit.

Take for example our production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 in the year 2000. A fine production, from an artistic standpoint; the direction, performers, all elements of design including original music and sound. Exactly the attention to detail we had been striving for in the eighteen months we had been working together as a team.

And audiences stayed away and we lost all the profits we had raked in from our acclaimed production Lysistrata. What happened?

To answer that question, I need to go back to my first semester at college.

For every theater artist there’s that show you saw that changed everything, that made you realize the full potential of what theater could be, and why it is an art form unique from all others. For me, that was Cloud 9.

First produced at the Royal Court in 1979, with a Broadway run in 1981 at the Theatre de Lys, (now the Lucille Lortel) Churchill’s work was part of the 1986-87 Season at the Ohio University School of Theatre. It was produced in repertory with Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.

Now get this: I was a freshman. I had decided to pursue a degree in acting. As a child my parents had taken me to plays and to musicals, which each seemed very different to me. I liked musicals and found a lot of plays to be boring. Not necessarily unenjoyable, just not exiting. And yet I wanted to perform in them.

Today I love watching plays, and do not find performing in them to be enjoyable. We change.

Of course, my knowledge of what a play is was quite limited. So many of the works I had seen at local theaters or performed in at high school were not new. You Can’t Take It With You. Blithe Spirit. The Importance of Being Earnest. The works of Shakespeare. To my mind, that was the majority of work an actor would do, the canon.

From left: Matthew Glave, Kevin McCarty, Alana Beth Lipp
Costume Design by William Anderson

All incoming freshman were required to take Introduction to Theatre Criticism, led at that time by the legendary Al Kaufman. A very important course, especially for a callow youth like myself, we learned the language of artistic evaluation. You like it (or you don’t) but can you articulate why?

We were told to read Cat On a Hot Tin Roof before attending the performance, but not to read Cloud 9. How does reading a play beforehand color your reception of the work? How does coming to the work without expectations?

Like a lot of my classmates, we were disheartened by this production of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. It wasn’t very good. Some performances were downright awful. Was that all right? Could we say that? Al assured us that we could.

I became concerned about the next four years. Is that what this school has to offer?

Then I saw Cloud 9. And my head burst open.

In brief, this play is a satire on British colonialism and mores and how the past is never past. Churchill plays with form, setting the first act in 1880s in Africa, and the second act in 1979 in London … but to the characters, members of one British family and those in their community, it has only been twenty-five years.

This gap in time is not explained. It just is, and no one questions it.

It begins as some kind of British farce, the gender reversals (mother played by a man, the young son played by a woman) easily dismissed as a kind of funny panto. That is, until the highly-anticipated arrival of a famous explorer breaks the thin veneer of gentility. He attempts to seduce the mother, then the son, and finally gains his satisfaction with the African servant Joshua.

“Shall we go into the barn and fuck?” asks the explorer, and they bound off, hand-in-hand. It was hilarious, and shocking, and a release. And my idea of what theater could be changed forever.

I was stunned by the play’s frank use of language, and how it addresses issues of homosexuality, feminism, domestic abuse, drag, pedophilia, incest. But the play also created in me a deep sense of longing, desire, and disappointment. If the first act was arch comedy, the second act was more troubling, as the now-adult children, freed from Victorian restrictions, struggle to understand who they are.

What did it all mean? I did not have the words, the experience to express the feelings this production aroused in me. It was 1986. I was just eighteen years old.

From left: Kevin McCarty, Cynthia Collins
Alana Beth Lipp, Joseph Hulser

In the middle of the second act, the company breaks the fourth wall to sing to the audience, a song called "Cloud 9." In this production, the lyrics were in acapella harmony, like a street corner, doo-wop melody.

The wife lover’s children
And my lover’s wife
Cooking in my kitchen
Confusing my life
And it’s upside down when you reach Cloud Nine.

It was a sexy-sassy rendition, and I was jealous. I wanted to be them. The actors, I mean, I wanted to be performing in a show like that.

More troubling to me now are the many difficult turns my personal life was about to take and I wonder if I missed the lesson of the story, that liberation does not necessarily make us happy.

In the New York Times, Frank Rich called Cloud 9 “sentimental agitprop,” and while he didn’t mean that kindly, I wish I had had those words to include in my essay for Dr. Kaufman. As a playwright, I have become a champion of sentimental agitprop. It's what I do.

Moving ahead twelve years, I developed a desire to direct a production of Hamlet with all those artists I had met and grown close to during the previous several years. And maybe someday I will write about that production.

In brief, it was a success. We decided to produce a new play, Sin by Wendy MacLeod, and also the first Cleveland production of The Santaland Diaries, both successes. Finally, in spring 2000 we produced Lysistrata, which was a huge success.

I was happy to skip from production to production under the banner of Bad Epitaph, after Hamlet’s warning not to offend actors; “After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.” It was a moniker which invited abuse and I was all for it.

From left: Raeleen McMillion, Cynthia Collins
Kevin McCarty, Alana Beth Lipp

We were compelled to create a season. I say “we” because I am almost sure I would rather not have done so, better to just produce a play when there’s a play you want to produce. It had worked so far. But suddenly we were in competition — or perceived that we were — by another upstart company, Charenton Theater Company, a name even more pretentious than our own.

Charenton’s first few offerings were mid-to-mid-late twentieth century classics like Waiting for Godot and American Buffalo. Works that say, “I haven’t read a play since college.”

And what did I do? I chose to kick off Bad Epitaph’s first full season with the most memorable play I had seen in college, Cloud 9.

To be continued.

Photos courtesy of Alana Byington

Source: Sexual Confusion On ‘Cloud 9’ by Frank Rich, The New York Times, 5/20/1981

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: How To Be a Respectable Junkie

How To Be a Respectable Junkie
(Dobama Theatre)

Last summer, local playwright Greg Vovos made a national splash when the New York Times wrote a piece on how the theater community in Ohio was reflecting the opioid crisis on stage. His new play, How To Be a Respectable Junkie premiered at Dobama Theatre last June, receiving The Plain Dealer called it, "raw, eloquent and moving."

A monodrama performed by Chris Bohan, a professor at CWRU and an old friend, Vovos based the piece on interviews with a man struggling with heroin addiction. "Before you solve a problem," Vovos told the Times, "you have to wrap your mind around it."

Tonight my wife and I caught the show at a one night only performance at the Parma-Snow Branch of the Cuyahoga Public Library. They have a four hundred seat auditorium and they filled the place. It is clear there is great interest in the subject, and in this performance.

One of my mentors said theater is a shallow education in everything. The "undergrad" show my fourth year was Lanford Wilson's Balm In Gilead. As part of our preparation we visited a halfway house and I was made aware of the use and effects of heroin.

The character I was playing was Dopey, who is addicted to heroin. If you are unfamiliar with Balm In Gilead, it's not easy to read. It takes place in and around a twenty-four hour diner around the year 1960. All the conversations overlap so you have to pay attention to exactly who is speaking to whom and what is happening.

Balm In Gilead
(Ohio University)

Dopey enters from outside and sits at the counter. He orders a coffee. The server says he's just going to fall asleep and Dopey is mildly belligerent. He doesn't say another thing for four pages, then suddenly he has "awakened" and announces he has to get outside. He is asked to pay for his coffee but departs with urgency.

Two pages later, he delivers a two-page monologue.

The details are not in the stage directions or anywhere else in the script. But what I had learned about heroin filled in the details. He'd shot up outside before entering the scene. In an effort to stay awake, he'd ordered coffee, and promptly fell asleep. Waking up, he needed to vomit. After that, he would feel more or less normal for a while, until the urge to take more of the drug. Trust the playwright.

Solo performances can be a tricky thing, I speak from experience. You are alone on stage, so who are you speaking to? And why? The audience? Yourself? Vovos has the character of Brian creating an improvised "how to" video and this suits the material very well, providing context and structure. It is memoir, lecture, and dramatic interpretation of the living nightmare that is addiction. The lies, the crimes, the pain. There's a lot going on here in 80 minutes.

Bohan is an ideal partner in this work, a guy I know to have boundless compassion who is also a brilliant performer, intelligent and with impeccable comic timing. It's an outstanding performance, at once urgent and laid back. It's also an important education tool.

And they're taking it on tour! For better or for worse, I can't imagine there is a better time in history for a piece like this, check it out if you can.

Join the "How To Be a Respectable Junkie" Facebook page for information on future performances.

This Is How You Got Me Naked (revisited)

Graphic: Tim Peters

When I chose to read Catherine Weingarten's play This Is How You Got Me Naked last Sunday morning, I was unaware that this script was her MFA thesis at Ohio University, nor did I know the annual Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights' Festival was this weekend and that this play was one of the featured productions, but I did know I was heading to Athens for the holiday weekend and that meant there was a good chance I could actually see one of the new plays I have read as part of my month of play reading performed on stage!

This is so totally why I am doing this.

However, walking through Uptown Athens at night, on a beautiful spring night, when class is in session, by myself, is a very weird thing for me to be doing. Each corner is crammed with memories, but they are ancient memories and I am very aware that I am a very middle-aged man, with a very white beard.

Don't make eye contact with the coeds ... don't make eye contact with the coeds ...

I had a fast pint at Jackie O's before the performance, sitting at the bar, not making eye contact, free-writing into my notebook. I came up with a brief dialogue about how I used to get hit on my older men when I would bring a small sketchbook to a bar and draw cartoons. It's like, I have this so I don't have to talk to people, and yet it makes people want to talk to me.

No one tried to hit on me at Jackie O's.

Balm In Gilead (1989)

It was exciting to return to the Forum Theatre. Most of my undergraduate work took place on that stage. The playwright held a seat for me right in front of the vom, and I could picture myself slouching in there during Balm In Gilead, smoking actual cigarettes.

The performance of Naked was just hysterical, it's one thing to read funny and another to play funny. Bonus, the characters are played by actors the correct age, you have to wonder with future productions how often the actors will be a tad too old, like the nearly-thirty teenagers in all those 80s sex comedies.

Bonus, too: There was a post-show discussion featuring O.U. sociology professor Dr. Thomas Vander Ven, whose works include The Morning After: The Definition and Management of Post-Intoxication Illness in a University Student Sample and Getting Drunk and Hooking Up: An Exploratory Study of the Relationship Between Alcohol Intoxication and Casual Coupling in a University Sample.

His comments were illuminating, he spent years skulking college parties, doing anthropological footwork, and much like myself he was hyper-aware of being the old guy with a notepad. But he came away with fascinating insights on the positive, social benefits of the collegiate hookup.

We know the bad things, and they are bad (when did blacking out become a badge of honor?) but for many young adults, the party is where many have their first opportunity to display basic adult competence, what he calls "drunk support."

Remarkably, put into a large social context, Catherine's play took on greater significance, especially the character of Jackie (played here by Kristin Yates and totally endearing) who navigates the annual "Dress To Get Laid" party with skill, bravery, resourcefulness, and after all, success.

Improv High

Questionable promotional graphic (1994)

Annually I am in the position of auditioning young adults for a position in arts education. They are generally actors who aspire to the position, and volunteer the desire - sometimes without even being asked - to teach children.

"I have a lot to teach children," they will say. It is not necessary for me to ask from where they acquired this ability with a Bachelor's Degree in Acting. I can look at their resume and see where they have taught, if they have ever taught at all, and that is what I will ask them about.

There are those of us, myself strongly included, who felt at a young age that we have something to share, to teach, wisdom to impart. Our arrogance is in believing that the desire to teach makes one a teacher, that having done something right once means you have the talent and skill to instruct others.

I know many teachers. They went to school to learn how to do that.

Perhaps many actors believe they can teach for the same reason they believe they can act, because they like to stand in front of people and to be the center of attention. My own desire to show how smart I am led my younger self into many embarrassing situations for which I was entirely unprepared.

I signed up to teach improv at the regional Thespian conference my freshman year in college. There I was, standing in front of students who were basically the same age as I, and they did not view me with any special kind of respect or awe. They were there to learn something. And I was whimsically unprepared. I had taken, maybe, one improv class, once, when I was a sophomore in high school. We'd played improv games in high school, and I thought I'd jump up and we'd play some but pretty much all of these students had already played them.

I had no commentary, no notes to offer them. I was unaware of technique, why one thing worked and another did not. It was a long forty-five minutes.

I did take improv classes in college, we all took a basic improv course freshman year and a year or so later one of the most important acting classes I received at school, taught by George Sherman, Head of the MFA Directing program at O.U. (Read my 1988 interview with George.) There we learned more than games, we learned theory, a philosophy and also a certain amount of history. I was compelled to read books on the subject.

Rupture, Improv Comedy (1988)

We performed club improv in bars and coffee houses at school, but played the same old games, for laughs. The kind of improv George taught us was long-form improv, and though it was very successful in the classroom, creating actual drama from premise and character, there was never any thought of performing that stuff in front of an audience. We just never considered it.

The one year I worked for Karamu's Drama/Theatre for Youth project, we were each assigned a Saturday morning children's theater class, for which I neither received nor thought to request any kind of lesson plans. These were extremely unhappy Saturday mornings in which I worked for forty-five minutes to get thirty ten year olds (okay, there were only eight of them) to sit in a circle to play a concentration exercise, which was akin to drop a handful of marbles on the floor and then yelling at them as they scatter under the furniture.

I made mid-class hallway trips for the kids to drink water and go to the bathroom last for twenty minutes.

As I bounced from youth education project to youth education project two things were becoming abundantly clear. First, you need a lesson plan. Like, you need to plan ahead. That was a hard lesson for me.

Second and a bit more disheartening, I was never going to be the cool teacher. I am many things, but being someone that teenagers or even small children want to be around, that would never be me. I could instruct, but I would not be loved. I learned to be content with merely getting it right.

By our second year producing as Guerrilla Theater Company, we began discussing additional projects to be produced under the GTC banner. The Guerrilla Youth Theater project was launched in late 1993 in Bay Village (why not?) in which Torque and I taught classes for elementary-to-middle school aged kids. We had lesson plans. Mine were lifted entirely from Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater. The class was arranged through the city recreation department.

We believed we had produced a decent eight-week curriculum and even staged an event at the end of the session in which we shared the exercises and games we had been working on with the kids parents. We promised to build on the work we had done in the winter session and were absolutely flummoxed when absolutely no one signed up for the winter session.

That spring we developed a concept in which I would teach high school students how to do perform long-form improv. The project was called IMPROV HIGH (see graphic above) and the promise was to create an inter-district high school improv troupe. Announcements were made, flyers were distributed.

We had two high school aged colleagues, both students at Cleveland School of the Arts. Bud was our most devoted audience member and Digit ran the sound for our late night show, Mind Your Own Business. They each did their part to sell their classmates on the project but the day of the first class they were the only two who showed up.

So I cancelled the whole thing. How could I create an improv troupe with two actors? This would not be the first time I would just walk away from something, even when there were dedicated participants ready to follow my lead, nor would it be the last. I regret that decision. They were there, you can do improv with two people. I could have joined in, we'd have three. I was afraid. I made a mistake.

The following summer GTC was done and I had a tentative agreement with Dobama Theatre to create a late night project there. My girlfriend and I were taking our first road trip together through the upper Midwest, twenty years ago this summer, in fact. I was yearning for an education in styles of theater which I might incorporate into this new project. In Chicago we saw the Neo-Futurists, yes, but also my first evil clown show (Die Hanswurst Klown), Danny Hoch's Some People and my first trip to Improv Olympic to see a Harold.

In Minneapolis we visited the Bryant Lake Bowl and saw an improvised, musical science fiction comedy titled The Young and the Weightless. It was a pretty educational theatrical exposition and it was my intention to attempt to approximate technique I had witnessed but had never really been schooled in. Dobama's Night Kitchen would be an education for me, as well.

The Realistic World (1996)

Some day I may take the time to cover that grand, flawed experiment which was The Realistic World. It may have been the world's first long-form improv based on the world's first reality show, but I can't prove that. It was the first time I had trained, coached and directed actors to perform any kind of improvisation onstage for a paying audience that was not an entire disaster.

Since that time, from time to time in my role as part of the School Residency Program I have led workshops in improvisation for middle and high school aged students, but these are brief and are usually only game-based improvs. You know, for fun. There isn't time to develop character or to dig very deep.

There's another problem, too, and that is my responsibility to the students and also to their teachers. Improv means trust and I can't encourage them to take risks but also be in the position of having to censor their behavior.

Actually, I can. I should. It's a skill, and it has been the hardest lesson to learn - how to say no. Improv has rules, of course it does, just because you do not have a script does not mean you do not have a structure. You cannot violate the reality of the scene. There is also the acceptance rule, that you take what is offered you and you agree to work with it and build on it.

For the uneducated:

WOMAN: I brought home a rhinoceros.

MAN: No, you didn't. (invalidation, bad choice)

MAN: Yes, and where are we going to keep this one? (good choice!)

The director, however, can say no. It's a director's job to say no. Rehearsal is not performance and when an actor breaks a rule, or does something unnatural - something intended to entertain or be funny - it is the director's job to call them on it. Not to humiliate them, just to stop the scene, address the issue, and either start a different scene or simply ask them to make a different choice.

As many times as possible. As many times as necessary.

But it is not easy. Invalidating an actor is not an action I take lightly. George was skilled in ending a scene when a rule has been broken. He was also good at letting an actor hang himself with his own rope if he made an asinine choice which did not actually break a rule.

Scene: A hardware store.

1. First actor establishes the store. They are organizing shelves.

2. Second actor establishes relationship by entering as a customer with a complaint above a defective purchase.

3. But then a third actor decides to burst in as a rather exaggerated example of a “robber” and holds the place up. 

However, we had been working with the rule that once you enter an improv, you cannot leave. So, having held the place up, he needed to come up with a reason to stay and the others had to deal with him. The decision to provide a character to the scene who was not actually a character but only a gag was clearly and painfully exhibited for the entire class to cringe at as the scene limped along.

For several years GLT has produced a summer theater arts camp at Berea-Midpark High School - Camp Theater. We teach those as young as four up through high school ages in a variety of games, exercises, scenes and disciplines such as combat choreography and stage make-up.

I was initially self-resistant to include much improv, apart from the very basic kinds of games, due to the constraints of time. The camp consists of two, week-long sessions. Some kids are only there for one week and for a few years our time with them were half-day sessions, perhaps two and a half hours. Improvisation, valid and valuable improvisation is not possible if you give it sixty minutes a day for five days.

We expanded to day long sessions last summer, continuing this year, and so I had the opportunity to work with the middle and high school aged campers in one group for two and a half hours each morning. They would split into two groups, one for middle school and one for high school in the afternoon to concentrate on scene work. But I would be working with them on my own all morning, and believed that with this time we might actually be able to create something wonderful right away.

Last summer was an experiment, one in which I was too limiting in the kinds of exercises we would perform, each performance based, skill based, character building. Not for performance. You see, each class would be presenting the scenes they had been working on at the end of the day Friday for their families. I had no intention for them to perform improv for an audience after such a brief period of work. It was technique-based work, and the students responded accordingly.
It was no fun.

Camp Improv (2015)

After all, these are kids – smart kids, to be sure, but not already skilled actors. They do not know how to “make choices” because they have never been asked to, they do not yet know how.

This summer, I flipped it. We would work towards sketch based improv. Very clear conflicts were assigned, characters were described and provided. Definite parameters were set, scene games which have a prescribed beginning and ending. They brought their own personalities to set scenarios and played them successfully and instead of having some vague sense of accomplishment from improving their skill set, they had the immediate satisfaction of making their peers laugh and successfully navigating a story.

And I said no. A lot.

Scene: You are lost in the city, and need money for bus fare.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Give me a dollar!”

Hold please. Take that again, make a different decision this time.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Please, give me a dollar!”

Hold please. If you were asking a stranger to give you a dollar, you would run up to them screaming, they’d run away. Try that again.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Hey, can you help me!”

Hold please. No seriously, your goal is to get the dollar, not to frighten the person. Do something different to successfully get them to pay you.

Camper walks up to other actor and says, “Excuse me, I know you don’t know me –"

Other actor says, “Who are you, stay away, I have pepper spray!”

Camper says, “That’s cool, really, I’m just a guy, the thing is –“

And the scene started to click.

For our final morning together, I asked them to bring drinks and snacks and we created a bar. We closed the stage curtains creating a narrow space which we crammed with mismatched chairs found around the school. A stage was clearly marked to one side of the stage with tape. Colored stage lights were turned on giving the space a clubby vibe and I had brought Christmas lights which the students draped behind the stage.

Camp Improv (2019)

The kids performed about an hour of club improv, scenarios they had worked on and also games. I acted as MC as they sat around eating chips and drinking pop and performing their bits. In between set-ups many of them volunteered to sing their favorite songs a capella and I was surprised by how good their voices were. Even the boys sang.

It was a performance no one else had the honor of experiencing, it was private where they could tell the same jokes we’d been telling all week and not be judged by the other campers or anyone else. They were confident and did confident work. Just before lunch I had the unhappy task of closing the show and asking them to break down the show.

They were called into a circle and I was just going to make some brief remarks about keeping their energy up to prepare for their afternoon performance when one of the older students, one who had attended for several years now, she rose her hand demanding to speak. She said, “I just have to say! This has been the best week of camp ever!”

Oh.

Uh, I said. Uh. That’s good, uh ... that wasn't –

Another blurted out, “Come on, man -- we love you, David!”

I was just trying to get it right.

Into The Woods (musical)

 
ONCE UPON A TIME … Ohio University was on a quarter schedule and the college more or less shut down between Thanksgiving an New Year’s. Six weeks to work, lie about, or travel.

December 1990 the school of theater arranged a trip for England which included tours and shows in London, followed by several days of workshops and shows in Stratford-Upon-Avon with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.


Our first night in we had reservations for some West End show, reservations which we lost for some reason, and our ticket broker gave the tour a choice of two alternatives - Man of the Moment by Alan Ayckbourn, or the original London production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

Ayckbourn’s work I was familiar with, and enjoyed. Of Sondheim, I knew nothing. If you do not count West Side Story, I had never seen or heard any of his work. Please forgive me, I was only 22, and by the age of 22 I had pretty much lost interest in musical theater entirely.

And yet, I chose to see that, in large part because like everyone else in the company I was suffering from jet lag, having been awake for over 24 hours straight. I thought a musical would more successfully keep me awake.

Nigel Planer as Neil in "The Young Ones"

 Note: I missed the chance to see Nigel Planer live onstage in "Man of the Moment", though I did eventually see him in "Feelgood" (for better or worse) ten or so years later.

Into the Woods in its original London production was very odd. The New York premiere (1987) featured legit Broadway talent such as Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason. In the West End the cast was composed of several famous television personalities, like presenter Nicholas Parsons as the Narrator and Julia McKenzie as the Witch who, though an experienced stage performer (and recognizable as today’s version of TV’s Miss Marple) did not look much changed when stripped of her witchy old-age make-up.

Yes, I am ashamed to have written that. But there it is.

Just appearing on stage these actors received applause. The problem was (and the soundtrack recording gives proof of this) many of them could not sing.

However, I did find the music infectious, as Sondheim’s work invariably is (“There's not a tune you can hum.” my ass.) It was colorful and interesting, and very funny. All these folk tales wrapped up rather neatly, and the title song reprise made it clear, after almost ninety minutes and no intermission, that the show was over. Except for the Narrator adding To Be Continued and the lack of any curtain call.

As you know, if you are familiar with the work, “Happy ever after!” is not how the show ends, and I soon discovered there was, in fact, a second act. This second part was confusing, disorienting, ill befalling absolutely everyone, their mistakes magnified. I did not understand the point of this second act, which I felt was maudlin, mawkish, somnambulant (literally so, I pinched the soft parts of my own hands very painfully to stay awake) and a tale or two too far.

But it kept with me. Later, I got the Broadway cast recording, still later the West End disc (Rapunzel’s Prince has the most bizarre accent) and even recorded the Great Performances production onto VHS, which I still have.

Listening to the albums I grew to appreciate the emotional ambiguity of the second act. Also, on Mandy Patinkin’s eponymous album (1989) he does a heart-wrenching cover of No More.

Tom Ford and Jodi Dominick (center) as the Baker and his wife.

In 2008, Great Lakes Theater inaugurated the “Re-Imagined” Hanna Theatre with a repertory of Macbeth and Into the Woods. I had children of my own by then, aged 5 and 3, and already they enjoyed love theater. We brought them to opening night, but left at intermission - by design. I felt the ending was too upsetting from a child. All the characters they loved were made unhappy (or always were) some would be killed, and horribly, the songs more complicated about complicated, adult issues. There would be a time for such challenging stuff, but not yet.

“Stay a child while you can be a child.”

The Great Lakes production was excellent (the Wall Street Journal called it a “tour de force”) introducing CLE audiences to performers who would develop long-standing relationships with the company (Jodi Dominick as the Baker’s Wife stands out in my memory) and gorgeous turns by returning actors whose work at GLT are becoming legendary (Tom Ford who played the Baker would go on to create a truly bizarre Sweeney Todd at the Hanna as well as a show stealing Monsieur Thénardier in this season’s record-breaking Les Miz).

It was disappointing to know my kids would only receive half of this particular production, and never have the opportunity to see the entire thing. I didn’t see the entire GLT production myself until it was almost closed.

Isn't it nice to know a lot?

Fall 2008 I had used vacation time to canvas in Beachwood, convincing elderly voters that Obama was not, in fact, a Muslim. The day before Election Day, I walked about neighborhoods in Euclid, encouraging likely voters to get out and vote. It looked as though every other house in what was otherwise a well-kept neighborhood was for sale, foreclosed, or abandoned.

November 4, Election Day itself, I was an emotional wreck, despondent in my fear that someone as willfully uneducated as Sarah Palin could attain high office, and demoralized by the fear-mongering and purely racist rumors. The economy was in free-fall that warm, bright fall day, and I did not know what kind of world these children would be left.

I could not even think that day, so I attended a student matinee of Into the Woods.

The second act clicked into place for me. The path from The Last Midnight to No More to No One Is Alone was a map of the psyche of a doubt-ridden parent. I sat in the front row on the balcony (there were fortunately no students in the balcony that morning) and tears, many tears, streamed down my face.

I’ll just come out and say it, Into the Woods doesn’t make sense if you have never had children. Tell me I’m wrong, that’s fine. Sondheim doesn’t have children. My argument can’t be substantiated.

However, just today on Facebook, colleagues far and wide, in speculating upon their decision to attend a showing of the new Disney film adaptation, have remarked upon the original version’s “eeeeendless, repetitive second act” (thank you for that, Henson.) Those who have shared this opinion, within my sphere, are uniformly child-free.

Conversely, my wife says she was always emotionally affected by the entirety of Into the Woods, even before having children. I would argue this is because she has very troubling issues relating to her father. I was never introspective about about my relationship to my own parents, my father was just this guy. I thought myself a solitary man, until the impending birth of and subsequent loss of my first child, a son.

So, allow me to rephrase my original statement … Into the Woods didn’t make sense to me until I had children.

For Christmas we went to see this new film adaptation, which was very enjoyable and arguably the most successful adaptation of a musical from stage to screen ever made. That that is a very low bar to hurdle does not render my praise in any manner faint.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Shakespeare's Audience (book)

A couple months ago I met with a professor of mine, it was the first time in over twenty years we had been in each other’s company. He looks the same, though he was much younger than I am now when he was my director, theater history professor, and curriculum advisor. His hair was thin then, and it is the same now, whereas mine is just gone.

Dr. William Faricy Condee is today Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. During my time as an undergraduate I spent sophomore year in his theater history class (for which I read absolutely nothing) and I took a course of his on theater architecture. I also like to brag that I am the only person at O.U. Ever to be directed by the good Doctor twice, as a sophomore in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and as a fifth-year in the world premiere of The Hanged Angels by W.R. Smiddie.

Condee's expertise is in theater space. He has written two books, Coal and Culture: The Opera House in Appalachia (Ohio University Press, 2005) and Theatrical Space: A Guide for Directors and Designers (Scarecrow Press, 1995) in addition to numerous articles on the subject.

The architecture course I took was a summer course, so I and a classmate were the only actors in attendance, with a dozen or so “others” who were complete to fulfill liberals arts credits. Condee impressed we two to make a few points abut the relative importance of space. He chose a scene from a translation of the original Medea, and the "Gentlemen Caller" scene from The Glass Menagerie, and asked us to perform each in a small, windowless office in the basement of the T-Com Building, and by the light of a candle. The Tennessee Williams piece played quite well, but we were never loud enough the suit the Doctor for Euripides.

Then we took the class to Peden Stadium and we stood at the fifty-yard line and performed both scenes again.

One way to look at is is, you have to consider the space when choosing which production to mount. But the more basic observation, though not obvious to me at first, is that these plays were written for their intended spaces. Nobody wrote intimate plays in Ancient Greece (that we know of) because they were producing work for the “theatron”.

Currently I am tossing ideas around my head for a new play about The Globe playhouse, the theater for which Shakespeare wrote his plays. This is why I finally, at long last, got in touch with my mentor. That’s a lesson, kids. Stay in touch with your mentors.

On the date in question, last April, Condee had an hour to spare and I had a lot of really, uh, super questions prepared … like, what effect did the space have on Shakespeare’s work?

He said, “I have no idea.”

That was like, the best question I had.

However, the hour passed quickly, as I told stories from the past twenty years, to kind of justify my existence, and he gave me a bibliography. He strongly recommended Architecture, Actor and Audience (1993) by Ian Mackintosh, and also Shakespeare’s Audience (1941) by Alfred Harbage, among others. It was this second that I went through rather swiftly, for though it is an academic investigation into the demographics of the audience for the Globe theater, it is charmingly written, easy for the layman, full of facts but also colorful details.

I did begin the Mackintosh book, and now intend to finish it. The view from the Globe “tiring house” and stage is very different from that of its audience.

“Their builders succeeded in getting as many people as close as possible to the actor without jeopardizing the actor’s primary task of communicating with every spectator, however distant.” - Mackintosh, p. 10

Such was the feeling I had a couple weeks back, standing on the stage of the Hanna Theatre, upon the thrust stage. I was leading a small tour through the all the Playhouse Square theaters, and as is my wont, began in the massive 3,200-seat State Theatre and concluded in the intimate 550-seat Hanna.

Looking out, from the edge of the platform thrust (the only such professional stage in Cleveland) I had the sensation that the balcony was leaning towards me, a feeling at once emboldening and vertiginous.

LOWIN
Planted upon this scaffold,
A swaying sea of ragged heads at my feet,
I feel twenty hands high.
The eyes of merchants without number,
Men of means within the galleries,
So close that I could slap the wig off of a lord.
Slap it right off. Not only with my words --

FLETCHER
My words.

LOWIN
-- But with my mitts. That close.

David Hansen © 2014

Early estimates (dating from early last century) of the size of that crowd were based on modern fire codes or a basis of contemporary seating, one which includes seats. Those scholars suggested the Globe held around 500 as well. Since that time, we take into account the fact that those in the pit stood, fire codes did not exist, and that even the galleries were packed. A contemporary account suggest a number as high as 3,000 but was probably two-thirds or half that. That is still an awful lot of people in an intimate space.

One of the things I truly enjoyed about Harbage’s book is that it dispels certain points of conventional wisdom, and in doing so honors the Elizabethan people, and the reputation of Shakespeare himself.

When speaking of Shakespeare’s audience, the opinions of members of the clergy are often quoted, those who despair at the den of sin and vice represented by the theater. In this case, they are speaking specifically of the building itself, and not the content of the work.

Harbage’s careful examination of contemporary accounts provides no indication that more crimes took place in a public theater than anywhere else. If anything, it indicates the opposite. He could also find no indication that those who publicly warned against the attendance at the theater actually ever went there themselves.

Of the private theaters, they said nothing. When the working class were priced out of attendance, and only those who could afford could attend, apparently everything was copacetic within the hall. But Shakespeare did not write for those houses, he wrote for the Globe. And Shakespeare was and is the more popular playwright.

As Harbage puts it, “The difference between Shakespeare and (John) Fletcher is, in some inverse fashion, the difference between a penny and sixpence.”

The documentable fact is that Shakespeare was popular in his own time, and very popular. The conclusion based on the assumption that those in the higher (more expensive) galleries were erudite and intelligent and those in the pit a mob of cat-calling thugs is that that Shakespeare wrote part of his play for one class, and part for another.

But that would make as little sense then as it would today. The so-called “groundlings” were intelligent, they were trained professionals, craftsmen and apprentices, and most likely regular theatergoers. Listening to plays was something they (unlike you) did very often. They were self-trained in hearing, in listening and appreciating.

William Shakespeare was successful because he wrote everything he wrote for everyone.

To be continued.

"Shakespeare's Audience" by Alfred Harbage
Columbia University Press, 1941

"Architecture, Actor and Audience" by Ian Mackintosh
Routledge, 1993