NYC EOY 2025 (part three)

Audrey Corsa, Irene Sofia Lucio,
Adina Verson, Kristolyn Lloyd
"Liberation" by Bess Wohl
James Earl Jones Theatre, 2025

Randy Settenbrino, owner of the Blue Moon Hotel, provided a verbal tour of the building, its history, his history. It’s a recent renovation, including three stories that he had added. Based on our experiences in the rooms across the street, he must have reconfigured every room on each floor, ours was quite spacious for NYC, very much so for the LES.

The main floor has a cafe and a dining area, the walls decorated with collages of neighborhood history and the landlord’s paintings, of his family, of Frida Kahlo, a series on the Fall of Man.

We returned to the Tenement Museum for the 100 Years Apart tour, detailing the Wong family (1970s) and the Gumpertz family (1870s) connected by their immigrant status and their successes in the garment industry.

Randy Settenbrino

It was also a big book store day, to Sweet Pickle Books, and also the Book Club Bar for Old Overholt Manhattans and reading. We both made an effort to get at least one book from each place we visited, or only one. For lunch we returned to Felix Empanadas, the dough they use is exquisite, rich and crumbly, the filling spicy and flavorful. Boss fries, too. Apparently they have live jazz every Saturday night, from nine to midnight.

That evening we took our first train out of the neighborhood, to Times Square and a Broadway show. Following a brief return to the Rum House, we headed to the James Earl Jones Theatre to see Liberation by Bess Wohl. The play is an exploration of second-wave feminism, told from the point of view of a contemporary woman who is trying to investigate and understand the C.R. (consciousness raising) group her mother had organized in an Ohio recreation center in 1970.

Felix Empanadas

During intermission my wife and I discussed the framing device, and whether or not the personal details of the story are fact or fiction. The piece rings with truth, but it is the manner in which we enter the play, with the narrator engaging the audience directly – very directly, in fact, responding to specific audience chuckles or even verbal responses – before leading into the performance in which she makes clear when (and when not) she is playing the role of her own mother.

The actor is not the playwright. But we are meant to assume that she is. In this very effective way, we believe what we are seeing and hearing are things that actually happened, in spite of the very obvious artificiality of theatrical performance. If there were no such narrator, if the members of the group simply entered and performed their parts and there were no narrator, we might assume it is entirely fiction. Historical fiction. Accurate, but not true.

The narrator tells us it is true, and so we believe her, even though there is no other reason to believe that it is. But I want to believe that it is. An emotional work, presenting the arguments that were present then, many of which we are still debating now. It highlights the progress that has not been made, but also that which has. Liberation is an epic play, it is powerful, and it is, ultimately, hopeful.

So, it is interesting. The night before we saw a performance based on Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar which, in its original publication, was perceived as a kind of hoax — fiction presented as fact. This night we saw a piece inspired by true events, and presented with a verisimilitude that transcends its artifice. And the next night we would experience a forty year old musical which has much more recently been revised to include moments of actual historic geopolitical intrigue.

Vero nihil verius, nes pas?

To be continued.

UPDATE: On Monday, May 4, 2026 it was announced that "Liberation" by Bess Wohl received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Play a Day: Antigone, Presented by the Girls of St. Catherine's

Madhiru Shekar

This week, New Play Exchange posted a list of plays curated by Audrey Lang, "Scripts About Teenage Girls." Today's play has been selected from that list.

For Wednesday, I read Antigone, Presented by the Girls of St. Catherine's by Madhuri Shekar and posted at New Play Exchange.

There are many reasons to set your play in the past. One of the most important reasons is that before today there weren’t cellphones. There are stories that can no longer be told, or told in the same way, with cellphones in the picture. There was a time when we could not access all human information in a moment, or to be able to reach someone, to know where they are.

Maybe today doesn’t suck as much as we imagine.

Do you know what it feels like to be a teenager, and having to lie on behalf of a friend because they were seeing someone they shouldn’t be? Someone older? Maybe a teacher? I know what that feels like. It happened. It has always happened. It will always happen, cellphones or no.

Shekar’s play, set in the not-too-distant past, centers on a production of Antigone at an all-girls’ school. The transformative power of theater is a popular trope, especially, you know, among theater people. In this tale we have a charming male drama coach, new to the school, one who inspires his young charges, and helps them to break through their personal issues to be more their true selves. He also fucks one of them.

Themes of pride, confidence, and the indefatigable power of women, all present in Antigone, are also reflected in this play, as the girls band together to protect one of their own.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Slaying Holofernes

Emily McClain

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

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

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

Judith Slaying Holofernes
(Artemisia Gentileschi, 1613)

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

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

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

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

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

Kimberly Belflower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broadway Premiere
Starring Sadie Sink
The Booth Theatre (2025)

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

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

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

Who should I read tomorrow?

"I'm Alive You Bastards And I Always Will Be" produced by Nightbloom Theatre Company

Photo: Steve Wagner

Tonight I am going to see the premiere production of a new Cleveland theater company, I’m Alive You Bastards And I Always Will Be, written by Roxie Perkins and presented by Nightbloom Theatre Company. And I’m scared. And I’m thrilled.

The company promises risk-taking work but doesn’t everyone promise risk-taking work? However, this production promises adult themes, strong language, violence, and references to sexual violence.

Most stage violence I have experienced of late is either cartoon gore (your B-movie musicals, for example) or a couple of dickheads punching each other stupid in this month’s toxically masculine, “kick ass” play. None of them inspire anything close to actual fear. Neither, for that matter, does Sleep No More.

The most popular example of shock theatre is the Grand Guignol. Before the advent of splatter films (also, World War II) middle class French audiences got a kick out Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris, where on any given evening they could expect to see half a dozen short plays utilizing grotesque and realistic stage effects to portray short dramas of torture, crime, and madness -- there were comedies, too, primarily on the subject of cuckolding.

It has been a long time since I have experienced anything truly creepy, weird or startling. I witnessed Die Hanswurst Klown present Prick Us And We'll Burst in Chicago almost twenty-five years ago, an evil clown show developed by a troupe of improvisers. The program was designed in such a way as to make you believe this was a real troupe of East German clowns, only the very last sentence of the performer bios suggested who the actor actually was.

From my journal, July 9, 1995:

Unbelievable. Helmut Voelker, with the big forehead, unwavering, glassy-eyed stare and gaped mouth, piercing high laugh, he couldn’t break eggs except on his head, he was so frightening and pitiful, REMEMBER HIM … like a wild animal. He frightened me. And when his hand was hit by a mallet or his penis was cut off, or his gift of a rose was refused, he howled and cried so pitifully, it made me feel terrible ...

Die Hanswurst Klown

Yeah, one of the other clowns severed Helmut’s penis ... while he was having sexual relations with a pumpkin. Blood spurted into the air.

Standing on a ladder, he made a solo, mournful, articulate soliloquy to the moon. This one expression of love was the only time he spoke during the entire show.

And it was in German.

Late during the history of Guerrilla, I had proposed reconfiguring the entire concept. In spite of our “game show” structure of introducing short plays, the whole endeavor still felt (to me) like a Too Much Light knock-off. What if we made an actual set, evoking a demented cabaret, with each of us developing alter-egos which we would maintain week after week, and that it would be these performers presenting the short plays?

From my proposal, June 1993:

“Maison de Foux” ... I picture a dinner theater trying to stay open after the city has been carpet bombed. Charred doorways, curtains askew, a big sign of lights proclaiming the name of the show, with a few bulbs missing or burned out … walls adorned with water damaged posters of rock stars, politicians and movies ...

While the audience is still meant to feel as though they are an integral part of what goes on, they are no longer encouraged to believe they own the place.

Nothing came of that idea, at least not at Guerrilla. The concept was revived in a somewhat different form for Night Kitchen.

Backstage with "The Gaslight Guignol"
Erin Meyers, Mike Schmidt, self
Jenna Weiss, Toni K. Thayer

This Vicious Cabaret was my attempt at an evil clown show, a post-apocalyptic comic nightmare in which a band of roving performers acted danced and sang for their supper (we literally accepted non-perishable food items in lieu of payment). Global warming had led to massive water shortages and the collapse of civilization as we know it.

The evening culminated with an audience member being chosen to join the company, but also having to choose which member of the original company would have to be killed to maintain balance. My character, Serious George, the most horrible of our quintet, was prepared with a knife to slit the throat of whoever was chosen. In case it was me, Mister Alfred (Mike Schmidt) would sneak up behind, grab my knife hand and do the deed.

I had palmed a blood packet, so the knife wound was particularly ghastly, a fine conclusion to a dark evening. Sometimes the packet would “pop” and blood would shoot across the stage.

Tonight, Nightbloom Theatre Co. has promised such effects as extreme, prolonged stage violence, punching, kicking, head trauma, eye gouging and gouts of blood. The play I’m Alive You Bastards is a feminist warning or threat: What will happen when the lid finally blows off of women’s collective efforts to suppress rage and anger? What happens when women transform into their monsters they have held inside?

The wake of the #meToo Movement has brought to the fore a new genre of unapologetically and aggressively feminist plays, like Mathile Dratwa’s A Play about David Mamet Writing a Play about Harvey Weinstein and Sharai Bohannon’s Punching Neil LaBute project. These are exciting creative developments.

So when I say I am scared to attend this show, it’s not really the stage violence I am afraid of. We know that’s fake. A surprise is titillating, that’s why we go to haunted houses. It’s the ideas, and the expression of those ideas which fill me with anticipatory dread.

Nightbloom Theatre Co. presents "I'm Alive You Bastards And I Always Will Be" at Maelstrom Collective Arts through Sunday, October 6, 2019



Happy birthday, Alice Bluegown. We remember.
Source: Crash Course Theatre #35: The Horrors of the Grand Guignol

The Women of Baker Street

Irene Adler

Five years ago courts concluded (and not for the first time) that the stories and characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written prior to 1923 are in the public domain, freely available for any artist to write about or interpret without fear of copyright infringement.

(The Doyle estate did go on to press the creators of the 2015 film Mr. Holmes that they had used details about Sherlock’s retirement referred to in stories written after 1923, which illustrates how legal issues continue.)

I could adapt almost any of the classic Sherlock Holmes adventures. I have chosen instead to create an entirely new mystery, one which will, ideally, fit neatly into the established timeline of events as set down by the original author.

Why a new adventure? Simply put -- women. The only recurring female character in Sherlock Holmes is Mrs. Hudson, the landlady at 221B Baker Street.

Contemporary adaptations, like the BBC series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and the two Guy Ritchie films, chose to inflate the character of Irene Adler into that of Holmes’ romantic opposite, though she appears in only one Doyle story and the characters have no such relationship.

Today we expect, in fact require, strong female characters. This is not a matter of political correctness, it is merely a fact. My daughter never held any interest in the Star Wars films until Rey was introduced. I never told her which books to enjoy, she always gravitated toward compelling women (Hunger Games) and has entirely avoided weak ones (Twilight).

"Treasure Island"
Great Lakes Theater (2019)

Our last two outreach tours, freely adapted by Eric Schmiedl from the classic novels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island, illustrate the challenge in finding compelling female models in 19th century adventure tales. You can cast women to play Huck and Jim Hawkins to great effect (and we did), but the actual women characters in these stories are only docile mothers and silly girls.

Having decided to create compelling women for this Holmes play, the question was how to do this and still maintain the authentic structure and feel of a Sherlock Holmes narrative. Holmes, Watson, Lestrade, Moriarty, Mycroft -- principals characters all. In order to introduce new characters, most would need to be absent, to make way. How to do that without losing what is intrinsic to the legend?

Of course, what is most iconic is the man himself. But could we create a female narrator -- not a women playing Watson (as Lucy Liu does in the successful, modern American TV adaptation) but a new character entirely? How will that work?

And who is the bully of Baker Street?

To be continued.

Play a Day: Antigone's Sister

Emma Goldman-Sherman

For Tuesday I read Antigone's Sister by Emma Goldman-Sherman and available at New Play Exchange.

A powerful re-imagining of the Antigone myth, one in which the playwright aggressively seeks to subvert the dominant paradigm. Cleaving to Sophocles' original, Goldman-Sherman has created an astonishing emulation of the structure of both Greek tragedy and comedy.

These lines are clearly divided between the women, especially in the character of Antigone whose pain and pathos are clearly described and felt, and the men, who are all utter clowns.

The women's tragedy is lyrical and knowing, the men ignorant fearful and low. However, as is evident in today's America, it is hard to laugh at the buffoon on high when in his shallowness and bigotry exacts such a high price in pain and suffering from those who are in the most need.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: The Space Between Her Legs

Tiffany Antone

For Thursday I read The Space Between Her Legs by Tiffany Antone, and available at New Play Exchange.

If there is one thing we have been missing in Cleveland, it's unabashed and outrageous corporeal humor theater. We're all too precious and philosophical here. We'll talk about sex, sure. But if sex is being had, if parts are being shown, then it has to be serious. Or violent. Sad, really.

Even Guerrilla Theater, even we, were too self-righteous when it came to what constituted appropriately rude humor. The entire company almost came to blows over a sketch called "Raw Ass," which was just a friendly tutorial on how to deal with a chafing anus.

"I think I saw space inside a pothead's vagina." That is a quote, and it is also the premise of Antone's hilarious new script. A woman discovers she has a wormhole to another dimension which has been transporting anything that has been put into or near it into outer space, including entire men.

To state this is a metaphor for women's power and the extent to which men with go to control that power is almost entirely beside the point, because this play is outrageous and hysterical, with the best worst date monologue I have ever read (ladies, here's your next audition piece.) Antone has a knack for hip, intelligent dialogue and a brilliant sense of timing.

Play a Day: The Witches' Tower

James Bartelle

For Sunday I read The Witches' Tower by James Bartelle, and available at New Play Exchange.

The past several year, the family has stopped into Salem, Massachusetts on our way up the coast the Maine. Our friend Kim lives there, and though we have often stopped by for a couple hours, last year we stayed for a couple days and had the opportunity to take out time to explore the city.

While there are a great many beautiful and interest things to take in and enjoy about Salem, the real fun is with the witches. Arthur Miller's The Crucible brought the Salem Witch Panic of 1692 to vibrant life, and arguably shaped the discussion we continue to have about those events and that time.

He was comparing that witch hunt to the "Red Manic" panic of his time. However, his analogy can suffer when you point out the simple fact, as he did in an article in The Guardian in the year 2000, that "there were communists and there never were witches." He goes on to argue, however, that his point was not the existence of a perceived threat but what the actual threat was, what was "the content of their menace?"

New Orleans playwright James Bartelle spins an original, compact and compelling tale of persecuted witches in a classic, lyric style. We are left to imagine whether the accused are truly servants of a malevolent power, or if their only crime is that of being women, punished for actions inherent in the human condition, actions for which no man in their time, or ours, would receive comparable treatment.

To have lost a mother in the course of childbirth? Would a male doctor be imprisoned for this? To have had an extramarital relationship? You could be President of the United States.

Bartelle has a way with repetition which is poetic, the condemned women's ruminations either actual spells, or an expression of madness imposed through institutionalized oppression. A powerful period piece reflecting our modern moment.

Play a Day: Once a Spy

Rachel Bublitz

For Wednesday, I read Once a Spy by Rachel Bublitz, and available on New Play Exchange, an account of a real life World War II member of the French Resistance, Nancy Wake.

The Nazis called her the "White Mouse." They also called her "Witch."

The piece is swift, and exciting, told in brief episodes which take our heroine and her colleagues across France and England. Her adventures get her into many dangerous situations, which she handles with confidence and determination.

She never uses her gender as a weapon, at least not the way this story is told. Wake is not a James Bond hero who has sex with her opponent before assassinating them, there's no monkey business. But she is aware of mans' weakness in assuming what a woman is or is not capable of thinking or doing, and is skillful in taking advantage of that.

The most remarkable scene is one, the one in which she seems most angered and disappointed, is one in which she is confronted with two women, captured by the Resistance. Wake is told they are being held as spies, but in reality they are being used as sex slaves for the soldiers. Wake swiftly determines one is not a spy and orders her released, and the other is a spy, and she Wake dispatches the way she would any male enemy.

The play has many characters, but Bublitz has written it so that it can be performed by as few as six performers. I imagine it would make a great high school drama, for those looking for something thrilling with strong historical context. The feminist angle is important, too.

Nancy Wake died in 2011, at the age of 98.

The Bechdel-Wallace Test

Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) is a MacArthur Grant Awarded cartoonist, creator of the long-running strip Dykes To Watch For and the graphic novels Fun Home and Are You My Mother? As a young theater artist in the 1990s reading Dykes in the Gay People’s Chronicle was a primer helping me to see beyond coarse stereotypes about lesbians when my circle of friends were either largely straight or closeted.

Click on to enlarge.

An edition of Dykes titled "The Rule" featured two friends discussing what movie to see. One explains she has three rules which dictate whether or not she’s interested in seeing a movie:

1. One, it has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who, two, talk to each other,
3. about , three, something besides a man

Now generally referred the Bechdel Test, the cartoonist prefers joint attribution with the person who originally thought up the criteria, an old friend names Liz Wallace -- whose contribution, you will notice, was noted on the original strip. Though "The Rule" is thirty years old, the term has become a meme in the past decade and a starting point for discussion about gender parity across all spectrum of media.

Breaking Point (1989)

What do the results signify? You could deduce from the dearth of roles for women in film that the point is representation. You can also consider what those roles consist of; do the female characters exist merely as romantic foils or objects of sexual desire - do these female characters even have names?

The bigger question, and the question I have been asking myself of late, is what stories are we telling? It’s not about cramming more women into your movie, and it’s not even about employing more women writers - although that would go a very long way to ameliorating the discrepancy. We should be asking ourselves what stories we writers choose to present to the world.

Scripts written for the theater (call them plays) have a handicap when it comes to passing the test, if only because most plays by design will have fewer total characters. But the challenge remains the same, what story do we choose to tell?

The first play I tried writing was the one-act Breaking Point, based on my own college comic strip. One night, as I was conversing with my stage manager and fretting about the one female housemate in an apartment of four. She was as smart and smart-alecky as the rest of them in the strip, but distilling several months of story line into a thirty-minute play, I realized how all the male characters treated her like shit.

“I write terrible female characters,” I sighed.

“Yeah," she said, shaking her head somewhat sympathetically. "You do.”

The Vampyres (1997)

I didn’t have another play produced for the better part of ten years. When I finally started composing The Vampyres in the mid-90s (finally, as in, why wasn’t I writing plays before this?) I had a story I was burning to tell, about a cynical med-student and a couple of poseur vampires which also included a former crush of the protagonists and a teenage barista onto whom he transfers his affection.

No, the two women do not talk to each other. If they did, it would certainly have been about the men. However, by that time I was aware of sexism in my writing, even if I didn’t know exactly what to do about it. I strove to retrofit the character of Mary so that she was a strong women who had her own agenda as an artist, but really, in brief she fell in love with a male vampire because he was irresistible in the way we are all told we just have to accept.

The story belonged to the male characters. It was a struggle between he and the other two hes. And it was represented in a battle over possession of the two shes. Giving the female characters their own personal agendas does not change what was the central conflict of the plot.

More recently, I have been working on a two-hander, the as-yet unproduced The Way I Danced With You. There’s two people in this play, one man and one woman, so the Bechdel Test does not really apply. But is the story equally theirs? Is the pursuit of her goals on an equal footing with her pursuit of her own goals? I believe that it is, and it is important to me that it is -- and not merely to satisfy an agenda. As I reported previously, the reception of this play changed from the Valdez reading in June and the Cleveland reading in November.

My breakthrough in creating feminist plays, however, comes largely thanks to my work in children’s theater. Who knows why this is, perhaps because at a distance I can tell stories to children in which gender has the fluidity that children themselves possess.

White Garlic and Red Onion

Adventures in Slumberland featured a protagonist in the form of a five year-old boy, who could be a girl, and was, in fact, played by a woman, and probably usually should be. His hero’s quest ostensibly is to find the princess (this is eighty years before Donkey Kong) but that’s a McGuffin, it’s really about a child growing to appreciate their own personhood.

Rosalynde & The Falcon turns the princess story on its head, as a young woman is persecuted by her wicked stepfather the king, and escapes to the wood where -- instead of looking after a band of thieves (or dwarfs, what have you) she becomes the leader of the thieves, and eventually the ruler of her nation. There are two named female characters … I guess it’s funny that one of them doesn’t even speak until the very end, but they certainly do not talk about the men, they talk about governance.

My latest work, Red Onion, White Garlic, opens early next month. I hate to describe a play by what it is not, but I did not set out to create a feminist children’s play. It was not my intention to create a play which passes the Bechdel Test entirely and without qualification.

What I did do was investigate Indonesian folktales, arrive at one which centers upon the relationship of two sisters, and every moment I found myself searching for a new character to add to the narrative, she was always female. I even considered male characters, but they never made sense as part of the story. It is not that men are absent. The tale belongs to women.

Red Onion, White Garlic opens April 8, 2017 at Talespinner Children's Theatre.

On Bullying

"The Jabberwocky" Company

You know where I stand politically. You are aware of my thoughts, my feelings. I write about them in this blog. I am outspoken on social media, and on the street. Like the vast majority of Americans, I am not happy with the direction our nation has taken.

But I am also a father, and I have a responsibility not to project disappointment or despair onto my children. They are not unaware. They were active during the campaign, and they were as shocked as we by the result. I never lied to them. I never promised them she would win. But like most of us, I never truly imagined that he could.

I mean, he didn't. And yet, he is the President. But that's another story.

The night of the election the only thing keeping me from falling apart was my daughter, who was very upset and could not sleep. I projected stoicism for her. This was not the end, but merely another setback in the slow but inexorable march towards progress. She finally did sleep, between us, like she did when she was a child. I did not sleep.

We keep an eye on the children. Because I believe the children are ... well, they are the future, right? And children will listen, and so on. My generation began their childhood during an era of great cynicism and uncertainty, which left us guarded and jaded, as were our parents. I would prefer my children to be as optimistic and confident as their immediate elders. I can't change the world, but I can shape the way they receive it.

Prior to the election, I had ideas for Red Onion, White Garlic. Talespinner Children's Theatre announced the production in October, but there was no script yet, just ideas, a list of things I would like to see or to have happen, and that's important, too, but you can do that and never accomplish the actual writing. November 8 broke that open for me, and ideas that had previously seemed novel took on actual significance.

Opening doors.

For example, every character in the play is female. That is not to say there are no men in it, although that is entirely true. But I did not omit male characters, the play is not defined by what it does not have. It is about these characters, and you may notice they are all women. I am aware that, in the past, I have written some weak female characters. Here, I took the opportunity to create women who are strong and foolish, wary and conflicted, scheming and malicious, generous and odd. It is all about them, and their story is delightful.

Like the man said, what stories will you choose to tell? Rehearsals for that production begin in two weeks.

At the same time, we have started an exciting new program at Great Lakes Theater. I have blogged for years about the outreach tour, about productions like The Secret Adversary and Double Heart. These were created with teen and adult audiences in mind. The new Classics on Tour program, which will visit twenty-one public sites in northeast Ohio and dozens of area schools, is our first production geared specifically for an elementary school-aged audience.

Rehearsals for The Jabberwocky began this week. This script was originally created by and produced for the Idaho Theatre for Youth, this is its second production. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's poem, here three kids use the power of imagination to not only escape the real world bullying they find in a local library, but also learn how best to deal with their tormentors.

It's an anti-bullying play, which are very popular these days. There are countless professional companies who have at least one in their educational outreach repertoire. And schools respond, they want programming with strong messages about conflict resolution and successful interpersonal communication.

It is disheartening when we live in an era when the most powerful man in the country (elected by millions, if far less than the majority of voters) sets an example of dominance and intimidation, mocking those with physical disabilities, degrading women, and dehumanizing refugees and immigrants. That is the way our children now understand you become President of the United States.

Lisa is directing this one, and we have put together an amazing ensemble of young performers for what promises to be a physically adventurous work. We have always had a short rehearsal period for these one-hour performances, but for this expanded performance schedule we have also contracted them for day long rehearsals. In just the first few days we have facilitated workshops in commedia, combat choreography, and puppetry.

Great Lakes Theater presents The Jabberwocky, tour begins February 21, 2017.

There will be puppets.