Theater Camp Writing Workshop (2026)

Theater camp has closed for 2026. An action packed eight days, full of theater games, stage combat, prop and set piece construction, costume design, more theater games, song and choreography, and a lot of playwriting.

We added the writing component after Covid, or rather, I did. I enjoyed leading a writing session for a different camp we were affiliated with in 2008 – the goal was poetry then, not plays, I had no idea what I was doing (I usually didn’t in those days, I was only forty after all) but the campers who responded to it went at it hard. Some kids love to write.

Some, however, would rather kick themselves in the face than write, and I respect that. And so, for our camp (collective our) I have insisted it be optional, presented opposite some other activity.

Most choose the other activity, which is fine. It’s preferable. This year it was at the same time as craft, and I had a dedicated crew of between four and eight for each one hour session – that was also different this season, an entire hour! And there was one period for high school aged campers, and another for middle school aged campers.

I had prepared prompt cards. We would create ten minutes of prompt-inspired free writing. Sometimes that would be followed by a debrief, or take another ten minutes to create dialogue inspired by the prompt. This was the challenge for the middle school aged campers, several of whom wanted to compose narrative. Creating action through dialogue was new to them.

As the days progressed, I would still offer prompts, but change up the assignment slightly – write a new short play based on your prompt-based free writing, or continue something you have already been working on.

They would ask, but can’t I write about -x- instead? And I would say yes. Can I work on something I was already working on outside of camp? And I would say yes. I had to remind them that this wasn’t school, I wouldn’t be collecting their notebooks, I wouldn’t ever be looking in their notebooks. They could write whatever they like. But I would continue encouraging them to write plays.

To that end I provided professional templates to follow, and we spent time talking about plays they had seen. I gave a brief description of the Aristotelian unities.

The last day, Thursday, we held an informal reading of their new works, with all of their peers as the audience. There were six or seven* short scripts, from the silly to sinister, and took volunteers from the entire assembly to stand and read and perform them to great appreciation and generous laughter.

Given the opportunity, I will expand on the material. It is challenging to develop a curriculum requiring this kind of deep focus when they are all sorts of variables that can be thrown at you. It’s a seven day workshop (six this year, really – we needed to catch up on props and sets on Wednesday) which has at times been forty-five minutes, then thirty minutes, and now an hour. Campers are asked to write for ten minutes then stop when some really want to keep going while others write for two minutes, get bored and start distracting their friends.

So, that’s a goal for next year, a more flexible lesson plan. But who wants to think about next year? Summer has only begun!

On Writing; A Memoir of the Craft (book)

Pengo's 2025 Summer Book Club

TL;DR: Write more. Read more.

I brought a couple of books with me for the trip, but when we visited the local library I was determined to get something and finish it before we departed. Ideally, I would finish it, get another book from the library and finish that before we departed, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

It’s not a very large library (it will get larger, more on that in a moment) but it is packed with tomes, and bestsellers, books with big names (literally) on their spines fairly leap off the shelf at you. I may have been gazing at the plentiful offerings from Maine-and-world legend Stephen King when I overheard another patron ask the women at the front desk for a copy of Hillbilly Elegy.

The former James David Hamel wrote one terrible book and became Vice President. It galls my kibe. I promptly turned away from fiction, faced biography, and found King’s On Writing; A Memoir of the Craft. It’s one of those books I have told myself I should read, and it was about damn time.

Here’s the thing; I’m a fan of Stephen King, the man, though not so much his work. But I like his writing. But I don’t care for horror or suspense. King was a constant presence of my adolescence; adaptations of his novels, films like The Shining, Christine, Cujo, The Dead Zone, they were on cable all the time, I didn’t watch them anymore than I watched any of the slasher films that were so popular at that time.

I did watch Creepshow, though, because it looked weird and I was delighted that it was funny. If I had given his work half a chance I may have appreciated King’s tremendous sense of humor in his fiction. And, of course, there is King’s own wonderful performance as Jordy Verrill in that film which made him an actual person in the world to me, and not just a name on a book.

It was my ex-wife, who loves all manner of fiction, who recommended I read The Stand, which I loved, but remains the only novel of his that I have read from the page. For long road trips, she and I would listen to the first three Gunslinger novels on audiobook, narrated by the man himself. It was because of this experience that I will never listen to an abridged audiobook. When possible, I prefer when it is read by the author.

I admire King. I should read more of his work. I am starting here.

"Jordy Verrill, you lunkhead."

Part of the book is autobiographic, “how I became a writer” stuff, but for much of the work he provides actual instruction (he has been an English teacher) not only on what constitutes good writing, but what and how makes good writing enjoyable to read.

King also advises the would-be writer – though you don’t need to be a writer to enjoy reading this book – on practice, which is very helpful. Much of this I know, or have my own personal opinions on, which I have come to in my own way and in my own time. But so much of what he says is true, practical, and useful.

He also repeats certain truths, because they are the most important, but so basic one might forget them in the details he also provides. You must read. You must write. You cannot be a writer if you are not reading and if you are not writing. If you don’t read, your writing won’t matter, and if you don’t write, you’re Fran Lebowitz.
 
“If you want to be a writer. You must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot.” - SK

Keeping King honest is not only his own sense of humility, but he is also unafraid to, from time to time, call out those whose work he does not respect. He loves all kinds of writing, so unlike those who would call his work trash only because he specializes in genre fiction, he dislikes editing that is bad, regardless of genre.

He calls a few authors and their work by name (the book was published twenty-five years ago, so Hamel’s 2016 book is not included) because he believes you can learn by reading those, too, a cautionary tale on how not to write. Okay! I should read those!

King is also an arbiter of truth in writing. When asked about the origin of one of my plays, I said, something pithy like, “It’s all stolen, but it’s all true.” I don’t know how the latter justifies the former, but it seemed appropriate at the time. Making stuff up is what fiction means, but it needs to ring with honesty, and this, as the man instructs, is how you bridge the gap from “write what you know” to “here’s a story about swatting with a fungo on Jupiter.”

And this is as good a time as any to explain that while this non-fiction book was situated on a shelf at the Friendship Public Library opposite King’s fiction, I had to go to the woman at the desk to find it, I didn’t just turn around and see it. But I could have, and you would know, because it sounded true, took less explanation, and sounded like a boss move.

Tabitha & Stephen King

The big question, for me, was what lessons I may have taken from Stephen King for my playwriting. He emphasizes story above all else, and also that dialogue defines character, but in drama dialogue is story, dialogue is action. He says, “writing good dialogue is art as well as craft,” and that is certainly true, and never more so than in a play script.

One of King’s extended metaphors is the writer’s toolbox, and what is one each level of the toolbox. Vocabulary, for example, and grammar, on the top layer. Below that, the proper elements of style, like tense and adverbs (not adverbs ...) below that, structure – literal structure, like how to construct paragraphs.

As you can see, a playwright’s toolbox will be very different. It’s all a matter of which tools you use the most, and which you use less frequently. The first layer would be dialogue and character, the second layer stage directions – the necessary stage directions, which are different from the ones you write for the first draft of your script and later cut because they aren’t necessary and will only annoy the actor.

This is a tremendous exercise, and one I need to think through before continuing. The Playwright’s Toolbox. A quick Google search tells me someone wrote a book by that title and just last year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t create my own.

The most critical part of the book – to me – is when he cautions the writer about backstory. To wit; “The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.” I have also been told, more than once, that a good play is about what is happening, and not about what has happened. Story telling can make a decent monologue, but any entire play cannot be about rehashing the past.

And I wonder, isn’t that what I do? Doesn’t that describe a lot of my plays? How much of The Right Room is couples talking to each other about their lives? And yet, I have seen how it is effective, that there is present action in story telling. Isn’t that why we love The Breakfast Club?

Finally, I was touched by the credit he provides his mother, and also his life partner. His mother, who worked her entire life, raising her children on her own, was supportive of his desire to write fiction from the very beginning. He also name-checks his several mentors.

But it is his wife, Tabitha Spruce King, herself a novelist, and also a poet, to whom he attributes his success, and not in some abstract, I couldn’t have done it without 'er kind of way. He is very specific about how, without her work, he would not be this highly visible, let alone successful, author. Not without her belief, her criticism, and her actions.

The Friendship Public Library seeks $500,000 to expand their current facility. Check their website for more information and how to contribute.

This Is Not The Play (workshop)

One year (it was 2008) we were conducting a summer camp for CMSD middle school aged kids, and each member of our team chose one discipline to focus on; we had our dance captain, visual art instructor, music director, acting coach. I was to teach creative writing. I had never taught writing before in my life.

In preparation, I requested only two supply items; a Moleskine for each camper and an inexhaustible supply of pens. Yes, the kids could have used spiral bound notebooks, or even lined, loose-leaf paper. But I figured it this way, if they were going to take writing – during the summer – seriously, I wanted them to have something special to write in.

It was a good experience. We played with rhetorical devices. A “ya mama” joke is just a metaphor, right? We flipped that and wrote metaphors about ourselves, comparisons which could be amusing in their grandiose self-confidence. "I'm so cool they put me in lemonade." We also wrote poems and other bits of prose.

Of course, for some campers the time we spent together was torturous. Some people just don’t want to write, they definitely don’t want to write during summer vacation. I don’t blame them. Some were so resistant to the idea of writing I just sent them to work with another one of the instructors. It was a camp, it was supposed to be fun.

The company I work for has been hosting a different summer arts camp in another part of greater Cleveland since 2010, but I never considered suggesting I teach writing again until last year. We made it elective; there was time mapped out for visual arts, you could do that or you could write. I didn’t want to have a single person engaged in the writing workshop who didn’t want to be there.

It was just a one hour block. I began our second day of camp making the offer; anyone who wanted to write instead of do art, even if it’s just one person, I would be happy to work with them. Most chose art, I got six people. That was perfect.

We found an area of quietude, camp can be pretty noisy with kids from elementary to high school all over the place. It was a relief in the late morning to be able to concentrate with our small cadre. We sat around a table in the house of the auditorium, the lights were dimmer than the brightness of the stage. I played instrumental jazz on my phone, or noise for focusing from an app I'd discovered.

My lesson plan was mostly the same each day, and inspired by the daily writing ritual I had employed to create the short play project. Unlike with my solitary, quarantine era writing, however, each brief writing period with the campers included the opportunity for a debrief and reflection.

1. Free Write (10 min.)

Debrief:

• How was that?
• What did you discover?
• What surprised you?

2. Single Word Prompt (10 min.)
They were asked to choose one from three suggested one-word prompts.*
Examples:

• Darkness - what we can’t see
• Normal - what does that mean to you?
• Frozen - a moment in your life you wish you could freeze and preserve and keep

Similar debrief questions, adding, "Would you like to share what you wrote about?"

3. Dialogue (10 min.)
Choose a central question inspired by your response to the previous prompt.

• Create dialogue between two characters, no names, no specific gender, no stage directions (Unless you feel any of these things are necessary, then go ahead. It’s your work.)

Sharing the work, al fresco.

That was the first lesson. The next day, when we broke into these groups, I made it clear that if you changed your mind and would rather create visual art than writing, that was cool. And also that if anyone else wanted to try the writing, that would be cool, too.

To my delight, we pretty much had six people each day for the rest of camp. Five were committed, the sixth was usually someone new who tried it out once, maybe twice.

From the second day forward, the third ten minutes could be for creating something new from that day’s chosen prompt, or campers could continue or rewrite something they had previously written.

By the end of the first week we had a name for the writing group. Early on, when I proposed writing from a prompt, one of the campers asked, “Is this the play? Are we writing the play?”

“This is not the play,” I told them, which struck them as amusing, the way I said it. It became a daily reminder about the free writing periods. “This is not the play.”

We also wrote some poems, we read our work aloud. I encouraged them to choose one piece to polish, type up and share with the rest of the middle and high school age campers, and to get other kids to read and perform their new scripts.

During our last session together, at the end of camp, we talked about submissions, competitions, their writing aspirations. We recently announced the dates for this year’s camp. I’m looking forward to it. I think there will be writing.

*Source: Think Written | 365 Creative Writing Prompts

Process LXI

Last Saturday I wrote a lot. I had a big, empty day and filled it with work. Occasionally I took time off to interact with social media, maybe do a little housework. I’m not good at spending long hours just writing, but here’s the trick: I wasn’t writing only one thing.

I was editing The Wytches – yes, I’m going with that title for the rewrite – I was editing my notebooks about mom’s illness, I was ruminating on Phil Collins, I was imagining the second act of Scenes From a Night’s Dream (the working title and not by coincidence also a song by Genesis) and finally writing the response to a poetry reading I had attended a month ago.

Moving from project to project, I was able to accomplish a little with each of them. If I had concentrated on just one, I don’t believe I would have made much headway at all. What does that make me? An amateur diagnosis would attempt to ascribe any number of neurological variances, at my age I am not interested in knowing about any of them. I am happy to have figured out what works for me.

So, what will this weekend bring? I have a book to read and to write a response for, but I also have a goal of creating at least 20 new pages for my workshop. I think I can get that done before Monday night. Right? If only I didn’t have this freaking headache.

On Self-Control

One of my notable character traits, which I assume is related to my being the youngest in a trio of brothers, is my sharp tongue. 

The eldest sibling doesn’t need to prove their dominance, they simply are; always bigger, always stronger. The middle child is the mediator, to be sure, and also circumspect. Like Janus, they sees both ways, being younger and older, and yet not definitively either.

The youngest, this youngest, exerted his personhood the only way he could. With his mouth. If he got physical, his older brothers could always smother him with a pillow until he could no longer fight. This is a thing that happened. Why throw a punch, when depriving the offending child of oxygen is so much more effective and doesn’t leave a bruise.

So, I had a big mouth. Witty, but also vulgar. And when cornered, I lashed out. I graffitied, writing with soap on mirrors, pencil on desks, chalk on boards, carving into wet cement. When, in sixth grade, I was caught writing something particularly nasty about someone on a table in the library, a panel was convened to try and channel my impulses.

My guidance counselor asked if I was interested in creating a middle school newspaper. 

"Sure!" I said. 

Fine, he said. Create one.

Unfortunately, I am not an eldest child, I had no sense of independent initiative and required guidance, not knowing how to ask for it and none was provided. I continued to stew in silent resentment through my middle school years.

The high school did have a weekly newspaper and I was finally able to express myself through cartoons. I also wrote the occasional story or opinion piece which were inevitably disastrous, my penchant for unfortunate and often irrelevant metaphors distracting from whatever point I was trying to make.

Words can be an ugly tool. Worse, when you have an affinity for using them but only for the expression of resentment and spite. These were the early  plays I wrote to either drive a wedge between myself and people who cared about me, or to kick them in the ass on the way out the door. I need not elaborate. Some saw their way onto area stages, others did not, but they were read. It was ugly. And stupid. And embarrassing.

Practicing restraint is one thing, it requires constant vigilance. My wife deserves all the credit, not for teaching me restraint, but for sharing with me more a open engagement and understanding of the world and the people in it. It’s humbling, and this humility has helped me to finally, as so many before had recommended, think before I speak. And to edit, edit, always edit. And also to know when its best to delete.

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.

Process XXXIII

And so this brief summer semester draws to a close. I did my best with what I have. I read the responses from other students and found them both poetic and prosaic, in some cases intentionally academic. I thought, is that how I am to be writing? But I am a creative writer, and that is not why I am here. I research but also ruminate. I am content. I exist, as the man says, as I am. 

The season has been seasonal. It becomes torrid and we shut the doors and crank the a/c and I am unhappy to live like that. I would prefer the doors open, the heat and humidity to bathe me in sticky sweat. The rains, too, bring the clouds of steam into the place and that pleases me well. It is cool and damp. It is hot and humid. Either way, I love summer. I love summer a lot.

Process XXIX

And we’re back. That’s it! That was my summer break. Just kidding, I will get one later. For now, I am taking one, six-week course in early American poetry. Already I am dead chuffed, inspired by the works of Anne Bradstreet to compose a poem about selling my mother’s house.

Tuesday, my son turned sixteen, and I rose early to make him a special breakfast, to celebrate him. By eight I remembered I had not done my morning pages, and it was at that moment that I chose not to.

I chose not to. I wanted to exercise, and then to get right to my work, and not to sit and write. I chose to break a six hundred and eighteen day streak of writing, writing every morning. Because doing so had become a burden. I had to write. I was no longer choosing. It was about the record, not about the process.

Siri tells me that six hundred and eighteen days from now it will be late January, 2023. That is far into the future. Six hundred and eighteen days ago, my mother was still alive, and the pandemic was only just starting, on the other side of the world.

I have been working, I have been writing. I have been moving and I will be writing. We begin again, every day, as we all must begin again. And it is with this in mind, that I compose verse about my mother’s belongings.

The Frantic Four (comic strip)

Artwork: Tom Packis

When I was a kid, I would get on a city bus, by myself, and take it to Lakewood. This was when I was ten or eleven. I’d get off on Clifton, and walk a half-mile south to get to Kovacs Comics at 16108 Detroit Ave.

I have this strange memory of a man with these bizarre growths, hanging from his face. They were like spheres of flesh, hanging from stretched tethers of skin. I found it horrifying, and only glanced at him and looked away. His face was unreal, grotesque.

Years later, in a novelty shop, I saw a rubber mask featuring the exact same, bizarre deformity, and I wonder, was that man real? Did I conflate some memories? Or was the guy on the bus wearing that mask and I couldn’t tell?

Anyway there I was, a child, on the RTA, on my own. Freedom! I can’t imagine my kids wanting to do that. 

I had a flyer from Mister Fantasy’s (15015 Detroit) and it was just an ad for the store. All the comics shops did that, printed up flyers to put into each bag of comics you bought. 

Artwork: Philip L. Fried

This flyer featured an original comic. “Mr. Fantasy” was direct addressing the reader, talking about how the store was closing, and that this was the last comic. Mr. Fantasy was a big bearded guy, the stereotypical image of a guy who owned a comic book store.

Thing was, though the comic was cheeky and cheery, in the last panel the character had shot himself. It was just a blood-spattered wall.

In 1981 or 1982, I was introduced to North Starr Comics. Originally it was a mail order concern, operated out of this guy’s basement in Fairview Park. But he had fixed up his basement the way you would a store, and my friend Tom brought me there. It was so cool, like a comic book speakeasy. If you knew the password, you could browse and buy and hang out and shoot the shit.

By 1983 he’d rented a storefront on Lorain Avenue. A proper store, open for business. And there was a regular cast of characters who would hang out there and antagonize each other. Some of us would spend hours there, reading books, watching comings and goings. If you have been paying attention, North Starr Comics was the inspiration for The Negative Zone, my recent comic book project.

"Ghoul" reference

Dave, the proprietor, also had fliers. They were usually cheesecake pin-ups drawn by this guy named Phil. And I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we made a superhero parody featuring characters based on all the guys who hung out at the store?

Looking back, this turned out to be my first public foray into script writing. I wasn’t much of an artist then (am I now?) but Tom was, and so we created The Frantic Four which was full of inside jokes and references. 

It’s not for the ages, suffice to say I didn’t know what to write about, things just happened. Mostly it was a goof, inspired by Marvel Comics’ own self-parodies like Not Brand Echh, or the kind of riffing humor you would find in Cracked. 

One lesson I am glad I learned early was about unappreciated mockery. We were all in on the joke, but there was one guy who had been the butt of our jokes for some time, and I made him the villain of the story. In his first appearance he was an overweight, diet pop swilling creep who had a cadre of robot servants dressed like high school cheerleaders. We used his actual first name, and the drawing did look like him.

After that "issue" of the comic was produced and distributed, I received a very terse but measured phone call from him (he was in his mid-20s at the time, I was fourteen) explaining to me exactly what the meaning of the legal term "libel" was and recommending I put more thought into my work.

He wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong at all. It freaked me out. So I had his character unceremoniously murdered by Dr. Doom and never mentioned him by name again.

It is remarkable to me, however, that for a couple years I was producing scripts, that another artist was turning them into pages, and that people actually received them to read (or throw away) in their monthly bag of comics.

My interest in the project waned at the same time my interest in superhero “floppy” comics did. By the time I was a junior in high school I was so engaged in other things, and that was around the time they ret-conned the Jean Grey/Phoenix Saga (if you know, you know) and I was moving on. North Starr closed shop while I was at college, which is as good a metaphor as anything else.

Creating The Negative Zone comic, taking the class, was  quite restorative. I felt like I had the opportunity to rewrite some history I had closed off in my memory, and to remember how enjoyable that period of my life was. It was so easy to dismiss the writing I did for this project as childish and silly. But that's what it was meant to be. And the really important thing to keep in mind is that we did it. 

Many thanks to "Frantic Four" co-creator Tom Packis for his amazing artwork!

North Starr Comics

Process XXVII

NEOMFA Playwrights Festival (2021)

Perhaps this is fortuitous, but this is the week I hit the wall. Maybe it is completion anxiety, or the expectation of great things unsatisfied. I want to leave town. I want to visit England with my family. I want everything unhappy to end.

Play a Day was very challenging this year. The reading was good, but it wasn’t about the reading. I was so busy with other things it felt like a chore, which is a shame.

The playwright’s festival was marred by technical difficulties and to be honest, it filled me with anxiety to be in a public space. The screening was held outdoors, and it was cold.

While I am thrilled about my daughter’s impending high school graduation, I am constantly reminded of everything she did not get to participate in during her senior year.

But, all right. The fiction writing workshop has come to a close. I am working on a half-hour radio drama for craft and theory inspired by the works of Firesign Theatre, that is due Monday. Then I can concentrate entirely on the comic book, which is due the following Tuesday.

And that will be two semesters finished. Classes on Zoom are no longer novel, none of this is. It is convenient, but soul-sucking, and I got a stress headache on Tuesday night trying to look at my screen outdoors, in the good weather.

Speaking of which, some guys have put in a patio. I spent last summer staring at a backyard covered in cardboard (to kill the grass) and I hope this summer will be very different, in so many ways. Last night, we got drinks and attended a movie. In a movie theater, It was weird.

Happy May Day!

DDT-V (revisited)

The DDT-V All-Stars
(Can you spot Doug Dieken?)

Fred kept us honest. Any expression of ego was roundly mocked. We were kids, making a cheap comedy show. 

DDT-V (“Lethal Television”) was created by high school and college students, and broadcast intermittently on our community access channel from 1983 to 1986. It was a collection of sketches, fake news shows, and a lot of commercial parodies.



Fred was the driving force, no matter what any of the rest of us thought. He wrote most of the sketches, did so many of the voice-overs, even appeared in front of the camera a couple times.

After he died from a heart attack two years ago (on my fiftieth birthday, as it happened, thanks, Fred) I came into possession of the archive of our work.

Some of it holds up surprisingly well. And even where the humor is a bit obtuse, at least it has style. We used every square foot of the studio building, went all over Bay Village, hosted an entire episode from a booth in the North Olmsted Denny’s, did a location shot outside Cleveland Municipal Stadium downtown. 

When we held a charity baseball game against the high school faculty to raise funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, our team had a ringer in the recently retired Cleveland Browns offensive tackle Doug Dieken.

Cartoon, The Bay Window
March, 1986

Watching these episodes I am able to track my development from a self-conscious freshman to a cocksure senior, which is a blessing and a curse. The one big regret I have, looking back, is that I never wrote anything for the show. That’s not true, I wrote one sketch that was recorded and aired. It’s not great.

I was intimidated. I didn’t know how it was done. Most significantly, I had nothing, at last, to say. I still believe that, at that age, I actually did not have anything of value to say. Or I did not know if I did. Most of what I did write and put out into the world, in the form of op-eds for the weekly high school paper, took the form of snark and grievance.

My editorial cartoons weren’t bad, however. They improved by the year. I suppose there is a lesson in that, that if I had tried to write, at that time, I would eventually come up with something worth being produced.

I guess that is exactly what I have been doing ever since. 

Wishing you creativity and happiness in 2021!

DDT-V Playlist on YouTube

Process XI

What has ever come out of Luxembourg? - from “Synchronicity”

Also, painted that lamppost.

Last weekend I banged out my second "dark fiction" short story. Most of my assignments for the semester are complete, except for the big one. It is good that I can spend the next week largely concentrating only on that. 

Also, we watched a few streaming theater pieces. “Is it theater?” they ask. You know what? Who cares. First, we saw the Baldwin-Wallace Musical Theater Program production of Spring Awakening which was neither live theater nor a movie, and yet, it was entertainment unto itself, even incorporating the pandemic into its concept.

So, too, Irish Repertory Theatre’s On Beckett/In Screen, an adaptation of his solo rumination and interpretation of the works of Samuel Beckett created and performed by legendary clown Bill Irwin, also including a nod to the current moment.

I would not or could not have seen either of these without their having been presented online, and I would have missed out on a larger discussion. The productions were not live. But I, as an audience member. I was live.

Monday my playwriting workshop will read a version of my new script that is slightly different from the one I shared with friends last month. First I need to read the thing again, I don’t know.

"On Beckett/In Screen"
(Irish Repertory Theatre, 2020)

And we decorate. A couple years ago I began putting our artificial tree outside, and getting a real tree to put inside. Setting up the outdoor tree on Tuesday, I thought that must be the earliest I had ever put up a tree. But then I remembered that I put up that tree the Tuesday before Thanksgiving last year because my entire family was in town because mom was not doing well and we thought this might be our last holiday with her.

We had Thanksgiving at her house last year, but everyone came here the night before. This year it was just the four of us. My first Thanksgiving dinner in my own house.

Odd. I told myself that on Thanksgiving I should do nothing that was not related to spending time with the wife and kids. No writing, no running, no additional housework. And yet by the end of a day spent playing trivia games and watching movies, I was entirely run down.

But the big good news is that the wife has completed the manuscript for a novel which is now making the rounds among her colleagues, and that includes me.

Process X

In the room.

This week I ran out of writing prompts.

On a whim last fall I looked up “writing prompts” and found 365 Creative Writing Prompts at ThinkWritten.com. They weren’t super involved, many of them focusing on one or two words. “Dancing” or “First Kiss”.

I found these to be much more liberating and inspiring. Many prompt books or online lists are too detailed. “Write about a time you disappointed someone.” Well, that makes it specifically about me, doesn’t it? I mean, it doesn’t have to be, but that’s where the mind first goes.

“Write about your virtual plans for the Thanksgiving holiday.” I mean, that’s a journal entry. I guess it’s aspirational, but not really.

Maybe I should start again from the beginning though I would like to try something new. So many of these prompts resulted in short plays, and many of those were turned into videos last Spring, at the beginning of the pandemic. Looking them over, I think of those. Gotta try something new.

This past week, James and I visited labor and delivery at University Hospitals. Next year is the twentieth anniversary of the events which inspired I Hate This (a play without the baby) and plans are afoot to bring that show to a wider audience.

James has never experienced childbirth, not from the outside, anyway, so this was a wonderful opportunity to know the space and to work with the text.

Okay, this is a big weekend. I have two weeks to finish two big assignments, fortunately there are no assignments for either of those specific classes this holiday week. And my full-length (which is not, I feel, full-length, but) is in good shape to be read the following week.

In fact, there were a few notes my advisor gave me that I was able to incorporate. "Breadcrumbs." Moments to keep the audience on their toes, even as the protagonists go on about 1980s teen movies, life ... everything, really.

Process IV

Question: How do you write in the style of an author whose work is intimately woven with life as they had experienced it in these United States when their life’s journey is not merely different from your own, but different as a direct result of the social structure that created the difference between theirs and yours?

To put it another way, their point of view made their writing what it is. For me to emulate that I should, what? I cannot pretend to be him. And I cannot write from my point of view simply emulating those elements of style which make his work unique; use of color, description of space, expanding of time, sense of alienation, anxiety, existential dread.

I cannot do this because the most important element, for him, his reason for writing, was protest. Expressing his walk of life, or mine, was not enough. The reader needs to be aroused, outraged, and moved to action.

Last Wednesday my professor asked the class how our writing was going, present progressive tense, as though it had already begun and is in process. I had not yet written a word. It’s an eight-page vignette that is due in a little over two weeks. But I have been engaging myself in these questions and finally arrived at a scenario, which I storyboarded yesterday and wrote the first pages this morning.

I may even use some of this post in my artist’s statement for that story.

The work on the play continues, just this week I had something of a revelation. Every piece, the play, the gothic short story, the protest vignette, has its own agenda. They each, however, require tension. For the play script I continue to be haunted by the observation of Joe Barnes, "It is hard to write a compelling play about two characters who are basically decent." They are decent, a mother-daughter duo who have (generally) open avenues of communication.

How to create conflict that does not involve men, men with a capital M. That it does not involve father, or boyfriend, or lover, that their struggle, if there is a struggle (there has to be a struggle) is between them, and not some other person. If you do not understand why this is important, you haven’t been paying attention.

Play a Day: Marginalia

Katherine Gwynn

Traditionally, I provide a bonus post on Saturdays in April. One post is for having read a new play, the second to reflect upon a play that is currently in production, that I have just seen, or maybe even a production of my own plays.

Not so this April. I have seen plays, recorded to be broadcast on screens. My wife and I watched Lauren Gunderson's I and You at the Hampstead Theatre, we saw that on Instagram last week.

My daughter and I watched the "Great Performances" broadcast of Ken Logan's Red, starring Alfred Molina. My daughter is a visual artist, I thought she might be interested, and I am glad to say I was right.

Those are the plays we have seen in April, 2020.

For Saturday, I read Marginalia by Katherine Gwynn and available at New Play Exchange.

Gwynn celebrates marginalia, those notes found in the marins of printed works, as well as the illustraions created for illustrated manuscripts, as well as those who dwell on the margins, the powerful women, the knowledge-seeking women, the men who would live in sbsurvience to women, those who would seek non-heteronormative relationships, and the transgendered who seek to be seen for who they truly are.

Today, and with plays such as these, those historically in the margins move onto the page itself. In the 14th century abbey which is the setting for Gywnn's drama, this journey is only beginning.

The playwright also celebrates passion; passion for books, passion for reading, passion for writing, and passion for passion. It is a lively little abbey, peopled with charming characters, each seeking their own garden of earthly delights. If only the world were more like this Benedictine cloister.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Morning Pages

Ritual is not what you do naturally. Waking up in the morning is not a ritual, nor is having breakfast. Ritual us not synonymous with routine, either. No, ritual is something you compel yourself to do, on a regular basis, something which does not come naturally, nor easy, but in doing so lends your life purpose, meaning, and hopefully, satisfaction.

For years, though not for all my years, I have tried to create a writing ritual. It happened less recently than you might imagine, but in the past five to ten years, I began rising at 5:00 am, so that I would have quiet, peaceful time alone, to write for thirty timed minutes.

Our gas fireplace was repaired in early 2016, and so the ritual during cold-weather months was simple. The fire. The coffee. The bathrobe. Thirty minutes, or three steno pages, whichever came first.

Around the same year, we had our deck rebuilt. And so warm weather months included its own ritual. The deck. The coffee. The robe. The birds and sky. Thirty minutes or three steno pages, whichever came first.

Then came the writing prompts and the one-page plays. What had merely been ritual had become a compulsion; when not doing something is harder than doing it. Once upon a time, for me, that was running. Finally, in my fifties, it is writing.

Social media apps get you hooked by awarding you for checking in every day. You have “streaks.” I keep track of how many days in a row I write my morning pages. Today is the 200th consecutive day I have written morning pages. Today I wrote about writing morning pages as my morning pages. Right now, I am typing that up.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Bullies of Baker Street"

Plotting down the bones.

The assignment was basic, yet complex. To write a play for children, one that would engage their imaginations and also entertain, to teach empathy and important lessons in positive social behavior (to wit; an anti-bullying message), one based in literature in keeping with the education department’s mission of fostering a life-long interest in the classics.

And why not a mystery? The professional wing of our company has in recent years produced one mystery a year. We would employ a familiar character -- one in the public domain -- perhaps the most famous detective of all.

This concept was still in the “what-if” phase when my supervisor, Lisa, blurted out a fanciful title; Sherlock Holmes and the Bullies of Baker Street!

It was supposed to be a joke. There is an entire cottage industry in “bully” plays, with titles like “Bullybeard the Pirate” and “How I Stopped the Bully” or even “The Bullying Bullies of Bullyville.” I made those up, just now, off the top of my head, but search them. They may exist.

The motivation behind these works is not unwarranted. Our educators are always seeking new ways to teach empathy and stem youth violence and intimidation. But could we create a play for children which satisfies a socially conscious mission and also provide an entry point to works of classic literature?

Lisa’s title sounded iconic, and yet entirely original. Whereas I was unsure of my ability to pull so many threads into one fifty minute show -- intended for children aged five to ten -- suddenly I was imbued with interest and enthusiasm. The game, you might say, was afoot!

(“The game’s afoot,” by the way, a line now commonly associated with Doyle’s legendary consulting detective, originates as all great English writing does, from Shakespeare. It’s from Henry V, a fact I was reminded of this summer when I saw an outdoor production in Public Square.)

Shortly before the deadline to announce the tour, I decided to tweak the title a bit, to Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street.

Many Holmes mysteries state a detail of the story for the title (The Sign of the Four, The Red-Headed League) or begin “The Adventure of …” (The Adventure of the Speckled Band, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches).

With this new title, the star is up front, the verb meets (rather than the passive conjunction and) evokes thrilling early 20th century action films, and the single bully is a mystery all its own -- Who is the Bully of Baker Street?

To be continued.

M*A*S*H (revisited)

"Heal Thyself"

Summer is here. Theater camp has concluded, my show has opened, and it is time for a little vacation with the family. A two-day drive, with four teenagers in the car, and guess what? We still all love each other.

Hotel life can -- if you can tear yourself away from your computer or phone -- provide the opportunity to take in some old fashioned television. We watched two episodes of M*A*S*H, back-to-back, just like I could on any single weekday during my childhood from seven to eight on Channel 43.

The vast majority of episodes from eleven seasons feature a cast of characters who were created for the television series, and not taken from any of Hooker's novels -- Potter, Winchester, Hunnicutt -- and the characters of Hawkeye and Houlihan grew to bear little resemblance to those from the books or from Altman’s 1970 film version, upon which the TV series is based.

Last night we saw the one where Edward Herrmann plays a relief surgeon who cracks under the pressure of “meatball surgery” (S08E17 "Heal Thyself") followed by the one where Col. Potter receives word that he’s the last survivor of his World War One buddies (S08E18 "Old Soldiers").

I have avoided re-watching the show for my entire adult life. When I was a kid I must have seen every episode several times over. I have probably watched M*A*S*H more than any other television program ever made. But whenever I happened upon a broadcast, revisiting just a few moments, I was appalled at the stupid jokes, the laugh track, and the general “niceness” that all the aforementioned characters fell into once they had jettisoned the difficult Trapper John and the impossible to make sympathetic Frank Burns.

Watching an episode play out in real time, from beginning to end, I was reminded of what made the show truly good. Yes, it was sanctimonious, I knew that as an adolescent. But take for example the way they took their time to play out the young surgeon’s disconnection from reality under pressure was truly affecting. I was surprised to learn they even borrowed from Shakespeare. I didn't read Macbeth until eighth grade. Herrmann’s doctor bemoans his inability to get imaginary (but also very real) blood off his hands.

The blood won't come off.
No matter what I do, it just stays there.
Just take it easy.
See what I mean? Look at that.
Never gonna go away.
No matter how hard I scrub or -- how much I wash it's gonna stay there.
Where do they come from? What do they -- What do they expect me to do? I can't.
I can't.

Well-written and well-played. When we moved into the next episode, and Col. Potter announced a sudden visit to Tokyo General, I knew exactly which episode this was. From somewhere in my head I heard the words tontine and pledge and the phrase, “give that man a cheroot.”

I may have been the only eleven year-old who knew what a cheroot was.

"Old Soldiers"

There were so any elements of the episode that I had no life experience to comprehend. The team of characters do not at first understand the colonel’s behavior, and one suggests he may have received a dire diagnosis himself in Tokyo. They never use the word cancer, not once, but when the gang is summoned to Potter’s tent, they have already braced themselves for the worst. “You have our total support,” says one, before learning the truth about the colonel’s recently deceased comrade.

You have our support? That struck my eleven year-old ear as odd, what kind of support do you provide someone who is ill? “I support you,” like he was being persecuted. Didn’t make sense. Now it makes sense.

Also, Colonel Potter’s entire war record was something I was unable to fathom. What I didn’t know about World War One was a lot. The final act of the episode features Henry Morgan speaking, taking his time, without interruption, describing the provenance of the bottle he has just received, the night in question, the fate of his comrades, an extended toast to lost youth … it is remarkably affecting.

The motion picture M*A*S*H is something I have also not watched in a long time. I saw it very young, and it had a poor effect on the way I saw the world. Indeed, it gave me an education in the madness of combat, and the joys of bucking the system. But it is cynical in the extreme, far too passive in its criticism of institutional racism, and downright condemnable in its treatment of women, especially women in positions of authority.

It is easy to tear down corrupt institutions, easier still to merely ridicule them from a distance. It is far more challenging to build up institutions based on basic human decency and understanding.

See also: Cleveland Centennial, M*A*S*H (TV show), January 20, 2012

Twenty-Eighteen

Boxing Day, a day to assess, to look, forward, to make plans, to try and figure out where it’s all going.

I need to return to the regular habit of writing by hand every morning for thirty minutes. I used to think I need to create blocks of time -- hours, say, on a Saturday, to accomplish the writing. This is not practical, however, and was only rarely successful.

When I began writing longhand a little bit, every single day, the work mounted up. It was a highly productive time. But it takes discipline, and sleep, and each have been lacking the past two calendar years.

I have always written but since I began writing in earnest -- ten years ago -- the productions have begun, the publications followed, and the opportunity to engage and collaborate with numerous companies in town.

In the past year I had my third publication (The Secret Adversary at YouthPLAYS) revamped by website (Thank you, Dreamhost Remixer) and created work presented at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and Talespinner Children’s Theatre.

There are only a few things in the coming year that I am able to report, though I am in negotiation to revive previously produced works, and have made a few proposals for the coming season.

Chennelle Bryant-Harris and I are co-writing a new play, The Lost Diary, inspired by a notorious piece of white supremacist fiction. A fragment of this new work will be workshopped as part of Entry Point at Cleveland Public Theatre, January 18 - 20.

Also, this coming month, the Chattanooga Theatre Centre will present a three-week run of my adaptation of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, January 26 - February 11.

In addition to new writing (and there exists new writing) one thing I have wanted to do is return to old writing. It is not necessary, of course, to bring every old idea to some kind of fruition, you could go mad doing that.

But there are certain pieces which went through considerable revision and even successful workshops which were abandoned for other projects. These Are The Times was one of these, and I was very happy to return to that this past summer. There are one or two of those abandoned piece to which I would like to return.

Best wishes to you in all your endeavors in the coming year.

Assessment

It has been two years since I wrote an assessment, which has been a useful tool to reassure myself that, in spite of any sense of inertia, the work continues.

Last week there was a reading of These Are The Times which was very productive, and when I have a moment I will be able to tweak a few things and then, if you can imagine, I will finally be able to begin the submission process. And it only took eight years!

Meanwhile, I composed a piece for Grand Rounds: Four 10-Minute Plays, which will be performed on December 6th at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage as part of the exhibit Beyond Chicken Soup: Jews In Medicine.

Just yesterday I was a "Writer In the Window" at Appletree Books, brainstorming a writing collaboration with my colleague Chennelle which will make its formative debut in early 2018, and tomorrow evening rehearsals begin for a play I will be performing in, to be announced.

Basically, after months feeling a bit adrift, November is packed. Suddenly, I have no time. And you know what? That is a good thing. When I am pressed I am most productive, which is stupid but there it is.

What is not good is how I have almost entirely stopped exercising. Nerve pain has made working out this past summer less than fun, but the fact is I have not gone for a run in over a month. Seriously, October 1 was my last time out. I haven't run so little since 2011, when I was taking antidepressants.

But the kids are all right. My education work is meaningful and sustaining. What I most need is to (literally) get off my ass, and move.