Ohio State Thespian Festival (2023)

Painesville (2023)

Paul Feig tells this great story in his memoir Kick Me about how, as a high school student, he volunteered to announce a home football game. He loved the sport and also thought of himself as witty and a good talker and of course, he was entirely unprepared and the whole evening was a fiasco.

The first time I led a workshop at a Thespian conference (they used to call it a conference) was as a college freshman. I was going to teach improvisation, and this was also a fiasco. I imagined myself as this elder statesman of theater, with plenty of wisdom to provide. But that was, in fact, entirely in my imagination.

Looking out over the gathered and interested Thespians, I saw people my age – I was still only 18, after all – and they were not impressed with my attempts to engage them in acting exercises, because, like Paul Feig, I was entirely unprepared. I had no lesson plan, and as I spoke my voice rang hollow, drifting to the ceiling of the band room in which we were working.

I thought I had something to offer, but hadn’t given a moment’s consideration as to what that might be. That was thirty-six years ago.

Hilliard (1994)

Four members of Guerrilla Theater Company led a workshop at the state Thespian conference in Hilliard in 1994 called “Adjustments: Surviving the Rehearsal Process.”

(Photo: Torque ignites the imagination.)

“Students will work with scripted material written by GTC members… with the GTC members taking the part of directors. The focus of this project is to get the student actor used to the notion hat no part of character is meant to be performed in a specific or “right” way, and that the process of discovering the character requires concentration, imagination, and most importantly, the ability and flexibility to try a lot of different choices before settling on one."

To wit; we were teaching acting. I don’t remember much about the day except it felt like there were more of us in the room than students.

In 2020, the state conference was canceled (of course) and plans were set in motion for how to engage motivated Thespians in creating something "virtual" in place of a conference in 2021. Great Lakes Theater arranged for online workshops, and Chennelle Bryant-Harris as the primary organizer and director for those, while I played a small role as script coordinator.

Virtual (2021)

The All-State show that year was the live-streaming of that video, Time Capsule. My main contribution was the suggestion that the song one student wrote and performed, extolling all the hopes and dreams this teenager had for the year 2020, which was written to open the show, be put at the end. It was a brutal conclusion, and I stand by it.

Because the State Thespian conference is supposed to be one of those transformative events in the life of a young theater artist. Our high school hadn’t attended one until my junior year (1985) and then because it was being held in the next city over, in Rocky River. We all loved it so much, we asked to attend the next year’s, which was held at Fairborn High School, outside Dayton.

It was at that festival that I met at least a half dozen or more high school seniors who would join me as a freshman at the Ohio University School of Theatre that fall. The All-State show was The Crucible the first time I had seen it. I took workshops in improvisation and audition, and saw several one-acts and cuttings from full-length plays. It was thrilling. It was intimidating.

This weekend the Ohio Thespian Festival was held at Riverside High School in Painesville, and the offerings have been nothing short of epic. Yes, there were fully staged performances of not only Rent and The Prom, but also (ta-da) the Cardinal High School production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee which was first pulled by the school, and then reinstated after the controversy became national news.

The All-Ohio Show on Friday night was Moon Over Buffalo, and the students also received an hour-long talkback via Zoom with playwright Ken Ludwig and – as if that were not enough – a live presentation and Q&A with composer Andrew Lippa!

Hilliard (1994)

As for me, I offered a playwriting workshop called How to Write a Play a Day, for which I tried not only to describe the techniques I used to write every day, but to address issues like writer's block, and how to develop small ideas as well as big ones.

(Photo: Tower rocks the 90s jeans.)

Pre-pandemic, I once offered a forty-five minute writing workshop at a regional conference, which I wasn’t satisfied with. There was no time for writing, just talking about writing. So I asked for a ninety-minute block, which was a little presumptuous. With so much to see and do, I knew it was asking a lot from the students. But then I also figured, not all kids are actors, dancers, singers, directors or designers. Some of them want to be writers. I was there for them.

And they were there, and we wrote, and read what we wrote, and even then it didn’t seem like we had enough time. But in that good way, you know?

369 Short Play and Monologue Festival

My wife and I passed through Asheville, North Carolina back in 2000 during a wide-ranging Southern road trip. It’s a lovely town with a well-established reputation for supporting the arts and artists. We had lunch at the Laughing Seed Café, which I am glad to learn is still in business.

This month, the Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective presents their 369 Short Play and Monologue Festival at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts in Asheville. Part of the mission of Difference Strokes PAC is to “confront issues of social diversity in a provocative way.”

As they were scouting new works to present as part of this festival, they tapped one of my short plays and one of my monologues for inclusion, and I am grateful to have my work selected for such a inspiring endeavor.

“3-6-9” represents three weekends of works, consisting of six short plays and nine monologues.

May 30, 2020
Cleveland, OH

My short play Protest, which opened last night’s performance, was written during the George Floyd Uprising of 2020, representing two sides of an argument (though there are always more than two sides) regarding the value of street protest. 

At several points in my life I have been involved in “civil disobedience” either as a participant or witness, since 2016 this has included our children though by the pandemic they were no longer children.

Protest was written before we attended the May 30 event in Cleveland, which began peacefully before the police attempted to force the crowd to disperse. We had gone shortly before things turned ugly, and I wrote another play, Should, a day later, inspired by a conversation with our kids about our feelings about what happened. You can read both plays at New Play Exchange.

My wife in Asheville (2000)
"Flat Iron" by Reed Todd

The monologue Whiteboard will be familiar to anyone who watched Savory Taṇhā during the lockdown. The 369 Festival will be the first time it has been performed in front of a live audience. 

Whiteboard is about a teacher discovering a hate word - meant for them - written on the board in their classroom at school. The word is never identified, so ideally the monologue could be delivered by anyone. Different Strokes will present this monologue twice, both tonight and again on the closing evening, and by two different actors.

In other news, I successfully defended my thesis yesterday. Next up: Commencement!

"369 Short Play and Monologue Festival" produced by Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective and presented at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts continues through April 22, 2023.

Assessment

April is the coolest month.

The come-down from a major project can be very difficult for me. All that energy and expectation and yes, anxiety – when it is gone, my body can feel it, like the after effects of an adrenaline rush. That, and all the spare time.

The closing of my thesis production, Scenes From a Night’s Dream, brought to a conclusion my graduate studies. No other classes this semester, just my thesis defense (it’s not really a defense, we’re just going to talk about it) and then I walk. Three years of aggressive reading and heavy writing, complete.

Rather than loaf or mope (see: My American Poetry Summer, 2021) I decided to be proactive and to use the month of March to change some unhealthy habits. Over the course of the pandemic I have added and maintained some twenty to thirty pounds, and also taken to drinking every single day.

Not heavy drinking, mind. But consistent drinking. And some might argue that is a lot. Certainly it must be frowned upon to drink during class, but Zoom made that not only easy but downright encouraged. I hid my beer in a coffee mug, other students just drank their wine from a glass like it was no big thing.

So, for March 2023 I decided not only to attempt to take a run every day, but also to limit the consumption of snacks, and to drink no alcohol whatsoever. The wife called it “March Mildness.”

And it was, I believe, a success. I dropped ten pounds in that month, presumably those excess calories that were constantly cycling through my system in the form of sugar and carbs from cookies and chips, beer and whiskey.

I was more productive, at work, in the home, in my writing, on the road. There was only one day I did not run last month, due to inclement weather. I documented the experience on my running blog, Daddy Runs Fast.

And speaking of productivity, the first of April marks the commencement of End of Play.

End of Play.® is an annual initiative, created by the Dramatists Guild, to incentivize the completion of new plays, scores, or songs over the period of one month.

Last year, I was working on three scripts, two of them for a class. This year, just the one. Last night I attended an online kick-off event which included some excellent writing prompts and a panel of playwrights sharing insight into their own particular process. 

My own plans for the month involve an adaptation, and not even a very long one. If I were to write two to three pages a day, my first draft would be complete well before deadline.

Anybody want a drink?

The Wild Party (book)

Queenie in "The Wild Party" 
(Art Spiegelman)

In February 1995, I traveled to New York City by train to visit my girlfriend.

My wife and I had separated, half of the furniture in the house we had purchased a little over year before was gone with her, and I had recently been diagnosed with a hernia for which I would receive surgery the following month. I was serving pizzas in an Uno’s in Lyndhurst, I had no theatrical prospects at all. I was twenty-six.

The train was comfortable, and warm, unless I leaned close to the window, which was frosted. The northeast was in a cold snap, NYC that week would be the coldest I have ever experienced. Still on the train, I opened my new laptop (with the last of the black and white screens) and began to write a play about vampires.

My girlfriend worked at the Shakespeare & Company at 81st and Broadway, the one featured in When Harry Met Sally (“Someone is staring at you in Personal Growth”) and while she was on I browsed and read and even bought, or walked around the corner to Café Lalo to sit and sip and write.

One book I picked up at that time was a recently released hardcover edition of the poem The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March, and illustrated by Art Spiegelman (Maus). I’m not sure what caught my eye about it. Maybe it was Spiegelman. Maybe it was the claim that the poem was “lost”. Maybe it was the 20s. Maybe it was my 20s.

At that time I had only a passing interest in the 1920s, though it was piqued that week as we saw the Alan Rudolph film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle at some little theater in the East Fifties which surely doesn’t exist any more. At that time I was into generational theory and turned onto the idea that the Lost Generation and that generation we call “X” had much in common. Aimless, rootless, artistic, unbound, nihilistic, you know … “whatever.”

Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle

As Spiegelman points out in his introduction, the Lost Generation “swilled gin” while ours “gulps Prozac.” Of course, the Lost Generation also experienced the horrors of World War One while ours had to, what? Make our own dinner? Learn about adult relationships from The Piña Colada Song?

Mrs. Parker is a biopic, starring the incomparable Jennifer Jason Leigh, and it was easy to overlook her personal disappointments and misery when she and Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott) were writing away at facing typewriters, creating threadbare stage performances, or trading witticisms in the Algonquin. 

We could do all of this, though standing in the smoldering remains of Guerrilla Theater Co. I no longer knew who “we” were. 

The Wild Party is told in rhyming, irregular couplets, March’s meter is what makes the piece sing, the timing of the rhymes is irreverent, in places obscene, always funny, and very funny. And the subject is so sordid! A showgirl named Queenie and a clown with a violent temper named Burrs decide to throw a wild party, and that’s really it.

There is drink, there is dance. There is an orgy. A teenager is assaulted, and the fighting begins. Burrs discovers Queenie having sex with another man, things go tragic. Then the cops arrive, the end.

Spiegelman doesn’t get in the way of the narrative, just promotes it with his graphic imagery. It has a hard-boiled quality, like Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Handsome guys have square jaws, Burrs is long and narrow like a villain. I do question why there is so much female nudity, but only female nudity.

The Secret Adversary
(A Tommy & Tuppence Adventure)

The 1920s were transgressive, folks were pushing back against their hopelessness with wildness and pleasure. The 90s were hardly hard times for us, but I certainly felt a little lost. 

I began casting about everywhere for inspiration, though it wasn’t until my two Agatha Christie adaptations, nearly twenty years later, that I took the opportunity to focus on the 20s. Tommy and Tuppence, however, are far too sweet and hopeful, especially as compared to the jaded Queenie and Burrs. 

In 1995, I channeled my nihilistic tendencies into the contemporary milieu of a vampire-themed coffee bar.

The Short Play Project (revisited)

Shelter in place.

The Covid-19 pandemic was real. Many of us were fortunate not to contract this potentially fatal disease until after we had received the vaccine. My own bout of Covid was brief and uncomplicated, and for that I am grateful. People died, in their millions, across the globe.

What I am about the recount is something we did during the lockdown, and is no way meant to diminish the seriousness of that time, which psychological after-effects we will have to cope with the rest of our lives.

The day the shutdown was announced in the United States, three years ago this week, those of us who were not “essential workers” were left with a great deal of time on our hands. And creators of live performance were quick to devise all manner of “virtual” entertainments.

On March 14, 2020 I put out a call for people who would be interested to record themselves performing one of my short play scripts. I’d written over one hundred since the previous fall, I’d write another hundred before that summer.

The earliest submissions really bring back the shocking sensation of the start of quarantine. Outside of a circle of friends, we didn’t know what the insides of other people’s domiciles looked like. Soon we would know the interior of everyone’s home, even Stanley Tucci’s.

Ellen chose the two-person play Packing about preparing for a flight, written just days before all flights were grounded in the United States. They has all their stuff laid out on the floor to pack, and the other voice in the scene is provided by someone over their phone. It’s eerie, to me a chilling reminder of that specific time.

Other early entries were playful, as adults treated that first week like an old fashioned snow day. It reminded me of the Blizzard of 1978 – we didn’t have school, but we couldn’t go anywhere, either. Laura and her partner knocked up a fort out of sheets and blankets in their living room for Worlds. Carrie, Hannah and Sam put on their PJ’s to present a sleepover for Butthole.

Then there were those who, through necessity, playfully used what they had on hand to perform two-person scenes. Amiee created Verses with the assistance of their dog, Buckley. Luke partnered with a pretzel for Advertisement, a now sorely-dated piece inspired by the Peloton/Aviation Gin ads. Do we remember those?

As the weeks and months of 2020 went on, creators got more sophisticated with their short play submissions, including animation, original music, and some truly professional cinematography. But these swiftly created videos from the first few days really put me back in that time, for better or for worse.

You can watch all seventy-five plays in the Short Play Project here.

"Peace" performed by Richard Stimac

Twelfth Night (As Told By Malvolio) (revisited)

This year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, a collection of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays. There are many plays that can only be found in the Folio, and so it cannot be overstated how important it was that those involved decided upon its creation.

It was published seven years after the Bard’s death, and to commemorate that anniversary, in 2016 the Folger Library (holder of the world’s largest collection of the First Folio) sent copies of the Folio to all fifty states for display. To this end they held a competition to see who would get to host the book.

Great Lakes Theater, the company I work for, partnered with the Cleveland Public Library and several other organizations to create the winning proposal: The First Folio was coming to Cleveland! It didn’t hurt that the book would be in residence during the Republican National Convention, ensuring even more visitors.

One of the events proposed was a forty-five minute adaptation of a Shakespeare title, which would tour area libraries. The last time the city held a political convention was in 1936 (two of them, in fact) the same year Cleveland held the Great Lakes Exposition, and it was there that you could view a 30-60 minute adaptation of a variety of Shakespeare’s plays, every hour, on the hour at a scaled-down reproduction of the Globe Theatre. Surely, I could also write such a brief adaptation.

Photo: Carolyn York

However, it had to be portable, and I would be limited in the number of actors we could employ. I do work best with strict parameters. The task I set for myself was to cut an entire play down to only four characters. Not just four actors, playing a number of roles, but only four characters. I wanted our audiences, many of whom might be seeing Shakespeare for the first time, to be able to focus on a simple, streamlined story.

The result was Twelfth Night (As Told By Malvolio). I had the title before I’d written the adaptation. Is it told by Malvolio? Not really. Does it matter? I say that it does not. But we needed to put that proposal together, and I wanted to make it clear this was not going to be a strict interpretation of Twelfth Night.

Recently I have been digitizing a lot of materials at the office; prompt books for outreach tours, going back decades, and that included this one. I hadn't read it in the past seven years, and I really like it.

Part of my affection for the script is my memory of the performers, Chelsea, Chennelle, Luke and Shaun, all actor-teachers at that time, and some of the loveliest people in the world.

But I also really love what I did with the text. I made the story as a 1980s teen romantic comedy. Imagining them as high school students made it easier to streamline the Olivia-Orsino-Viola bizarre love triangle (get it?). 

Photo: Carolyn York

Taking place over the course of a single day in high school, Orsino and Viola (presenting as a boy named Cesario) were given lines from Toby Belch and Feste, making their friendship even more playful as they prank this hipster version of Malvolio.

I only changed one or two of Shakespeare’s words. Orsino says “Awesome!” more than once, and Olivia calls Cesario boyfriend, not husband (Sebastian does not appear.) Let’s say I was reshuffling Shakespeare, not only editing this play, but borrowing from other sources.

We expanded upon Olivia’s grief at the recent death of her brother as well as Viola’s plans to pass as a man using text from As You Like It, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Measure For Measure, Richard III, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Venus & Adonis. I found it all very satisfying.

The reason I shelved it and forgot it, however, was that I never thought of this as my play. I didn’t post it to New Play Exchange, or feature it on my website. Upon review, I have changed my mind about this. It is an adaptation, and it is mine. It would make a great one-act for a small cast, especially for high school aged students.

"Twelfth Night (As Told To Malvolio)" is available at New Play Exchange, or contact me directly.

The Great Globe Itself (revisited)

"I'll come in again."

Recently I have been digitizing a lot of materials at the office. That includes the prompt books for outreach tours, going back decades, a number of which I have written.

So, yes. I have been lingering over my old scripts, because they're interesting. They include sound cues, stage directions — and edits. Lines that were added, lines that were cut, lines that were changed.

These changes would make their way into the final draft of my script. But one line change caught my eye, from The Great Globe Itself, first produced in 2015. It's a significant edit, because it answers a question, central to the third act, which I had failed to address when we started rehearsal.

"They come to hear the gods, not me."

I checked the version I had posted to New Play Exchange and was surprised to find that I had not included it in the final draft. All the other changes were there, but not that one. It makes a difference, and I'm glad I caught the mistake.

"The Great Globe Itself" is available at New Play Exchange, or contact me directly.