Two Weekends in September

Good kitty.

Outdoor Theater of a Different Kind

The remnants of this late season has included bouts of strong summer storms, bringing down trees and flooding cities. So is the harbinger of catastrophic climate change. And yet, we get out. To enjoy what the urban outdoors has to offer, because we know the days are drawing far too short and sometimes it snows in September.

Last weekend, I took a three hour stroll through the streets of Cleveland with two hundred of my closest friends, attending Micro Theater CLE: Tremont Reloaded. And what I witnessed was a cavalcade of performances:

A short play about a fork in the road set in a dead end street, a multimedia performance about childhood trauma executed in an attic, a laconic chain-smoking improviser, lazing on a chaise lounge in someone’s driveway, and so much more!

And as usual, I provided the cat poop in the sandbox.

To be sure, I received so many positive marks about my brief solilokitty ("Stray") which was a surprise to those who were prepared to enjoy a series of silly stories told by dopey dogs. Then this feline arrived (performed with cat-like reflexes by the always adorable Katelyn Cornelius) to unwind an inscrutable saga about their transition from feral stray to pampered rescue cat.

Folks were moved, it stuck with them, which is only natural. Cats have depth. Dogs are dumb.

Molded From the Clay

For three seasons now, Cleveland playwright and impresario Stuart Hoffman has produced a series of creepy plays in September (Advent for spooky season) at Wizbang! in Cleveland Heights. If you have never been, Wizbang is homebase for circus performers Pinch & Squeal (Jason and Danielle Tilk) offering offbeat entertainments and clever concoctions in intimate digs festooned with fabulous frippery.

This year, Hoffman opened his roster of supernatural stories to include those by other playwrights with Out of the Kiln: When Your Past Haunts You, and so on Friday evening our senses were cooled by unnatural infestations, comic tales of torture, playful poltergeists, and a literal throwing of hands.

The night concluded with a rendition of “The Hearse Song” delightfully choreographed by Millie Sherin which was unsettlingly sexy.

Mike Frye, Mindy Herman, Keith Kornajcik 

Back to the Shop

If last week’s trek through Tremont was summer’s curtain call, participating in Pandemonium last night was opening night for fall.

Cleveland Public Theatre’s annual gala is an enormous party, this year celebrating the extensive renovation of the (former) Russian Orthodox Church space which is now fully accessible.

We were on the other side of the campus, the folks from Micro Theater CLE provided a stage to present a cycle of 10 minute plays. The stage was located outside the scene shop; at the first Pandemonium, over twenty years ago, I had produced a series of Neo-Futurist plays inside the scene shop for audiences seated inside the freight elevator, arriving every fifteen minutes.

I done lots of Pandemonium.

My offering this evening was Lombardo (also directed by Millie Sherin!) in which a character-free young man from LIFE interviews Guy Lombardo about his switch from radio to TV for his New Year’s Eve broadcast. A short play meant to take the piss out of bad biographic plays, I made a point not to include any data I couldn’t find on Wikipedia.

The scene was stolen by Mindy Herman as Lombardo’s wasted wife Lillibell. One of my colleagues observed, “I always love your woman characters,” which is funny because Lillibell is a parody of all those poorly drawn female characters.

Speeches were made, performances were witnessed, the massive, tented dance floor opened just as the clouds did, and I was in bed by eleven.

Welcome, autumn!

Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art (book)

Garretson “Garry” Beekman Trudeau (b. 1948) is the single greatest influence on my life as a writer. There have been others who have inspired me in my work, from William Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw to Annie Baker, and also from Charles Schulz to Harvey Pekar to Alison Bechdel. Because comic strip artists have had as much of an impact on my life as any playwright.

For example, John “Derf” Backderf just released The Dissidents, his first graphic novel since the epic Kent State (2020) and this is a work no less expansive in scope, for which its creator has been doggedly journalistic in his pursuit of historic accuracy. In this case the events are so far in the past (a century!) he has had to rely entirely – I assume – upon the written record.

I’ve read it, and like Kent State or My Friend Dahmer, it should be added to the long list of recommended (and also then probably censored) reading for high school students across the nation. It’s brilliant, it’s timely, it’s important.

But what about this Trudeau guy? He was the creator of Doonesbury, and in the late 1970s, while my preadolescent friends were getting a fantastic, exaggerated and exploitative history of Vietnam watching films like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter on cable teevee, I was desperately consuming the history of the war and the entire “Me” decade by scraping up every single trade Holt, Rinehart and Winston paperback I could get my hands on at Baluk’s bookstore in Westlake.

A prized possession.

His comic strips were remarkable at the time because of the so-called political content. Sure. At that time, the comic pages were reserved for silly jokes about beleaguered husbands and shrewish wives. The war and the Nixon administration had been reserved for the editorial page, but when Trudeau was recruited (due to his work producing the strip Bull Tales for a Yale publication) to create a comic for daily syndication, he became the first to address contemporary issues – sex, drugs and the war – in the daily comics.

I mean, he wasn’t. He was preceded by Walt Kelly (Pogo) and Al Capp (Lil’ Abner) and others, but he was the first BABY BOOMER to do so, and to be so literal about it. The timing was not remarkable, it was inevitable. It could have been someone else, fortunately it was Trudeau.

Because of his wit. His very dry wit. Decades later, I would be taken to task for my work in the Ohio University paper The Post because I just wasn’t funny. But like so many other would-be college paper cartoonists, I was simply emulating the style of Doonesbury, how the punchline was usually the second to last line, only to be undercut by the deadpan reaction.

Doonesbury, October 26, 1970

And it is this deadpan, dry reaction to humor that has led people to hate and fear me in everyday conversation. And it is the same kind of dialogue I have always incorporated into my plays. This summer I read Trudeau & Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art by Joshua Kendall, the first authorized biography of G.B. Trudeau, and one of the first delightful things I learned was that, as a child, the future Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist was an aspiring impresario.

At the age of eight, he waxed entrepreneurial, establishing the Acting Corporation, which marketed and produced his own plays in the family’s home.

“We transformed the basement into a makeshift theater, with bunk beds as our balcony," [Trudeau] says. "My mother had red curtains installed as a Christmas present … I jerry-rigged the most dangerous lighting board imaginable, and I almost burned the house down. I also built sets from canvas flats. Our troupe comprised relatives and neighborhood kids.

“I was a little dictator who controlled all the elements. I wrote and directed the plays, composed the music, designed the sets and costumes, oversaw makeup, props, etc." (pp. 15-16)

He was a theater producer who became a cartoonist, I was a cartoonist who became a theater producer. And this should not be a surprise. Because they have so much in common. While I had entertained notions of playwriting in high school, I had no idea how or where to begin. Creating the strip Breaking Point my sophomore year in college, I was constantly thinking about and writing dialogue and action (essentially, scripts) for a cast of fictional cartoon characters which I would then draft and have published for an audience.

Breaking Point, May 27, 1988

Trudeau did something surprising, but necessary, when he chose to take a sabbatical in 1983, stepping away from the drawing board to rethink the strip. It’s all cool that Hi and Lois, Blondie and Dagwood, and the Peanuts kids never age, but Michael, Boopsie, Mark, Zonker, B.D. and the rest were ostensibly Baby Boomers – all of whom were for some reason still undergrads in the early 1980s. That had to change if the strip was to remain relevant.

However, it was a working vacation, as Trudeau returned to his first love – the theater. He partnered with Elizabeth Swados (Runaways) to create Doonesbury: A Musical Comedy which opened at the Biltmore Theatre in late 1983. It wasn’t a sensation (Frank Rich called it “pleasant”) but even if it were, it’s intentionally dated, set squarely in that interregnum between the queasy late 1970s and the go-go 1980s. I’ve never heard of anyone else producing it. But do I have the original cast recording on vinyl? Yes, I do. Do I have it on CD? Yes, again. I am partial to the opening track (“Graduation”) and Michael’s gentle attempt to court his girlfriend J.J. (“Get Together”).

 
The most significant result of this endeavor was actually a downscale, downtown spin-off (a friendlier locale for such things) a cabaret in which to skewer Reagan era policies on a rotating basis. This was a format more in line with the daily criticism Trudeau was conducting, anyway.

Trudeau and Swados undertook a second theatrical collaboration … "Rap Master Ronnie," a one-hour "partisan revue"... which premiered at the Village Gate in the fall of 1984. Frank Rich was more kindly disposed to this venture, praising Trudeau's "ingenious lyrics, the bristling polemical wisecracks and a sparkling cast."

Trudeau (said), “With 'Doonesbury? Liz (Swados) played in my world— a mainstream Broadway musical with lovable characters. But with Rap Master Ronnie, a downtown political revue with complicated characters, I was in Lizworld. I came to prefer the latter, scrambling for money and audiences, huddling behind the bar at the Village Gate, reworking numbers on the spot, the kind of on-the-fly theater Liz was so brilliant at." (p. 215)

I can dig it. I love those things, too.

The Dissidents: Autocrats! Vigilantes! Communists! And Cartoonists! By John Derf Backderf (Abrams Books) is now available in hardcover.

How I Am Spending This Fall (2026)

Last week there was another big storm that brought down trees on both Mayfield and Taylor roads, cutting power to my neighborhood. I had a brief Zoom rehearsal schedule and drove to a different part of town to find bars to participate.

Samantha Cocco is directing Katelyn Cornelius in my monologue Stray which will be presented as part of the Monodogologues for Micro Theater CLE’s Tremont Reloaded which will take place this Friday and Saturday nights.

The fall has become surprisingly full, and Micro Theater CLE has been a big part of that. They are not only producing the only cat piece in a selection of monologues about dogs (Sam calls Stray a “solilokitty” and I am down with that) but also a performance of Lombardo at Cleveland Public Theatre’s Pandemonium the week following.

The theme for Pandemonium this year is “Under Construction” which put me in mind of this taut and gritty look at a man at the crossroads, taking the risk of his life and succeeding against all odds. Just kidding, it’s an acidic satire of trite formulaic theatrical biographs. I’m going to stick my neck out here and share that Lombardo is one of my own scripts that I choose to read from time to time just to make myself laugh.

There are also two productions in October. Tickets are now on sale for I Hate This (a play without the baby): The Silver Collection a fund raiser for the Preeclampsia Foundation, an intimate house performance (see previous blog post for complete details) and my first opportunity to perform for a live audience in a couple of years. I know folks worry about the subject matter, but it’s a story I love telling. Contact me directly to make your reservation.

Cole Tarantowski, Rachel Gold
"The Right Room"
Photo by Daren Stahl

The month concludes with The Right Room, presented as part of the Verum Project series at Convergence-Continuum. When originally presented in an actual hotel room for the BorderLight Festival in 2025, it became the most talked about show that virtually no one saw. It’s funny to think that con-con, which features one of the smallest professional spaces in Cleveland, presents an opportunity for so many more people to see this show. Rehearsals begin soon, and I am so excited to share this, and all of these pieces, with audiences this season.

• Micro Theater: presents Tremont Reloaded, September 11 & 12, 2026
• Cleveland Public Theatre presents Pandemonium: Under Construction, September 19, 2026
• I Hate This (a play without the baby): The Silver Collection, October 14 - 18, 2026
• Convergence-Continuum presents The Right Room at the Liminis, October 29 - 31, 2026

I Hate This (The Silver Collection)

Photo by Anthony Gray Photography

Since 2002, I have performed I Hate This, live and in-person, forty-four times. Is that a lot? I was put into the company of A Christmas Carol in 2024 and over the course of four weeks I put in twenty-nine performances.

A long time ago, I realized this was a piece I would return to for the rest of my life, whether I wanted to or not. But how? I mean, it’s supposed to be a personal piece of storytelling, but the subject matter, stillbirth, is challenging. I’m not afraid of it, the audience is. I cannot blame them.

And how do I make reproducing the play relevant? How do I tell it again, in a manner that is honest, that isn’t just a reproduction of the original? To tell this story so that it is helpful, edifying (edify: instruct or improve) and also entertaining? That attending is not a chore, but a worthwhile experience? And might I suggest, an enjoyable evening?

Every five years since the birth of our first child, I have been able to retell the story in different ways. In 2006 we broadcast a radio drama. In 2011, I paired the piece with another solo performance. In 2016, I had a one night only performance with a few new adjustments. And in 2021 we created the film.

For this year, the 25th birth anniversary of our first child, and to commemorate Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month (October) I will be embarking upon a project I have been desiring to create for years – a house performance.

I Hate This (The Silver Collection) will feature:

• An intimate performance for an audience of ten (10) members only, each evening. 
• A revised, updated text, to reflect the time that has passed. 
• An open bar and homemade refreshments 
• 10% of the admission will go to the Preeclampsia Foundation, whose mission is to “improve the outcomes of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy by educating, supporting and engaging the community, improving healthcare practices, and accelerating research.”

I will be reaching out to interested audience members in September. Please drop a note in the comments if you would like me to contact you.

Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play) (staged reading)

Before the summer gets away from me completely, I wanted to reflect upon one of the highlights; a live staged reading of Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play) produced in Westlake and Canton on Saturday, June 13 by our friends at Seat of the Pants productions.

Not too long ago, “live stage reading” would be redundant. But I had a virtual reading of this script a few years ago, and while that one was also well produced and performed, I could not hear the audience. Oh. Does it make a difference to hear them.

Under the outstanding and thoughtful direction of Katherine Nash, actors Jeannine Gaskin and Diwe Augustin-Glave were tremendous as Moms and Dots, as we returned to the quarantine (for the moment) to address isolation, anxiety, and the modern generation gap.

And what did I hear? A lot of laughs, and also groans, sympathetic sounds, and one very audible FUCK during a tense silence right before one of the characters also says, “Fuck.” I took that as a win.

I also didn’t hear a laugh that I had expected, which falls shortly after one of the most upsetting moments in the piece. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. I should be grateful. It means people cared. I learned so much, from everyone. There will be changes, but now I know it comes together.

I’m working on a new script, an adaptation, for which I created a synopsis of the novel upon which it will be based. And it occurs to me that I could take that synopsis, feed it into any so-called “artificial intelligence” plagiarism machine and have created to my specifications a new (you couldn’t call it original) two act play, in moments. Just knowing that is demoralizing.

However, I often re-read my own work – for pleasure. I can surprise myself, I make myself laugh. And on those occasions when they are produced for an audience, and they laugh. Or, you know, suddenly blurt, “FUCK.” Well, I’d like to see the billionaires try to take that from me.

Many additional and deeply felt thanks to project producer Michael Glavan, and SOTP artistic director Craig Joseph.

See also: "Demented and Sad, But Social"

On Adaptation (revisited)

The Odyssey (2026)
Directed by Christopher Nolan

As we drove across the country this summer, for our annual visit to Maine, my wife made plans to spend the night in Albany, arriving in time to catch a screening of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. She taught that poem to first year high school students for several seasons, so she is quite familiar with the work, while I am not. But I like Nolan, the cast is (as the kids say) stacked, and I was looking forward to it.

Not only did I enjoy the film, I was moved. Like, seriously, when was the last time I was made to deeply feel something, watching a movie? I experienced a deep melancholy, a feeling of great loss. I was troubled. I still am. I’ve been thinking about it for two weeks.

And the memes are killing me, particularly those that focus on Robert Pattinson.

Those trolls who were prepared to bury it at the box office may have been excited to learn that Emily Wilson, scholar and recent translator of a best-selling version of The Odyssey also hates it, but for diametrically opposing reasons. They hate that it has a diverse cast, she says it isn’t diverse enough. They say it has a “woke” message, she says it has no message at all.

Anyway, it’s a fucking blockbuster, on track to break one billion in global box office on its third weekend in theaters. What are ya gonna do?

Adaptations are a puzzle, transforming a piece from one medium to another. What to keep, what to lose, what to emphasize, what to ignore. And what to outright change – and that’s certainly going to be contentious to someone.

Nosferatu by Jim Shepard (1998)

This summer I have been reading Nosferatu, Jim Shepard’s 1998 novel about German film director F.W. Murnau. Drawing from historic record, it is fiction told (largely) from Murnau’s first person perspective, about his upbringing, his time as a pilot in World War One, and becoming the celebrated director of Nosferatu, The Last Man and Tabu. It is also the story of one man’s struggles with passion and guilt in a time when his relationships were literally a crime.

Adapting Bram Stoker’s supernatural saga Dracula into a visual medium to create Nosferatu at the nascence of the motion picture era was an artistic challenge, and several of Murnau’s experiments with light and shadow are iconic while other seemingly clever tricks with slower frame rates and reverse exposure today seem a bit silly, taking the edge off Max Schreck’s horrifying performance as the titular character.

In Shepard’s novel, the director laments to his journal the static nature of the camera – early cameras were huge and heavy – and how he wished it could move. In a later film, The Last Man (also known as The Last Laugh) Murnau either pioneered or pushed forward many schemes to get the camera to do just that; to pan, to track, the zoom, to swing, even. If those methods had been available to him in 1921, who knows how much more affecting his vampire film may have been.

The Machine Stops (2026)

Last week (still on vacation) a few of us headed out to see a local theater production. The day before, the wife and I took a wrong turn through a village and I was surprised to see a large banner advertising a stage adaptation of The Machine Stops, the early 20th century science fiction short story with which I have a long personal history, producing a radio drama of Eric Coble's stage adaptation for our NPR affiliate, and even making reference to it in And Then You Die.

Sticking out of the program was a letter-size page of director's notes explaining his thoughts about the story and how this production came into being. Hot take? Don’t do this. Telling people what to think about the thing they are about to see just before they see it is never a good idea.

That's what your blog is for.  

Reading it over – after the performance – did clear up a few questions. It was originally a thirty-five minute adaptation, rich with movement and sound and style and passion, performed by high school students, created for a high school theater festival. The costumes, lighting, the ensemble choreography were all very effective in telling E.M. Forster’s classic tale of a future when mankind has chosen to live underground, apart from one another, all of their necessities served by the Machine. And it was all right there in this production – especially powerful were the constant droning sounds of the Machine, created entirely by the voices of the ensemble, making their sudden absence all the more startling when, well. Spoiler alert. The Machine Stops.

Unfortunately (checks director’s notes) in order to serve an adult audience, and to expand the slight original material to an hour, the production had been expanded to include laborsome tangential stories meant to incorporate modern relevance, to wit; opinions about Covid, quarantine, and Liberal government overreach.

Really, I want you to imagine enjoying a seamless and well-executed multidisciplinary performance that comes to an abrupt stop every ten minutes so that company members in street clothes can drag a chair and a table onto a well-designed set, and perform seemingly unrelated and obvious agitprop under a nondescript spot before moving on. It’s crazy.

I bet the original high school version went over like gangbusters, and those young people deserved it.

There have been several summers when I would be here, on vacation, and also using that time to conduct research for plays. One year I was reading books on the Globe Theatre, and the voyage of the Sea Venture and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Another, it was all about the Lusitania, the “Great Silence” and even more about World War One. Those were for assignments, or commissions, what have you. Most of the adaptations.

This summer I have been reading and re-reading a certain novel, and like The Machine Stops, it is another work of early 20th century science fiction. This one was, shortly after it was written, adapted into a classic silent film, one which I would like to adapt into a stage play. 

And there are perils in adapting early science fiction: Do you play it straight, which (depending on the work) may seem dated, and lack the desired sense of immediacy? Do you entirely update it, as many modern films have done (see: Spielberg's War of the Worlds or Will Smith in I, Robot) and become something entirely other than what fans of the work are expecting? And how much do you push your idea of what the message of the story may be, to the alienation of certain audiences, as with The Odyssey, or this local production of The Machine Stops?

It is a voyage upon which I look forward to embarking.

See also: On Adaptation (2011)

Wrap-Up | BorderLight 2026

Mike Frye

BorderLight 2026 has closed. I had gotten myself a “Binge on Fringe” pass so that I could make plentiful reservations without thinking about the cost each time. No, I didn’t max out the pass, but that’s fine. Let's call it a donation.

Saturday I made the error of booking some shows back-to-back, I don’t recommend it. You fret about how long the show you are watching will go over and then run the risk of entering the next show late like a douche.

By noon I’d decided to just drop one of the shows I had planned to see and relaxed. Maybe a little too relaxed. No one need eat an entire jumbo pretzel at Hofbräuhaus all by themselves.

I arrived late to Bell, Book and Discount Cocktails, and chose to lurk just outside the open door of the Grille like the incubus from Fuseli’s Nightmare. Like a creep.

Later, I was on my way from one place to somewhere else when I ran into Bell/Book’s Carrie Williams at the Patio, part of an SOR crowd enjoying Tales From the Bard. Improvisor Mike Frye (with musical accompaniment by Jack Routhier) spins a sung and spoken yarn based on audience interactions.

I had no idea what the plot was (hardly the point) when he announced the arrival of Old Father Time. And oh God yes, he was looking directly at me. I was pressed into service, and executing my role as instructed, hobbling in pain and just as suddenly spry. Then old. Older. It was a hoot.

So, I can honestly say I performed at BorderLight this year. See you in 2027!

BorderLight Theatre Festival at Playhouse Square, July 8-11, 2026