Assessment

Today was truly the longest day of the longest month. Rehearsals for the Great Lakes Theater School Residency Program are in full-swing. Expansive hours in a vacant office in the Hanna Building (not the site of Edith’s studio - she was in a penthouse on the top floor) training four new actor-teachers how to illuminate the classics for a potential 16,000 students in Northeast Ohio during this school year.

Last night it was Curriculum Night at Noble Elementary, attended now by not only my daughter but my son. My wife and I are members of the PTA. Please Vote Yes On Issue 6. Heights schools depend on it.

There is a great deal of theater in my future. Sunday we will be present for a matinee of The Life of Galileo at the Allen Theatre, the new home of Cleveland Play House. Next week in the Hanna Theatre, Cabaret opens Great Lakes 50th Season, and The Taming of the Shrew opens the following week.

Before the first half of 2012 comes to a close, I will have been playwright, actor and director for three different shows at three different companies.

Meanwhile, I am still attemtping to conduct my exploration of Cleveland during different points in history. Recently I have been looking into the fifties … however, with the impending staged reading of It Can’t Happen Here, we will be dipping back into the year 1936 … as if that weren’t already apparent.

Last year, during the first weekend of September, I took a 24-hour writer’s holiday with the intention of completeing an entire play. I wrote one act, which while shy of my goal was not something I was unproud of.

… what a dizzying array of double-negatives, now where wasn’t I ?

It is my intention to jump back onto that train very soon, hopefully in the form of another retreat at my parents home in Lakewood. Having had a year to meditate on the second act, purgation is definitely in order. But not this weekend. Or the next. Nor the one after that.

Let’s say October. New play in October. Someone hold me to that.